The Wrong Side
http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/2132/ferlinghetti_11_1_10/
Jesse Tangen-Mills interviews Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
November 2010
The unrepentant revolutionary poet and Beat godfather, now 91, looks
back at friendships with Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, Fidel, and the
Sandinistasand asks when The Nation will publish his next poem.
Aside from being one of the most famous living poets in the United
States, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an erudite publisher, a recognized
painter, and lately, he's a little ticked off at the world. Who can
blame him? Fifty years ago he wrote: "I am waiting/ for the American
Eagle/ to really spread its wings/ and straighten up and fly right."
Decades later he's still waiting; it seems no one has heeded his
calls for change. With a massive ecological disaster, two costly
wars, and an economic depression, he might rightly say I told you so.
But who would listen? Poetry hardly draws the audiences that it once
did, much less the national poetry tours that Ferlinghetti speaks of.
The ninety-one-year-old began writing poetry and painting sixty years
ago, and hasn't stopped since. He founded one of the oldest and most
prestigious independent publishing houses in the United States, City
Lights Books, that famously published Allen Ginsberg's Howl. A friend
to Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso, he is often considered
the father of the Beats. But he is more than a bookworm. Ferlinghetti
was in Nagasaki shortly after it had been obliterated; he was
arrested for publishing Howl; he was an American advocate for the
Sandinistas and later the Zapatistas. From surrealism, to abstract
expressionism, to fluxus, to eco-poetry, Ferlinghetti was there. He
was the man, and he suffered, somewhat. Perhaps that's why he has
never been afraid to shake things up, andas evidenced in this
interviewhe still isn't. In fact he made me promise that the
political content of our conversation wouldn't be edited out,
something that apparently has happened to him before.
Which leads me to the side of Ferlinghetti that shows in his
bibliography, but hardly comes up in his biography: he's a
Hispanophile. He reads and speaks Spanish (despite his modest denials
of speaking it). Like the protagonists of Roberto Bolaño's novel The
Savage Detectives he bounced around Latin America in pursuit of
poetry, justice, and truth. I wanted to find out more about this side
of Mr. Ferlinghetti's past, as well as his views on the state of
politics and poetry today. We spoke by phone between Colombia and San
Francisco, and the following is a record of our talk from two
different ends of what we might agree is a dying world.
Jesse Tangen-Mills for Guernica
Guernica: I know you've traveled extensively in Latin America. Did
you make any famous acquaintances?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: I met Pablo Neruda in Cuba on the first or
second anniversary of the revolution in 1959. I just happened to be
in Havana on my way back from St. Thomas, when Neruda had come to
address the fidelistas. I was staying in some cheap hotel on the
beach, where I met, it turned out, editors for the literary
supplement Lunes. They took me to meet him. Neruda was staying at the
Havana Libre, which had been called Havana Hilton as it was called
after the revolution, the top floor penthouse. He was writing in a
giant-sized notebook in huge handwriting. He was there with his wife
Matilde, and she spoke French. At that time my French was a hell of a
lot better than my Spanishand it still is. He showed me this
cuarto-sized notebook that he was writing in with a large pencil. He
spoke English. He said, "I love your wide open poetry." I didn't know
if he had meant my poetry or the Beats. He, like us, thought that
poetry could contain everything, every subject. He wanted to put
everything in his poems and take nothing out. Ginsberg, Gregory
Corso, Kerouac, LeRoi Jones, and myself, had been translated and
published in El Lunes, the literary supplement of the newspaper la
Revolución. The editors of El Lunes were young poets. This would
never happen in a capitalist country [Laughs]. A big newspaper's
literary supplement was run by these young, at that time unknown
poets. Then it came time for him to give a reading and they had sent
a limousine for him. And he said, "Well why don't you come with me?"
and I said, "No, no you go ahead." He said, "No, come with me." So I
went to the National Assembly building, right where the dictator's
henchman once met. It was a huge elegant chamber with velvet
armchairs at least in the balconies. The fidelistas filled the hall,
still in fatigues smoking cigars, in these velvet chairs. They had
their feet on the furniture. The whole place was trembling with
fantastic excitement, which you might call revolutionary euphoria. It
was so alive with this euphoria it seemed like everything was
possible. This is before people had a chance to have second thoughts
about it. He read many poems and he got a standing ovation after
every poem. I didn't see him again.
Guernica: A few months ago I read a new poem of yours "At Sea." I
noticed you dedicated it to Pablo Neruda. Can you talk a little bit
about how you feel about Neruda now, so many years later?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: I've been reading him in Spanish and it turned me on.
