Original subtitles

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a more complicated individual

than we are used to having in American writing.

- He was the most accessible to me,

the one that reached me and moved me.

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an old-ass anarchist.

- Lawrence is a bohemian, became a leftist,

politically conscious.

And then he opened up a bookstore to reflect that.

- Like many people, Lawrence has many facets,

many faces, many personas.

- [McClure] Lawrence is probably the most popular

modern poet.

- [Lebel] Poet is only one of them.

He is also the publisher, the activist, the painter.

- [Voiceover] His heroes were

Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Prevert.

- And as a publisher, he has brought together one of the

most amazing publishing houses in the world.

- [Lebel] Lawrence and the gang at City Lights,

they made the book store, a center of a village.

- Lawrence was the mayor of North Beach,

not question about it. He kept it alive.

- And because he won his legal case..

He opened up the doors for all us

to celebrate the rights of first amendment,

freedom of speech.

- His willingness to stay involved and keep foraging ahead,

and keeping it sort of that fire burning,

with new people always looking for the next voice

and continuing to publish, it isn't stuck in the past,

it isn't some 50s, 60s only institution.

It's as alive as anything.

- Ferlinghetti is still grappling and still

speaking out and using poetry as

kind of the ultimate freedom of speech.

- I am waiting for my case to come up,

and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder,

and I am waiting for someone to really discover America

and I am waiting for the discovery

of a new symbolic western frontier,

and I am waiting for the American eagle

to really spread its wings, and straighten up and fly right,

and I am waiting for the war to be fought

which will make the world safe for anarchy,

and I am waiting for the final withering away

of all governments,

and I am perpetually waiting for rebirth of wonder.

Here we are, City Lights Bookstore,

center of the universe, San Francisco.

When I arrived in the 1950s,

citizens didn't seem to consider themselves

part of the United States.

It was still a last frontier,

in more ways than one.

It may still be, and so that's why the youth today

are still attracted to this.

It's a way out of American corporate mono-culture,

and materialist consciousness of the country.

People are still coming for some reason or other.

Maybe the gold rush isn't over after all.

- I mean, what the hell was City Lights Books?

It was a place where you had a window into literature,

political ideas that were basically being ignored.

- In the 60s, the radicals from Berkely would come there

to meet, to plan demonstrations.

The radicals from San Francisco would go there.

We'd all get together and talk about things,

speak about what we could do.

And at the same time, we could sit around in the chairs

and leaf through small fanzine type poetry magazines

while we were discussing the serious issues

that we were concerned with.

- This wasn't the center of wild drinking

or drugs or anything.

You know, it was a place where you sat down in a chair,

and you read a fucking book.

A guy like Lenny Bruce would come in to see a book.

He's coming in before a show to check something,

some writer, some legal book, censorship, first amendment.

And so this place was a serious resource.

- It was like where the minds went to meet

and to talk over what we had done

and what we wished to do.

- You know, if our amendments had addresses,

the address of the first amendment would be right here

at City Lights Books.

You can find respect for the first amendment in other

book stores and other publishing houses across the nation,

but you will never see it,

the first amendment, so fully, so happily ensconced

as it is here at City Lights in the city of San Francisco.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, congratulations,

literature, culture, the first amendment

is better because of you.

- The concept of City Lights Bookstore

in addition to the press changing our idea

of what a book was, or what a book of poetry was,

also changed our idea of what a book store was.

A very democratic idea, right?

The same way with making the books inexpensive and portable,

breaking open the doors of the bookstore,

allowing people to come in and sit and read,

it was all the sense of bringing literature

out of kind of T. S. Elliot mold, taking off it's tie,

putting on some strange looking pants

and bringing it to the people.

- We became notorious

for publishing the beat poets.

But the beats were only one generation of dissident writers

that we published at City Lights.

Writers like Bukowski.

We published Sam Shepard.

Dissident thought, not necessarily political all the time.

- He, as a publisher,

had an enormous vision,

starting very small,

building from the small poem book,

later to novels to translations.

His international fiction line is fantastic.

- As a publisher, City Lights has always been

totally independent, never taking any government grants,

or any other kind of grants.

Our main focus is on radical politics,

radical deep ecology,

feminism and poetry.

- There was this kind of confluence of the revolutionary

openness of the poetry and a very,

a sort of disrespect for tradition

and a sense of breaking through,

kind of rolling a grenade into the library

and breaking a convention.

- That's what his mission has been.

To create a publishing apparatus

which published him and a lot of other people.

And that's what you have to do.

He created an iconic publishing force in City Lights.

That's what Ferlinghetti did.

- Well, when I got into the scene here,

I discovered North Beach.

Took me quite a while.

I had a painting studio starting in '52

in Nine Mission street, the Audiffred buildling,

studio I inherited from Hassel Smith.

