A
Conversation with
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
By Jeff Troiano
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti is a poet, publisher, painter, and bookstore owner. Simple
enough. Yet it seems almost larcenous to spell those occupations,
in reference to Mr. Ferlinghetti, in lower-case type. As a poet, his
A Coney Island of the Mind is considered a classic of the 20th
century. As a publisher, his decision to produce Allen Ginsberg's
Howl challenged the censors and ultimately reaffirmed our First
Ammendment rights. As a painter, he continues to produce fresh, provocative,
sensitively rendered "statements" that convey his message
as much as any poem. And as a bookseller, City Lights is America's
most famous bookstore—a mecca for book-minded visitors from around
the world.
Jeff
Troiano: In early 2001 you wrote in an essay in the San Francisco
Chronicle that poetry and freedom of speech were in big trouble. How
bad are things now?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Things are worse. Freedom of speech is
always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts
of the world, unfortunately.
What
is "Skyscraper America"? Where is it found?
"Skyscraper America" extends around the world with American
corporate monoculture. There are skyscrapers in Sumatra, in China,
in Japan, in the Middle East, in mid-Europe, in all the countries
that were once under dictatorships. The first thing they do is rush
to adopt the worst features of American corporate monculture: Skyscrapers,
automobiles, the whole schmeer.
In
the wake of 9/11, do you envision any change in American consciousness?
Business as usual, right?
"Our
doors are open."
It seems to me it's changing for the worse. The spineless Democrats
are taking dictation from George II who usurped the throne and is
occupying the palace illegally. Hopefully, we'll get to a boiling
point... We've been at the boiling point for quite some time. September
11 was really the beginning of the Third World War, and not in the
sense of World War I and World War II, but in the sense of the beginning
of the war with the Third World. That's what it is.
You
were an active participant in WWII, and you saw Nagasaki after the
blast. How did this contribute to who you became as an artist and
as a man?
Before I was at Nagasaki, I was a good American boy. I was an
Eagle Scout; I was the commander of a sub-chaser in the Normandy Invasion.
Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept
in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs
can do.
Is
the current threat to our civil liberties comparable to what you experienced
in the early '50s?
No, it's much worse. That was nothing back then. President Eisenhower's
reign was very stultifying; there was lots of unspoken censorship.
But today, Eisenhower looks like an angel compared to these bandits
who are now running Washington. They're criminals; they're international
criminals. Under both Bush administrations, they've reappointed at
least four felons who were convicted during the Watergate years and
during Iran-Contra. They're in government now. These are international
criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.
Way
back when, did you expect trouble when you published Howl?
Of course. It seemed the clamor was such that this book would
not be allowed by proper society. After all, Howl was a vast castigation
of American consumer society.
Did
you anticipate any sort of Supreme Court intervention?
Well, I doubted that it would get to the Supreme Court, but as
long as we had the American Civil Liberties Union to back us up, we
were ready to go to the Supreme Court. Of course, without the ACLU
we'd have been out of business. We were just a one-room bookstore;
we didn't have any money for lawyers.
Back
in those days, you had an incredible stable of writers: Ginsberg,
Kerouac, Corso, Snyder ...
It would have been nice had we provided a nice warm stable and
we were feeding them regularly—the care and feeding of poets.
The care and feeding of authors is what publishers do. We didn't really
have a stable. One at a time, poets would stagger in the door, drunk
or sober, high or stoned. They were looking for a stable, but we didn't
have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves. We were a two-bit,
one-room bookstore with no money. That's how it was.
How
do you envision the future of publishing? E-books?
The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized
presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge
conglomerates. The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those
that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends
on the money. New Directions, who's been my publisher since they published
my book A Coney Island of the Mind> in 1958, is a rare exception.
They were the first to report on and publish poets like Ezra Pound,
Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams—a huge
list of important American, as well as European, writers. New Directions
is still going strong, and they're still not a part of any corporate
conglomerate.
What
can we do as individuals to stem the tide?