Guernica: You call Neruda an "omnivore" in "A Far Rockaway of the
Mind." Can you elaborate a little on that?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Yeah, he wrote about everything. He was like
Whitman that way. He saw poetry of some kind in everything and everybody.
Guernica: Did you meet any other famous figures in Cuba?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: The editors of Lunes took me to a cafeteria
where they said Fidel often came for lunch. Sure enough, this big guy
smoking a cigar comes out of the kitchen. I said, "Isn't that Fidel?"
and they said "Yes," and I said, "Well, how about introducing me?"
and they saidlike most unknown poets when confronted with somebody
famous"Well, we don't know him." So I just got up and went over and
shook his hand, and I was surprised he had a very soft handshake. He
had a big smile on his face. At that time, I couldn't think of
anything much to say in Spanish, except that I knew he had met Allen
Ginsberg at the Lennox Hotel in New York, so I said, "Soy amigo de
Allen Ginsberg." And he got a grin on his face, sort of waved, got
out and got into his jeep, an open jeep. He just drove off by
himself. I mean, I could have been a hired agent from the United
States or somewhere else. It would have been an easy assassination,
but at that time he didn't seem to need a guard he was so popular.
Guernica: What do you think of Fidel now?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: How old is he now? Eighty-five?
Guernica: About there I guess.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: I wish him well. I wish he could have
continued on his original revolutionary path. I'm rather ill-informed
after those first years.
Guernica: When was your first time in Nicaragua?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: I went in 1985 at the invitation of Ernesto
Cardenal, who was the minister of Culture. We did a tour of the
country, always in a caravan of military vehicle with a walkie-talkie
in the first vehicle and another at the rear end. It was still war
footing then. Everyone was still carrying guns. We went down to the
Southern border with Costa Rica and we got there just after the
border station had been burned down by a fire from Costa Rica. We
stopped on the way through a jungle camp of fidelistas in the deep
jungle. I don't know what they were doing there, if they were
training or just hanging out.
Then we took a Soviet-built helicopter from Managua across Lake
Nicaragua to Ernesto Cardenal's hermitage, an island on the other end
of the long lake. Solentiname was the name of his retreat, where he
had invited many young sons of fidelistas, kids who were probably
from poor farms to learn how to make art. They made quite a few
paintings, which became quite famous, very much in demand. I don't
know for how many years he continued with that school of art with all
those kids.
Guernica: When did you meet Ernesto Cardenal?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Well, you know he was known as a poet first in
the United States before being known as a fidelista. He was published
by New Directions first, who was my publisher. I had never met him in
person, but I knew all about him. So when he came to San Francisco we
met. He came to City Lights bookstore. We hung out there. He wanted
to go to Army and Navy stores, surplus stores, where you can buy
uniforms and stuff like that. They don't exist anymore. But he wanted
to go there. I didn't know why. And he bought a dozen berets. I
should have known something was up. [Laughs.] Why should he buy a
dozen berets? Soon after that was the fidelista insurrection. I guess
you know the rest.
Guernica: Do you still keep in contact with Cardenal?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Through others like Daisy Zamora, a poet
through the very last years of the Sandinista regime, I get news of
Ernesto through her now and then.
The second time I went to Nicaragua was 1989, just before the vote,
when the Sandinistas were voted out. They abided by the vote and
didn't go back on their word. At that time there was a totally
different feeling in Nicaragua. The country was no longer
militarized. You didn't see any guns, but the countryside looked
pretty impoverished still. It was a sad tale, but before it became a
sad tale, that summer we went to this huge rally in the baseball
stadium in Managua. The Sandinistas came from all over the country
and filled this stadium. Must have been ten thousand Sandinistas in
there with huge flags and banners. Lots of great music and I was with
my son, he was just eighteen, I think. It was a great experience for
him. There was such great enthusiasm at this rally and everyone was
sure that the Sandinistas would win the election. Of course, they
didn't. Well, with the United States giving out dollar bills on
street corners to thwart this election.
My son was in Puerto Escondido surfing. I got there to pick him up
and head to Nicaragua. He was totally barefoot with not a cent in his
pocket when I got there. He had been there all summer, sleeping on
the beach, no money. So he had a surf board, and when we got to
Mexico City to change planes to go to Nicaragua, he wanted to take
the surfboard with him. I said, Oh no. He didn't realize there was a
war going on. So we checked the surfboard in the airport. When he got
there he immediately realized what a travesty it would have been if
he had shown up with a surfboard in the middle of a revolution.
Guernica: You've traveled in Mexico as well.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A lot, especially Oaxaca.
