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Lawrence FERLINGHETTI 66/FREE RADICAL Our heroes tend not to own stores. But there is an berg’s “Howl,” and the equally brave nonchoice of exception—poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who I’ve Lawrence facing obscenity charges in a case that went to trial in always imagined standing a bit like George Wash- 1957 (Ferlinghetti was found not guilty and the bell- ington in the famous painting by Emanuel Gottlieb FERLINGHETTI wether verdict has proved instrumental in the continuing Leutze, crossing the Delaware. Except Ferlinghetti By Christopher bollen First Amendment protection of artistic freedom). would be on a boat in the San Francisco Bay instead Photography Grant Delin Ferlinghetti has also been, in different periods, a of an eastern river, and instead of Revolutionary War World War II Navy man, a Fidelista, a Sandinista, soldiers along with him, there would be all of the a Zapatista, an antiwar activist, an environmentalist, a revolutionary writers and poets—Allen Ginsberg, At age 93, thE LEGEnDARY translator, and an expressionist painter (a passion that Jack Kerouac, and Frank O’Hara, among them—who poEt, publishER, actIvIst, takes up much of his time). But at age 93, and still a he has helped in his career as founder and publisher AnD bEAt ICON Isn’t DonE die-hard San Franciscan, the man is foremost a poet. of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore and press. reshApInG thE nAtIon’s His 1958 collection A Coney Island of the Mind is one City Lights, which opened in 1953, still remains literary lanDscapE—AnD of the best-selling books of poetry in America (only in its original North Beach corner building and has tryinG to sAvE America in the genre of poetry is an ultimate best seller also become the literary equivalent of the Four Corners from Itself an aesthetic masterpiece), and his 1979 poem “Two Monument—a landmark where visitors can stand so Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mer- as to be in many different states all at once. City Lights cedes” is, in my mind, the single best poem dealing with the American class struggle. All of the nation’s is where Ferlinghetti began his Pocket Poets Series, LAwrence FERLInGhEttI In sAn FrancisCo, which included the brave choice of publishing Gins- AuGust 2012. All clothing: Ferlinghetti’s own. dreams and frustrations reside in that poem, tossed in 68/FREE RADICAL those seductive, straightforward lines: “And both scav- FERLINGHETTI: No, I was a poet long before. But engers gazing down / as from a great distance / at the I wasn’t political before that. Besides, I was a good cool couple / as if they were watching some odorless American boy. I was a Boy Scout in the suburbs of New TV ad / in which everything is always possible.” The York—trustworthy, loyal, friendly, courteous, kind, poem ends on “the high seas of this democracy,” and obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Ferlinghetti has never stopped steering his boat right BOLLEN: And have you stuck to all of those principles? through those storm-driven waves. His latest collec- FERLINGHETTI: Of course. [laughs] But it wasn’t just tion, Time of Useful Consciousness (New Directions), going to Nagasaki; it was coming to San Francisco at a came out in October, a sequel to his earlier book, time when a new San Francisco was being born. I got Americus, from 2004. Ferlinghetti refers to Ginsberg here after coming back from the Sorbonne. I was a as “the Whitman of our age,” but Time of Useful Con- GI there. I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. sciousness has that epic, galvanizing, country-hopping After the Second World War, the population was so voice of a latter-day Good Gray as Ferlinghetti rec- uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods reates the pioneer spirit of racing west for gold, for and took off again. So the population was very fluid, freedom, for art, for land, for the hell of it, for life— and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. as well as all the messy stops along the way. He evokes The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for many of his Beat conspirators, but there is a larger America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new elegy in these caffeinated verses, a sense of a certain culture happened in San Francisco, not New York. loss of the spirited American animal that Ferlinghetti BOLLEN: I always wondered why the West became so admires, and a maniacal, self-interested, climate- the cauldron of youth and not New York. killing new republic that doesn’t seem deserving of FERLINGHETTI: I was from New York and I tried to the characters who brought it burning to life. settle down there at the end of the war. I tried to get a Last August, in a small café in North Beach, I job at publishers and newspapers, but everything was met Ferlinghetti for coffee. He looked nothing like sewed up. Whereas in San Francisco, it was still wide George Washington, and nowhere near 93. (Is a open. It was still the last frontier in the ’40s. It seemed life of poetry the secret to staying young forever?) like it was possible to do anything you wanted to out Ferlinghetti has a busy season ahead (subsequent to here. And when you think of what did happen, what this interview, I learned that a full-length documen- started out here and went east—just like the electronic tary called Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder is being revolution that started in Silicon Valley. released by First Run Features in February). But, like BOLLEN: Time of Useful Consciousness is very much all great poets, he’s thinking far beyond the next few about the West—about the last frontier and the months. He will always be, for me, one of our great travelers along that road. national poets, and he is, to quote from his latest work, FERLINGHETTI: It’s one of a two-book series. The “the one who bears the great tradition / And breaks it.” first one started in Europe, moved to New York, and CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN: The title of your new book ended with the assassination of Kennedy. This book of poetry is an aeronautical term, isn’t it? “Time of useful takes off from that point and moves west. consciousness” is a term for the time between when a BOLLEN: And there are Beat figures scattered in these pilot loses oxygen and the time they pass out. I’m inter- poems. I wonder now how you align yourself with the preting that title as a warning for America right now. legacy of the Beat poets. LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Yeah, it’s when we are FERLINGHETTI: I don’t mean to give them more still conscious and have the time to do something to save weight than other poets. The bohemian generation is ourselves. And everybody knows what should be done, what they called people who didn’t lead conventional but they don’t do it. Congress, the corporate world . lives before the Second World War. When I arrived BOLLEN: Why don’t they? Because it’s easier not to? in San Francisco, I was still wearing my French beret! FERLINGHETTI: It’s easier not to and the sales fig- And then the Beats like Ginsberg and Kerouac, they ures can better gratify their immediate needs. It’s were a few years younger than me. They weren’t old instant gratification. Everything is me, me, me, me; the enough to be in the war. So there’s a difference. My social contract is forgotten and the younger generation poetics were totally different than Allen Ginsberg’s. We doesn’t even know what that term means. had the same political positions. Ginsberg’s background BOLLEN: The downside of our electoral cycle is that was immigrant Russian, Jewish, radical, communist. Typ- everyone is engineered to think of the future in four- ical New York radical. Threw potato salad at etiquette year periods. And the best thing to do if you become picnics. Whereas I grew up in very staid Westchester president is nothing because anything risks reelection. County. Totally different background. It was only when FERLINGHETTI: Everybody hopes that Obama in I got to San Francisco that I started listening to the the second term will be like Franklin Roosevelt in his first free radio, KPFA [a community-supported radio second term. But Franklin Roosevelt had to worry station in Berkeley, California]. KPFA had just been about being reelected for his third term. There wasn’t founded in 1949, and it was a totally different station a limitation back then. So it took courage for Roos- than it is today. It started out as a station that really evelt to act in his second term. had a wide cultural program for that time. Alan Watts BOLLEN: Today happens to be the 67th anniver- was on there. And so was Kenneth Rexroth, the most sary of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. important poet and critic in San Francisco. He was You served in World War II and you actually visited published by New Directions in New York, published Nagasaki right after the bomb was dropped there. in The Nation, things like that. And he had a program. FERLINGHETTI: I was there seven weeks after the He didn’t just review books, he knew every possible bomb was dropped. It was just like walking around field—geology, astronomy, philosophy, logic, classics. in some landscape that wasn’t on Earth. It was an It was a total education listening to him.
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