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author
scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel
like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
With their commercial tactics, they've wiped out about half the independent
bookstores in the country. It's happened across the board in major
cities in the United States. For instance there's not a single independent
bookstore left in downtown Chicago. There are hardly any left in New
York City. The San Francisco Bay Area is very fortunate to still have
a lot of independent bookstores. There's nowhere else in the country
like this.
What
effect can poetry actually have these days?
Make love not war. We have to raise the consciousness; the only
way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the
general populace. Since 9/11, people are expecting intellectuals,
especially writers, to articulate some new paradigm of reality to
live by. Many of the poets in the high poetic positions have been
singularly silent or, at best, come out with a low mumble. It's the
unknowns who have come up with some great poetic statements.
In your
inaugural speech as San Francisco's poet laureate you mentioned some
things you hoped to address: gentrification, "autogeddon," the Blue Angels, chain stores, painting the Golden Gate Bridge golden,
and tilting the Coit Tower. How
did it go?
Well, I was up at the Coit Tower the other night, but there were
two police squad cars parked there, so I didn't have a chance to tilt
the tower. I'm still working on it. Look what it did for Pisa! And
I was disappointed when I came out here and saw that it was a Navy
red-lead color. That's what they put on ships before they paint the
gray. It's anti-rust. Let's make it California-golden color. And the
Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember
seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington
Square; they thought they were back in the war. It's just a big militaristic,
jingoistic display of testosterone.
Do
you think it's possible to regenerate the "island mentality"
you felt when you moved to San Francisco in 1950?
I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.
Nothing's going to change in this country as long as everyone's so
well fed. What it takes for a revolution is hunger and passion. There
won't be any changes until we have another depression like in the
1930s, which we have not approached yet in the present recession.
Which
of your gallery exhibitions has been the most satisfying for you?
I had a show at George Krevsky Gallery this past spring. That
show traveled to Woodstock, New York where it showed for six weeks.
It was a big show, about 20 large canvases. It was called "lit.paint."
Do
you think your paintings communicate as effectively as your written
works?
The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy
and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read
a poem. There have been surveys that conclude that the average amount
of time someone looks at one painting is 10 seconds. It's much easier
to consume the visual image than to read something.
From
what I've read, your early paintings emulated the Abstract Expressionists.
Why have you shifted?
Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s
and '50s. A lot of people who take up painting go right into doing
non-objective or abstract, and they think that makes them artists.
The famous non-objective artists, from the New York School, for instance—Kline,
De Kooning, Motherwell—were Abstract Expressionists, but they
were great draftsmen; they could draw extremely well before they started
painting non-objective.
Did
you become disenchanted with your own work?
No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.
Would
you like to write another novel?
Well, yes, I've been writing one for quite a few years. It comes
from a phrase in my first novel, Her, which was a Paris novel
of the 1940s. It was a surrealist novel. It contains a phrase—"Fourth
Person Singular." That's the title I'm using for the new novel.
I have no idea if I'll ever finish it.
What
are you reading?
I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from
early in the last century. I'm also reading The Trials of Lenny
Bruce, a great book on Lenny Bruce, who was what I call a "stand-up
tragedian." I'm reading School for Dictators by Ignazio
Silone, who was a famous Italian anti-Fascist writer in the '20s,
'30s, and '40s. It's the story of an American who wants to become
a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various
Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power. They
learn that they gained power with the complete cooperation of the
existing democratic institutions. It's just what's happening here;
it's what happened in Florida, which was a subversion of the last
presidential election. Then there was the complete cooperation of
the Supreme Court, and now there is the complete cooperation of the
Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
Do
you feel a growing need for poets and artists to become activists?
Not necessarily. It really depends on the artist. Some of our
greatest painters and poets are not activists at all. Like the Japanese
haiku masters, or various Polish poets or Chinese poets, or 12th century
mystics like Rumi or Hafiz, the great Persian poets. You can say they
were dissident poets, but they weren't really activists. If certain
artists aren't used to thinking politically, what they create won't
measure up anyway.
If
you could change anything at all about San Francisco, what would you
change?
I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You
see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got
to go a long way from here.