I had an old Austin car and I came up Columbus and I saw

some guy putting up a sign right here that said

Pocket Book Shop.

So, for some reason, I parked, I don't know why.

Except my old friend George Whitman had just started

his first version of what's now called

Shakespeare and Company in Paris.

And it was a used book store, and I said, well,

that's what I'd like to do,

have a used book store, sit in the back,

read under a shade and

groan if anybody interrupted me.

So, I came across the street and I introduced myself,

turned out his name was Peter D. Martin and he had

a little magazine called City Lights.

It was the very first pop culture magazine.

So, I said, what are doing?

He said, I'm starting a pocket book shop.

And there was a brilliant idea.

There was no paperback bookstores in this country.

It was just the beginning of what became known as

the quality paperback revolution.

He said they had 500 dollars, I said well, I've got 500, so

it started over a handshake.

- In 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco,

five poets got together.

- Lamantia, McClure, myself,

Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder

with Kenneth Rexroth as the moderator,

got together and gave a reading at the Six Gallery

in San Francisco,

where I first read Howl.

And where all of us as a poetic group

all got together on the same stage

with Kerouac in the audience,

with Neal Cassady in the audience.

- I think we discovered what the meaning of

reading out loud was.

None of expected to have a publisher, but the idea was

speak to people directly

with poetry that couldn't be published.

And lo and behold, Howl,

which certainly couldn't be published,

was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

who was there that night

and sent a telegram to Allen the next day

asking Allen to publish Howl.

- Now, as you may have seen in the papers,

collector of customs, Chester McFee,

confiscated 520 copies of a paper bound volume of poetry

entitled Howl and Other Poems by Allen Gingsberg.

You wouldn't want your children to come across it.

- The juvenile department

of the San Francisco police department

arrested Lawrence's bookstore manager that evening

whose name was Shig Morau,

and also put out a warrant for the arrest

of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who wasn't there that day.

Lawrence turned himself in,

and was subjected to a trial that they thought was going

to be a disaster.

- Lawrence had anticipated that and he had gone to the ACLU

and asked whether the ACLU would defend him

in the event he ran into this kind of situation.

Ernie Besig, the executive director of the ACLU at the time

said of course, free speech is free speech.

We will defend this.

I was a young lawyer and I was handed the task

of preparing the constitutional argument.

- [Morgan] Judge Horn had just been through a big trial

in San Francisco.

Some teenage shoplifters who he had sentenced

to see the movie "The Ten Commandments."

He was a conservative, born-again Christian who

took no nonsense from people.

And so, of course, they felt they had lost the case for Howl

just by the selection of the judge.

Lawrence had laid his whole career on the line.

He risked not just a heavy fine, though,

he risked a prison sentence.

Allen was overseas at the time,

never even came back for the trial.

It was more of a novelty to him.

He realized that it was

an important even in American history,

but he didn't realize the serious trouble that Lawrence

could actually have gotten into.

-Lawrence Ferlinghetti,

bookstore proprietor, said there were four-letter words

in the poems but it is easily defendable as work of art.

It's a first breath of fresh air in American poetry

in almost a generation.

This is the way official San Francisco welcomes

this book of incomparable power.

- I saw the best minds of my generation

destroyed by madness

starving, hysterical, naked

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix

angel-headed hipsters

burning for the ancient, heavenly connection

to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high

sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness

of cold-water flats floating across the tops of

cities contemplating jazz.

- Judge Horn turned out to be a very fair judge

and he ruled after the trial that Howl was not obscene

because it had some redeeming social value.

- It's not the poet but what he observes

which is revealed as obscene.

The sad waste of Howl,

of the sad waste of the mechanized world,

lost among atom bombs and insane nationalisms.

- Howl gave a legal president that really important

for publishers who were already active,

and also kind of was an inspiration, I think,

because the Howl trial created so much national publicity.

I think for younger people it's difficult to imagine

the impact the three or four page pictorial spread

in Life magazine had in those days.

That was huge.

So, it was kind of important in the sense that it

brought a lot of attention to a really critical

point of principle, freedom of speech.

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti kicked open the door

to free up publishing

at a time when it really needed to happen.

He risked a great deal for a lot of books

that couldn't have been published in this country.

Many books that are now considered classics

can be freely read, carried in your back pocket

and taught in almost every university in the country.

- This is called Autobiography.

I am leading a quiet life

in Mike's Place every day

watching the champs

of the Dante Billiard Parlor

and the French pinball addicts.

And I have read somewhere

the Meaning of Existence

yet have forgotten just exactly where

But I am the man

And I'll be there.

And I may cause the lips

of those who are asleep

to speak.

And I may make my notebooks

into sheaves of grass.

And I may write my own

eponymous epitaph

instructing the horsemen

to pass.

