Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, relatable as ever, claims that he would up and leave for New York at any moment if someone would just offer him a brownstone in the West Village. He insists that this is why his last 57 years living in San Francisco have been merely a visit that went rather long, and the booming success of City Lights Books has simply been part of that vacation. Beat poet Ferlinghetti, with equal parts idealism and skepticism, recalls everything from the psychedelic dream of world peace through LSD to a miserable trip across the Soviet Union inspired by a writer who never actually made the journey himself. When Ginsberg’s Howl was banned, he took it to court and changed the meaning of obscene, opening the floodgates for literature and poetry. As he once wrote, “I am awaiting, perpetually and forever, a renaissance of wonder.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
This is Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading A Coney Island of the Mind. The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life. It is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them, as if they were taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.


Tania Ketenjian:
It was 1994 when I first learned of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's work. Even though I had lived in San Francisco and had visited the bookstore and publishing company he had started in 1953, City Lights Books. It wasn't until a very close friend from New York suggested I read A Coney Island of the Mind. Just the title itself was enough to enchant. The idea of Coney Island, a coastal place with all sorts of people walking down a boardwalk, images of hot dogs and the zooming sounds of roller coasters. The reality of Coney Island is fantastic enough. To actually make it a place of the mind seems even more extreme. This collection of poems is seeing its 50th anniversary this year, and for that reason, I had the opportunity to interview Lawrence Ferlinghetti the day before he was slated to leave for Italy and France. He's 89 years old. He's lived in San Francisco for 57 years. He published Allen Ginsberg's Howl. He created the Center for the Beats. He was San Francisco's first poet laureate. There's a street named after him. He's traveled the world. He saw the destruction of Nagasaki, charred bodies that changed his idea of politics and the quote-unquote truth forever. My name is Tania Ketenjian. This is Sight Unseen, and I visited Lawrence Ferlinghetti at his home in North Beach, a quintessential San Francisco neighborhood that still has the energy of another time with its winding streets, its Italian trattorias, and at its center, City Lights Books. Ferlinghetti's most recent book of poetry is titled Poetry as Insurgent Art, and in this interview, part 1 of 2, we visit the power of poetry, the evolution of political action, and what it feels like to be 89 years old. Stay tuned for that and more on this week's Sight Unseen.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Poetry is what we would cry out upon coming to ourselves in a dark wood in the middle of the journey of our life. Thank you, Dante. Poems are burning bows. Poems are arrows of desire. Poetry gives words to the heart. Poetry is the truth that reveals all lies. The face without mascara. What is poetry? Wind stirs the grasses. Howls in the passes. Voice lost and dreaming. Door floated over the horizon. Oh drunk flute! Oh golden mouth! Kiss kiss in stone boudoirs. What is poetry? A clown laughs. A clown weeps. Dropping his mask. Poetry is the unknown guest in the house. Poetry is the great memory, every word a living metaphor. Poetry, the eye of the heart, the heart of the mind. Words wait to be reborn in the shadow of the lamp of poetry. First light and a dark bird wings away. It's a poem. Well, I could go on for 100 pages.


Tania Ketenjian:
What I love about that and what I think is something that I read and listened to you talk about was just how poetry is something that is very naked and your paintings are very naked in the sense that they're very straightforward. They really say what they mean and they feel they're not oblique. And you were talking about how so much in contemporary art, both poetry and painting, gets its strength from obliqueness and how frustrating that is to a certain extent. Is that true?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Oh, I wouldn't say that modern poetry and painting gets its strength from being oblique. I'm saying that's what makes it popular with— with various cliques, people who think if it's oblique and it's opaque and they can't understand it, then it must be profound.


Tania Ketenjian:
Is there kind of a moment either when you saw an artwork or a poem that you thought, this can make a change, I can make a change through either creating it or manifesting it?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Well, yes, this is one of the main messages of the Beat poets. Going back into the 1950s that you change the world by changing the consciousness of the world. Of course, this wasn't just the Beats, this was the whole psychedelic generation. If you could change the consciousness of the world, in the case of the 1960s counterculture, by psychedelics, then you could change the world and it'd be peace on Earth. Well, that— The idea was if you could turn on all the world leaders on LSD, for instance, then there would be peace on Earth for the rest of eternity. Well, of course, that turned out to be a sad delusion.


