“The kind of poetry which has been making most noise here,” Ferlinghetti remarked, “Is what should be called Street Poetry ……It amounts to getting poetry back into the street where it one was, out of the classroom out of the speech department, and in fat off the printed page. The printed word has made poetry so silent.”
Laurence Ferlinghetti has continued to live and write in San Francisco and in 1998 he was acclaimed to be the city’s first poet Laureate. He is also a painter. ‘Two Scavengers In A Truck, Two Beautiful People In Mercedes’ was published in 1979 in a volume called ‘Landscapes Of Living And Dying’.
The poems’ title alerts us to the simple contrast that is its subject ‘beautiful people’ is perhaps written with a mild sense irony as this phrase was originally coined by the Hippy Movement in 1967 to refer the ‘flower children’ who shared the counter culture ideals of peace and love. The couple in the poem are not beautiful in this sense but wealthy and elegant.
The poet is deceptively simple. In places it is written as if in bright primary colours, so we read of ‘yellow garbage truck’ and the ‘red plastic blazers’, we get exact details of time and place, and we see the precise position of the four people all waiting at the “stoplight,” and the garbage collector looking into the “elegant open Mercedes,” and the matching couple in it. The details of the dress and hair could be directions for a filmmaker.
The poet contrasts the people in various ways. The wealthy people on their way to a man’s place of work, while the “scavengers” are coming home having worked through the early hours. The couple in the Mercedes are clean and cool but the scavengers are dirty. But while one scavenger is old, hunched and grey hair, the other one is depicted as the opposite the beautiful he is compared both to gargoyle (an ugly grossest creature use to decorate medieval churches and word of evil spirits) and the Quasimodo (the name means almost human)
The poem moves to an ambiguous conclusion. The two scavengers see the young people, not as real people but as characters in a TV advertisement in which everything is always possible as if that is with determination and effort, the scavengers could change their own lifestyle for the better but the adjective ‘odourless’ suggest that this is a fantasy and their smelly truck is the reality.
The poem also considers the fundamental American belief that ‘all men are created equal’ and the red light is democratic because it stops everyone. It holds them together as if anything at all were possible between them. They are separated by a ‘small gulf’ and the ‘gulf’ is in the high ‘seas of democracy’, which suggests that anyone can cross it.