"We heard it in the 1920s in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (especially in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'), in Ezra Pound's Cantos that couldn't possibly be sung, and in the increasing stoicism, if not cynicism, of many who came of age during the war or returned from it with radically changed perspectives. It was also a period credited with America's 'loss of innocence,' which affected all American art and writing.
In this sense, Ferlinghetti is defining beat as beaten down, beat up, pounded by reality, but also refined by political, technological and social events. What, one wonders, will be the outcome, the twenty-first century’s reaction to this two hundred year cycle?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti may have been beat, but he certainly was not defeated, at least personally. He has had an enviably active and important life. He was born in Yonkers in 1919. Shortly after his birth, his mother was committed to an insane asylum. He was sent to France to be brought up by relatives. He didn’t learn to speak English until he returned to America at 5 to attend boarding school. His youth was punctuated by contrarieties that prefigure his later life. He received the Eagle Scout award, joined a street gang, was arrested for petty theft, and started writing poetry.
He received a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a MA from Columbia University. He started hitchhiking and then hopped a freight train for Mexico, reading poetry along the way with his friends. He joined the Naval Reserves and was sent to Nagasaki, Japan just six weeks after the second atomic bomb blast. With the help of the GI Bill, he obtained a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1951, he married and had a daughter. In 1953, with the help of his friend Peter Martin, he founded City Lights bookstore at the corner of Broadway and Columbus in North Beach, San Francisco, bearing the same name as Martin’s magazine. In 1955, they launched City Lights Publishing to feature the work of their friends and fellow beat poets, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. The Pocket Poets Series, which published dozens of tiny volumes, is still popular and in print today. The very next year, they were tried for obscenity after publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and lauded by free speech advocates as heroes when they won.
Sometime along the way, Ferlinghetti began the idea of public poetry readings in his bookstore. This idea, coupled with his publishing empire, attracted a whole host of like minds from all corners of the world. His large circle of friends ultimately included: William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka), Peter Orlovsky, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov, Herbert Huncke, Ken Kesey, Philip Lamantia, Lew Welch, Charles Bukowski, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams and Robert Duncan. Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel, Big Sur takes place in Ferlinghetti’s Bixby Canyon cabin. Unlike many poets who starved for their art, Ferlinghetti, all but orphaned in his youth, found a way to prosper by it. His life’s work is a monument to the intellectual history of mid-century America.
So what does he have to say to us now that we have crossed into the new millennium?
I recently went to hear a reading by the beat poet Ed Sanders, whose poetry book, Poem from Jail, was published by City Lights in 1963 after he tried to board a Polaris sub at a dock. He was charged with assaulting the forces of the United States military, evidently with all the tropes, metaphors and imagery at a poet’s command. The 30 page manuscript was written on toilet paper, and smuggled out of jail in a cigarette box. Ferlinghetti was his publisher. I was impressed by how little the past 50 years have effected Sander’s aesthetic. He is still working out the issues of his youth and still using the same methods to express himself. Of course many of those issues are still with us, but I was struck by how little his thought had advanced. It was like a very unpleasant déjà vu.
By contrast, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s recent works are still vibrant and very now. In the spring 2001 issue of 'Exquisite Corpse', Ferlinghetti excoriated the eastern poetry establishment for not being able to see how much was happening to shape American culture on the west coast. In recent writings, he has praised the democratizing impact of internet poetry and focused attention on new radical poets, at least one, sometimes two generations younger than himself. In 1998, when he was inducted as San Francisco’s first poet laureate, he took the opportunity to attack his fellow San Franciscans for betraying their heritage as an open community. The workers, the poor, and the immigrants were being driven out as creeping materialism slowly transformed the metropolis into a “homogeneous, wealthy enclave.” He attacked the automobile, freeways, chain stores and the chain gang labor they bring with them. He advertised the virtues of independent bookstores, libraries, poetry readings, bicycles, and pedestrians.
His poetry has moved on as well. In his recent poem, "White Horse," Ferlinghetti compares the new gang in the White House to the Trojan soldiers inside the horse. They come in through the gate as if bearing gifts, but in actuality they are there to rape and plunder. The old political edge is still there, but the subject matter and attitude have been thoroughly updated. These civilian soldiers come with weapons of crass destruction, their visions of territorial imperatives, the products of their pathological personalities. Ferlinghetti never used to pull any punches and he still doesn't.
Considering that most of the Beat poets are either dead or still stuck in the past, it is refreshing to find out that the poetry that Lawrence Ferlinghetti is writing today is just as new as it was 50 years ago. In another recent poem entitled "Speak Out," he envisions a vast land that allows an attack on its Twin Towers to generate "the Third World War/ The war with the Third World." The ability of poetry to compact thought into the fewest possible words could not be better illustrated. The old anger rises up again. "The terrorists in Washington/ Are shipping out the young men/ To the killing fields again/ And no one speaks." They're gathering up the usual suspects. When will they come for YOU?
Perhaps we can now stop talking about Lawrence Ferlinghetti as a beat poet, and return to seeing him as a contemporary poet. To gain fame early is accounted a good thing -- by the young. Surly the charm of it must wear off, however, if it means an interminable period of being eclipsed by one’s own reputation. Fifty years is too long a time to lie a-dying. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is alive and well. He is in his eighties now. He is not without the telltale signs of age, but his mind is sound and his voice is strong. He speaks to us in our language and of our issues. It’s time we let him live again.
"Politically, it all started with the disillusionment of intellectuals with the Communist dream in the 1930s (as tellingly articulated in Arthur Koestler's The God that Failed). In the postwar years, this led to increasing resistance to commitment of any kind, in literature as well as in politics. And it was a part of a growing alienation of artists and writers from mainstream society and government in general.
"This eventually led to the romantic rebellion of Beat writers. And today we have the electronic revolution that favors pragmatic, technocratic, materialist consciousness at the expense of the subjective. In poetry we have the still greater estrangement of new generations of rappers and slammers who are much more alienated from society than the Beats ever were, though with less commitment, politically or otherwise." [Exquisite Corpse, Issue 8]
© Copyright Gary Lehmann 2005