Guernica: When was the first time you went to Mexico?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: When I was in college. I came in through the
East side, through Laredo. I was probably eighteen years old when I
went to Mexico City. But then I didn't go back until I was out in San
Francisco. I had gotten to San Francisco in 1951. I started going to
Mexico in the nineteen sixties.
I used to go in my old VW bus with my dog. And we went to practically
all parts of Mexico including Baja. All the popular spots. Mexico
City of course. Now, I avoid the big cities. The first time I was in
Guadalajara it was like six hundred thousand and now it's like two
million. I don't want to go over there anymore. Oaxaca is still my
favorite place.
Guernica: What was your first contact with poetry there?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: It's been quite a while now. I have met a lot
of poets. I read at the Plaza Nacional en Bellas Artes and I had a
whole array of Mexican poets on stage who had translated various
poems of mine.
Guernica: I saw that City Lights published Homero Arjidis's last
book, Solar Poems.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: He's an old, old friend of mine, and a still
older friend of Nancy Peters and Phil Lamantia, a surrealist poet who
died about four years ago. (Nancy Peters was the managing editor of
City Lights until she retired last year.) Ernesto Cardenal officiated
Phil Lamantia's first marriage in Mexico. That must have been in the
nineteen fifties. Then, when Homero came to the States we always saw
him, and had dinner with him. He was also the Mexican delegate for
UNESCO, up to six months ago. I visited him during his first month in
Paris. I had dinner with him at his new UNESCO apartment. We
published Solar Poems. He had a reading at City Lights two months
ago. I believe he's back in Mexico.
Guernica: I really enjoyed Solar Poems.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Beautiful.
Guernica: There's a romanticism in those poems, but interestingly
romanticism for a dying world, I felt. Do you share the opinion that
we're at the end of something?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Definitely. Homero was always involved in
ecological struggles. His Grupo de cien, the group of one hundred,
was an activist group that campaigned against various ecological
horrors and was able to stop the building of a huge cement plant in
Baja that would have devastated the landscape. They used to put
full-page ads in the New York Times. So he's always had an ecological
consciousness. Recently, I've written poems that have more or less
the same consciousness.
Guernica: What Latin American authors were known or read in the
United States the first time you came to Latin America?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Hardly any. Allen Ginsberg was a great
cultural ambassador. He spoke taxi cab Spanish. He stayed up all
night in Chile translating "Howl" into Spanish with other poets.
Guernica: I know that your publisher City Lights was the first to
translate Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in the nineteen fifties. So, how
did you meet Nicanor Parra?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: I came upon Parra when I was riding on a train
in Chile between Santiago and Concepcion, 1959. We were invited to an
international poetry festival organized by the communist party
somewhere in Chile. Ginsberg and I didn't know the CP was the
organizer until after we arrived. We had been invited by Fernando
Alegria, professor then at UC Berkeley, and his brother in Chile was
one of the organizers of the conference. Jorge Elliott was on the
train. He spoke English and I was sitting near him in coach. He said
that he had translated Parra. I asked him to send it to me. He did
and City Lights published it in the Pocket Poems series. I met his
sister Violeta [Parra] in Lima later in that same trip. She came to a
bad end, as I understand.
Guernica: I've often seen similarities in your work. Do you see any
correlation between "a coney island of the mind" and "antipoetry"?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Parra definitely was an influence. He had a
satirical bent that was very similar. Of his poems I remember:
"Therefore
I grow a louse on my tie
And smile at the imbeciles descending from the trees."
Guernica: Some people say that the U.S. is in a state of decline? Do you agree?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Yes. [Pause. Laughter.] Western Civilization
has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910.
That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there
was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That
civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American
triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is
really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization. I was on
television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does
it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on
mainstream media." Sort of a condescending question. I said, "Well I
think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not
the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture
of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors,
artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They
are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant
culture." So we come up to today, and I think today America's on the
wrong side of the world revolution. What I mean by that is, the world
revolution is the people's revolution, the liberation movements in
all the third world countries, which when everyone tries to get
started the U.S. stops, as they did in Nicaragua, like they're still
trying to do in Cuba. The democratic revolution, the people's
revolution, we're on the wrong side of the revolution. We're on the
wrong side. We're not on the side of the people of the world. I sent
a poem saying that to The Nation magazine in New York and they
accepted it about, must be six months ago, and I still haven't seen
it appear in The Nation. I've been out of the country. I was in
France and Italy last couple of months, but I don't think it's
appeared. They may have had second thoughts, even though it's a
leftist journal.