Tania Ketenjian:
That notion of changing consciousness, how do you think that can happen?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Well, by, by— through poetry. I mean, poetry is the primary means of changing consciousness. A much more profound way of changing consciousness than going to a psychiatrist. And as I said, when you present the world with the facts of all the disastrous things that are happening today, people don't want to hear it, so they do not want to be disturbed in their pursuit of happiness. And the other book I had published this year— it was the 50th anniversary edition of Coney Island of the Mind, published by New Directions. It's been in print since 1958.


Tania Ketenjian:
One of the things that I really love about some of the poems in Coney Island of the Mind is that they're written in the vernacular, a kind of street vernacular.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Oh yeah, definitely. This my vernacular, as you call it, it grew out of my growing up in New York City and in, in the suburbs of New York. And so it's not— it's just street talk of that time. For instance, see, it was like this. When we waltz into this place, a couple of far-out cats is doing an Aztec two-step, and I says, Dad, let's cut. But then this dame comes up behind me, see, and says, you and me. Could really exist. Wow, I says. Only the next day, she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.


Tania Ketenjian:
It's true. Yeah, that's what I mean by vernacular. Well, do you, you know, I mean, that person is still so much in you. You know, you've become such a quintessential San Franciscan, but you're totally a New Yorker as well.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Only, I'm just out here on a visit. It's only a 57-year visit, but I could go back anytime. Anytime anyone wants to offer me a brownstone in the West Village.


Tania Ketenjian:
You're there. I'd love you to read something else from Coney Island in the Mind. It's just so great to hear you perform. I love the way it looks on the page. I mean, it really looks like a painting on the page.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
The first poem in A Coney Island of the Mind, Goya in America. In Goya's greatest scenes, we seem to see the people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of suffering humanity. They writhe upon the page in a veritable rage of adversity. Heaped up, groaning with babies and bayonets, under cement skies, in an abstract landscape of blasted trees, bent statues, bats' wings and beaks, slippery gibbets, cadavers, and carnivorous cocks, and all the final, hollering monsters of the imagination of disaster. They are so bloody real it is as if they really still existed. And they do. Only the landscape is changed. They still are ranged along the roads, plagued by legionnaires, false windmills, and demented roosters. We are the same people, only further from home, on freeways 50 lanes wide, on a concrete continent spaced with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness. The scene shows fewer tumbrils but more strung-out citizens in painted cars, and they have strange license plates and engines that devour America.


Tania Ketenjian:
It definitely still very much resonates today, and one of the things I want to ask you is It being the 50th anniversary, I mean, does it feel like 50 years ago?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
No, it feels like yesterday. I don't know where the 50 years went. I don't know where the 50 years went because they just passed by in San Francisco, the Dream City. San Francisco, when I first arrived, and it's still that way, it really isn't a part of the United States. It's sort of an offshore republic. People have an island mentality.


Tania Ketenjian:
I read that you had said that and, and in an interview with Amy Goodman, which I thought was a really great interview.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
It was a good interview. She's very good, very fair.


Tania Ketenjian:
I thought it was great. And, and I remember you saying that and I wondered… For me. I wasn't sure if that still was true, because San Francisco is such a wealthy city.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
It really is, and that was true when I arrived in 1951. The first people I spoke to gave me that impression, that they had an island mentality, and they weren't really part of the United States. Today, what with the modern communications and the internet and television and fax and cell phones, it isn't— it can't be an island anymore. During the days of the 1960s counterculture, one of the big slogans was "Be here now." Today, with the cell phone and the internet and the television and the whole technological smear, it's "Be somewhere else now." You go to a restaurant and both people are dining in this expensive restaurant and they're both on their cell phones. It's be somewhere else now.


Tania Ketenjian:
You definitely don't call yourself a beat. You find yourself of a different time and I mean obviously you're part of the counterculture. How much did you feel part of that and how much do you feel an observer of it? I mean what is the balance?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Well, we were embedded in it and as publishers at City Lights, It's always from the second year of our existence, we've been a publisher. And as a publisher, we're embedded in the counterculture. And as an editor all these years, I've been absorbing it and re-editing it and been a part of the counterculture as you might say as a working journalist. But the City Lights itself has always been… The original idea of City Lights was to have a— create a community center more than any kind of a business. And as a community center, all during the 1950s, 1960s, and up to today, it's been a community center for politics and social change.


Tania Ketenjian:
So in that respect, not much has changed in 50 years.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Well, City Lights is more of a community center now than it's ever been, but there's plenty has changed. I mean, we went through the Senator McCarthy era with the Un-American Activities Committee, but under President Bush, we have much worse repression and it's much worse than it was during the McCarthy era as far as the repression and limitation of freedom of speech, limitation of civil rights. It's much worse than it ever was under— during the Un-American Activities Committee years or during the time of Eisenhower or any other. I mean, today Eisenhower just looks like an angel, and yet we were protesting, we were demonstrating against his war policies way back then.


