Includes 29 poems revolving around the title, selections written for oral readings with jazz accompaniment, and 13 previously published poems.
The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's-as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul. Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind has become a modern classic. It has been translated into nine languages and there are now three-quarters of a million copies in print.