Guernica: There was an exposition of your paintings recently in Italy, correct?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Oh yeah, I had a six decades retrospective of
my painting in the Museo di Roma. It has now moved to a museum in
Calabria. Close to sixty paintings, a lot of them are quite large.
Guernica: How did you feel at the exposition?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: When I was there I got a huge amount of
publicity in the national press. Full-page spreads. For writers and
artists, that never happens in this country. Andy Warhol was somebody
who could.
Guernica: When I think of the connection between painting and poetry,
Frank O' Hara comes to mind. Did you know Frank O'Hara?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: We published his Lunch Poems in the Pocket
Poems series. The way that happened was that I wrote him on a
postcard and said I know you published a couple of "lunch
poems"because he wrote them on his lunch hour, when he was working
at the Museum of Modern Art. He said, okay let's do a book called
Lunch Poems. A couple years passed, and I wrote him, "Are the lunch
poems cooked yet?" And he wrote back, "Still cooking." And it went on
like that for a couple more years before we finally got the
manuscript. Been in print ever since.
Guernica: I was saddened to hear that Voznesensky passed as well as
another Beat poet, Peter Orlovksy. Someone told me to read "An Elegy
on the Death of Kenneth Patchen." Do you think the world is just
trying to "forget about them and their awful strange prophecies" as
you put it in that poem?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Peter Orlovsky didn't make any "strange
prophesies." He wrote vegetable poems. That's what he called him.
Voznesensky didn't make any "strange prophesies" either, but his
great rival and compatriot was Yevtushenko. Yevtushenko was very
interesting, at the time that the Soviet regime sent him, there was
an NYU exhibition of Beat poetry and Beat art, and Andrei Voznesensky
showed up at the opening. We didn't even know he was in town and he'd
come to the States for the reading. And he said, "I have to hurry
back to Russia because I don't want to miss out on what's happening."
So he went back. Yevtushenko stayed in this country more, and I think
he became a professor at Southern Methodist University. I imagine
that perhaps the younger generation identified him too much with the
older Soviet Regime. Both Voznesensky and Yevtushenko were sort of
working a very thin line between being dissident poets, and not being
so dissident that they were banned from publication, and they weren't
allowed to leave the country. It turned out that they were allowed to
leave the country because they could come to America and earn a lot
of money for the Soviet Union in dollars, so they were allowed to
attend poetry readings.
Voznesensky and Yevtushenkoboth of themcame to San Francisco in
readings sponsored by City Lights Bookstore. They were wonderful
readings. Yevtushenko read at Project Artel which was a huge old
factory building, but we couldn't find a place that was big enough
for him. He said he was used to reading in football stadiums in
Russia. Voznesensky was here a couple of times. We read at Fillmore
once between sets of the Jefferson Airplane. I got to know
Voznesensky much better. We did a tour of Australia with Allen
Ginsberg. In 1973 we went to the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. And
then we sold out the town hall in Melbourne and Sydney. I should say
that Voznesensky and Ginsberg, they sold them out. We had huge
audiences. At the reading in Melbourne, it was exactly at the time
when Soviets were still in Afghanistan, and just when Voznesensky was
about to read, a huge parade of protesters came in and marched down
all the aisles with big placards protesting against the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan. And Andrei and I were standing on stage.
And he said to the audience, "What should I say?" I said, "Don't say
anything. Just stand here silently. Don't say a thing and it will die
down." He stood there for at least fifteen minutes while the
demonstrators went on. The police didn't clear the hall or anything.
Finally, the protesters went back out and Andrei read his poetry.
Guernica: I read Poetry as Insurgent Art. Is dissidence a part of poetry?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Of course! I mean you just read the book, right?
Guernica: Fair enough. Then what about Sartre's critique, "What can a
poem do for a starving child?"
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: He said that?
Guernica: Yes. As someone who has dedicated his entire life to both
causes, do you think there's any validity in that? How would you respond?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Phrased like that and they quote it that
Sartre said it? He probably said it in conversation some time. The
phrase is taken out of context. The next phrase is probably, you
can't live without it. So I would say you can't live without it.
Guernica: Can poetry change the world?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poetry can change the world, just like any art
can change the world, by changing consciousness. Of course this was
the great slogan of the nineteen sixites hippies' revolutionenlarge
the area of consciousness, which quite often was done by psychedelic
means. Generally, the idea was, you could change the world by
changing consciousness. There were so many things that proved to be
an illusion. For instance, people like Timothy Leary would say if we
could feed LSD to all the heads of state then we would have universal
peace. Well, that certainly proved to be not truenot that they all had it.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
