Happy Birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti is 90 today!

Read a lovely tribute at the LA Times website: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/03/happy-90th-birt.html

Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

And he was also a poet, driven by a sense of both art and political engagement. "Besides molding an image of the poet in the world, he created a poetic form that is at once rhetorically functional and socially vital," the critic Larry Smith wrote. "His work exists as a vital challenge and a living presence to the contemporary artist, as an embodiment of the strong, anticool, compassionate commitment to life in an absurd time."