Tania Ketenjian:
Why do you think people have strayed so far away from wanting to face this mess? I mean, in the sense that, you know, when you first came to San Francisco, people were upfront about how messed up things are. Now, as you say, people are more involved in pursuing happiness.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
That's right. Everyone that's in the— that's actually making it in American society is too well fed. So you could say the large part of the population of the United States that's above the poverty line is not wishing to be disturbed. They just want to— they want their personal self-gratification and they want to get what they want to get and the hell with everything else. It seems to me today people just don't give a damn. It's really extraordinary. Sometimes I go to do a poetry reading in the university and everyone just sits there. I could tell them that the ecological disaster is descending on them much faster than they realize, and they just sit there and look at you like, Okay, let's change the channel.


Tania Ketenjian:
So that, I mean, that's interesting to have that feeling of, you know, the audience reactions. Then what would it have been like 40 years ago?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
What would what have been like?


Tania Ketenjian:
You go to a poetry reading, you read a poem, how does the audience react?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Well, from that point of view, the audience isn't as well-fed as it was. It was less well-fed back then than it is today. And yet, there was more possibility, more hope in the air, say, in 1950 or 1960 or 1970. There was still more hope in the air before the complete social contract was destroyed by, by rightist movements in the government. The way the media has been controlled by the government in the last 20 years, you could say, it's really very hard for the general public to get at anything, much less the truth. I mean, you really have to listen to some alternative sources of news besides network television. You have to listen to people like Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! because it's no use arguing with ignorance. I have relatives in the Midwest and— or in Tennessee, and there's no use arguing politics with them because they say, "I saw it on television, it must be true." And of course, the only— their only news sources are cable and network television. So how can you argue with someone that just doesn't have the facts? Or they've got the wrong facts.


Tania Ketenjian:
Well, media has changed so much since you started City Lights. You know, both poet— I mean, media, of course, as I'm saying, has changed a tremendous amount, but poetry and the art world are two things that I think have changed dramatically over the last 50 years. I mean, poets can now have bestselling books. The art world is one of the only areas of the economy that is rising at extraordinary speeds. It's just, it's interesting. And you're involved in both those worlds.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Well, I think today there's probably more books of poetry published and more poetry readings given than any time in the history of the world, certainly in the United States. There's a plethora of poetry books being published and really, as a publisher, I'm quite conscious of the numerically speaking is much more now than it ever was. I mean, in the 1950s, our little poetry press was just so insignificant compared to the main— major publishing.


Tania Ketenjian:
I read that you were influenced by, or you loved the poetry of Blaise Cendrars.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Blaise Cendrars is a peculiar case for me because he wrote a prose, a long prose poem called Sur le Transsibérien, in other words, On the Transsiberian. He wrote this long journal and poetic prose about his experiences on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I went to Moscow in 1967. I took the Trans-Siberian Railway 5 days and 6 nights all the way across. Russia in February in the deepest winter all the way to the Sea of Japan near Vladivostok. Later, I found out that Blaise Cendrars never actually took the trip himself. It was just all in his imagination. In fact, he had poeticized this bleak landscape. Of course, I was going in 1967, which was the 50th anniversary of the of the Russian Revolution and there were these great banners over the main streets, "Glorious 50th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution," and you'd see these hordes of miserable people in black scurrying along the boulevards and completely joyless. And it was a very depressing trip. I couldn't wait to get it out.


Tania Ketenjian:
Did you learn anything from it out of…?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
I learned— I wrote one long poem called Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow. When I came back from— I got pneumonia way out on the— in Nakhodka, a workers' city on the West Coast, a very depressing place of cinderblock buildings. I came back on a Soviet air flight back to Moscow, something like a 12-hour flight in rigid seats with no food or drink. It was a Russian Army plane. We landed in Moscow airport at midnight. This is what the narrative I tell in the poem, which is Moscow in the Wilderness, Sagovya in the Snow. And I got into this long black bus all by myself. All the other passengers had been soldiers and they'd gone off in their trucks. And I got into this long black bus to go into the center of Moscow. And the bus started into Moscow and Sagovya came over the bus radio. And so Sagovya in the poem represents the voice of freedom coming through as we pass through all these devastated sites where Soviet communism at its worst was still functioning. And so it's on an old Fantasy recording using Segovia's actual playing in the background.


Tania Ketenjian:
How unusual, what a kind of contradiction for Segovia to come up in that context.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
He broke through the thaw.