- When Lawrence was born in 1919, his father had just died.

And Clemence, his mother, had a nervous breakdown.

And so she went to a mental institution near New York.

- Our Aunt Emily was French and she took me

to France with her when I was about a week old

and we lived near Strasborg.

I don't think we came back to America

until I was about six.

I didn't even know I had four brothers at that time.

- Of course he was convinced

that Emily was his true mother and that he was French.

But after four years, around 1923,

Emily decided to go back to New York.

But, she hadn't enough money.

She wasn't feeding Lawrence enough.

And soon the social system took the child.

And Lawrence was just four years old and ended up

in an orphanage in Chappaqua near New York.

- The photo of Emily,

mad and elegant,

thinking herself a great writer

with something to say to the world

in her shadow hat

having her picture taken

with the child she always wanted.

She had lovers,

but no child.

She stood by the bedside and took me.

- Emily found a job as private teacher

at the Bislands, a very rich family living in Bronxville,

near New York.

- I went along with her and there was a butler.

There was a Swedish cook.

There was a chauffeur.

And there was a gardener, an old Italian gardener,

who always smelled of garlic and pepperoni.

And he lived in a shack in the garden.

He was a hunchback.

It's right out of Dickens. (laughs)

- After a year, Emily during her free day,

just went out and never came back.

- I was writing my French aunt when I was 12 years old,

that's when I discovered I could really write.

She was in France, I was back in New York.

And, so That's how I,

the first writing I did was to my French Aunt Emily.

She answered for a while

I mean, I remember getting letters from her.

Then she really went crazy.

I don't know whether she had insomnia or

amnesia or what.

She just disappeared.

Never heard from her again.

Nor did anyone else.

Emily Monsonto.

And saw her never again.

And never saw her again

except in the back of old boutiques

peered into now again

with haunting glance in the Rue De Seine.

The Bislands didn't adopt me legally

but they had had a son named Lawrence who died in infancy

and I came along right after that.

Luckily, my name was Lawrence.

Anna Lawrence Bisland was a daughter

of William van Duzer Lawrence

who founded Sarah Lawrence College.

She married Presley Bisland

who was from Natchez, Mississippi.

He always wanted to be a writer.

He really was of Mark Twain's generation

and he was a very handsome man.

He was very witty.

The library was full of Greek and Roman classics

also bound volumes of all the great English novelists

like Thackeray and Dickens.

That's what I grew up with was this library

and at the dinner table I would recite the poems

that he gave me to learn

and he'd give me silver dollars for learning the poems

like great old chestnuts, like

Horatius at the Bridge and things like that.

Eventually, I ended up going to Bronxville Public School.

Took me a couple off years to become Eagle Scout

maybe when I was about 14.

Trouble was, the same week I made Eagle Scout,

I got busted for stealing pencils

from the five and ten cent store.

Well, I was shipped off to Mount Herman,

which was a working farm school at that time.

Which I got sent to in Massachusetts

to straighten me out after I was a delinquent juvenile

on the streets of Bronxville, New York.

My roommate there, he had two books.

His Holy Bible was one pocket, he had

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

In the other pocket he had

Thomas Wolfe's Look Howeward, Angel.

So, I read Look Howeward Angel.

It happens in Pulpit Hill, North Carolina.

Well, Pulpit Hill is Chapel Hill.

So, I went to Chapel Hill because Thomas Wolfe went there.

I worked on the Carolina Magazine,

which Thomas Wolfe had worked on.

And unfortunately, I wasn't able to write like him.

My father died before I was born,

dropped dead of a heart attack when, I believe,

he was 42.

He came over probably in steerage from Italy,

about the turn of the century.

His name was Carlo.

Carlo Ferlinghetti.

Driving a cardboard automobile without a license

at the turn of the century, my father ran into my mother

on a fun ride at Coney Island.

Having spied each other eating

in a French boarding house nearby

and having decided right there and then

that she was for him entirely

he followed her into the play land of that evening

where the headlong meeting

of their ephemeral flesh on wheels

hurdled them forever together

and I now in the back seat

of their eternity

reaching out to embrace them.

The Ferlinghetti family had never told me

that had shortened the name to Ferling

and just before I published my first book

I restored the name to Ferlinghetti.

In a dream within a dream

I dreamt a dream

of all the animals dying out

All the animals everywhere dying and dying

The wild animals, the long haired animals,

winged animals, feathered animals,

clawed and sealed and furry animals

rutting and dying

and dying

in shrinking rain forests

in piney woods and high sierras

on shrinking prairies and tumbleweed mesas

captured, beaten, starved and stunned

cornered and traded

species not meant to be nomadic

wandering rootless as man.

Ferlinghetti, liberal poet in search of his father.

I was arrested trying to see what

the inside of the house looked like

where my father was born in Brescia.

