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.
The twenty-nice poems of the title section form an integrated sequence in which the poet's eye sees beneath the "surface of the round world," while the section entitled "Oral Messages" was particularly written to be read aloud and communicated in the voice of our times. A measure of the poet's success in this is evident in that the paperback edition of a Coney Island of the Mind is now in its nineteenth printing with a total of 300,000 copies in print.