Tania Ketenjian:
I mean, I can't imagine something so different.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
It was a shock to get into this bus in midnight Moscow and here's Segovia come over the radio.


Tania Ketenjian:
So you've done a tremendous amount of traveling. I mean, and you lived in Europe. How do you think you would have been different if you hadn't traveled?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Oh, well. So I would have traveled in my head like Blaise Cendrars and produced unknown paradises.


Tania Ketenjian:
Disappointed loads of your followers who would have wanted to see how true your poems were. Let's visit another poem from Coney Island of the Mind.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
That's— I remember I wrote this on the Bolinas Beach, number 24 in the Coney Island of the Mind. We squat upon the beach of love among Picasso mandolins struck full of sand and buried cat's paws that know no sphinx and picnic papers, dead crabs' claws and starfish prints. We squat upon the beach of love among the beached mermaids with their bawling babies and bald husbands. And homemade wooden animals with ice cream spoons for feet, which cannot walk or love except to eat. We squat upon the brink of love and are secure as only squatters are among the puddle-leavings of salt-sex's tides and the sweet semen rivulets and limp buried peckers in the sand-soft flesh. And still we laugh, and still we run, and still we throw ourselves upon love's boats. But it is deeper and much later than we think, and all goes down, and all our loveboys fail us, and we drink and drown.


Tania Ketenjian:
The reason I chose that is because it just paints a fantasy land. I mean, it's a true fantasy land. It happens to be Bolinas, but California is almost like a fantastic place because it's so beautiful. So talking about creating fantasy places, it seemed apt. But you choose one that you think is more appropriate.


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Well, Number 20 in A Coney Island of the Mind is also another poem that grew out of my growing up in New York. The penny candy store beyond the 'L' is where I first fell in love with unreality. Jelly beans glowed in the semi-gloom of that September afternoon. A cat upon the counter moved among the licorice sticks and Tootsie Rolls and Oh Boy gum. Outside the leaves were falling as they died. A wind had blown away the sun. A girl ran in, her hair was rainy, her breasts were breathless in the little room. Outside the leaves were falling and they cried, too soon, too soon.


Tania Ketenjian:
It paints that environment so perfectly. The September sun, the September light in New York is so beautiful and— It's just lovely. And it can easily be seen now. I mean, it's not that far. And that's what I think is so amazing about this being the 50th anniversary. 'Cause I hope you don't mind me addressing your age. Do you feel older? I mean, obviously you feel older, but do you feel like an old man?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
I feel like an old used car.


Tania Ketenjian:
Do you?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Yeah, preferably an expensive sports car.


Tania Ketenjian:
What do you like about being old?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
What do I like about what?


Tania Ketenjian:
What do you like about being old?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Oh, nothing. Being old is no fun. Norman Mailer told me a few months before he died, everything falls apart. First it's this and then it's that.


Tania Ketenjian:
Are there poems in your mind that you think about, that you memorize, that stay with you, that revisit you?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Yes, but not necessarily my own, except I really get a charge out of reading some of my old poems that I haven't looked at in years, like the poems in Coney Island of the Mind. But I'm much more likely to think of poems by, for instance, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which is the most important poem he ever wrote, much greater than The Waste Land. It was published in 1942, whereas The Waste Land was 1922. The Four Quartets was the only book of poetry I took with me when I was on board ship for 4 years in the Navy. And so I'm still— I quite often— quite often a line from the Four Quartets will come to mind more than any other poet.


Tania Ketenjian:
And which line is that?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Well, various lines, you know? Can't come up with it.


Tania Ketenjian:
It's that— it's the sports car. You say that you get a charge from reading your old poems. I mean, did you— you must have revisited Coney Island of the Mind quite a bit this year as you were putting out this one. So what's that charge like when you say that? What does that mean?


Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
Well, I realize that it really makes it as a poem, but they're just great fun to read aloud. They're performance pieces. We were doing, in the 1950s, we were doing performance poetry, although we were never called performance poets. I'm talking about the early San Francisco poets of that period. You get the poem off the printed page and out into the air. It's an oral message.


Tania Ketenjian:
Those were the words of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, publisher, and political activist. This was part one of a two part interview. Coney Island of the Mind, 50th anniversary edition, is published by New Directions, so go and get your hands, eyes, and ears on it. It includes a CD of Ferlinghetti reading, or rather performing, the poems. Next week, part two of this interview. My name is Tania Ketenjian. This is Sight Unseen. You're listening to Resonance 104.4 FM, the UK's first radio art station.