Ferlinghetti has always been addicted to spiritual posturings, to invoking the names of the gods, saints and bards in phrases such as Time magazine uses for captions, and to digging their ineffable incarnations in the apparitions of old men and boys, misfits and thugs and flowers and bums. This is San Francisco-style sentimentality, largely his own creation.

He writes merely endless sentences of flat prose, with here and there a Tibetan or Arabic formula, a prayer phrase, and breaks them up into panting lines. Headlines, that is, blown up and made to sound as significant, as portentous as headlines shouted or keened out over a mike in concert with amplified sitars and bongos and young people rocking and whining, delirious with noise and smoke and bemused by the desire to trip along. Public poetry, publicly performed.

Everywhere today the voice of the inauthentic is heard in the land...