This paper, just one of the national press stories about

my bust in Italy and it included a copy

of my father's birth certificate.

All my life, I've been looking for my father's birth place,

looking for my father, and when I find it,

I'm driven away by the people who live there now.

See these ruins of a while civilization there.

People ate and slept here.

They did everything else here, in that ruin right there,

they had people

lying down together, eating together, sleeping together.

Now, all gone.

Finito.

Let me in, I want to pray!

Let me in, I must pray.

Modern man must pray.

El dio invisible.

It was very brilliant of the Catholics to invent

a God that can't be seen.

So you can't prove he exists or he doesn't exist,

cause you can't see him.

If you could see him, he wouldn't be God anymore.

Well, when I was graduating from Chapel Hill,

all the guys I knew

were volunteering for the armed services.

It was the only socially acceptable thing to do.

I had never heard of a conscientious objector.

On the east coast, we didn't have such things

as far as I knew.

After I signed up in the Navy, I was sent to

midshipmen school in Chicago in the fall.

When I graduated, I was an ensign, and two days later,

I was standing out of New York Harbor on my first ship,

which was J. P. Morgan III's yacht

which he had leased to the Navy.

And the Navy gave it a coat of gray paint

and commissioned him as Skipper of the ship.

We had 50 pound sticks of dynamite,

those were our depth charges.

We were supposed to light the fuse and throw it overboard.

That's all we had were depth charges.

And I was in D-Day, June 1944.

We were in an armada of at least 1000 ships,

and we were the smallest U.S. commissioned vessel.

USS Subchaser 1308.

It's a 110 foot wooden ship with 30 men and three officers.

We were on the anti-submarine screen.

We didn't land.

We could see all these dough boys getting shot up

on the beaches.

But we were much safer being in the Navy.

We had a camera on board, and a little camera lab,

and we took a lot of amateur pictures.

We didn't have time to take many.

I was the skipper

and Gene Fineblatt was the Executive Officer

and we were steaming in the huge convoy all around us,

a forest of masts arising

from all the separate ports in England

where they had departed

so we all came together just as dawn was breaking

when the whole fleet headed for the beach,

and started debarking the troops.

The sea is calm tonight

off Dover Beach

The birds at dusk

cry out syllables

of some deconstructed word

we are yet unable to decipher

to explain existence

And they lift the last light with their wings

Keeping the secret.

At the time of the liberation in Paris,

that fall, the fall of '44, I got orders to go back

to the states and then cross the Pacific toward Japan

and we were loaded with 5000 troops.

We were supposed to be an invasion force.

But, unknown to us...

We took a train to Nagasaki one day

and it was totally open.

There was no guards or anything keeping people out.

Of course this was maybe six or seven weeks

after the bomb was dropped.

They'd cleaned up the site somewhat.

And I walked around in this, like, a three square mile

mulch of fused ruins, like human flesh fused to a tea cup.

And bones and hair sticking out of this mulch.

Every single building flattened and pulverized.

And you realize a while city, it just

disappeared.

Made me an instant pacifist.

No doubt about it.

Up to that night, I was totally politically naïve.

I was a good American boy, Boy Scout, never questioned it,

being in the military service.

Of course this is World War II,

which is called the Good War.

And, so there was no discussion about

whether we should be in the war

or should we have dropped the bomb.

Years later, after I became more politically literate,

I came to the conclusion,

we never would have dropped the bomb

if the Japanese had had white skin.

It was monstrous, racist act.

After Nagasaki, we steamed back to Portland, Oregon.

And so, I was mustered out there

and took at train across to New York.

I ended up working in the mail room at Time Magazine.

Cause I thought I could work up to copy boy

and so up become a great writer for Time Magazine,

Time Inc.

We were a scurvy crew down there, mostly disgruntled G.I.s

and grunts from the army and others intent

on fucking up the system.

After seven or eight months, I get discouraged

and went to Columbia university on the G.I. bill

and got an M.A. instead.

I still had in mind getting back to France.

So, as soon as I got my M.A.,

I took off for Paris, immediately.

So, I looked up George Whitman when I got to Paris.

He was living in a real dump of a hotel

on Boulevard Saint Michel,

in a tiny room with books stacked up on the wall

on three sides and George in the middle

in a broken down easy chair, cooking his dinner

over a can of Sterno.

That's how it all began.

- This is the second time that I have seen

Lawrence and George together.

And, both times have been really moving because

there's a very strong sense of familiarity

between the two of them

which I hardly ever see with Dad

because most of the people around Dad are very young.

I think that's one of the secrets why he's

stayed so young himself.

But to see him with an old, old friend,

where there's this long history

and this very intimate, shared passion for literature

that's been their life.

- Well, we were both at Sorbonne together

at the same period I mean.

I got a little diploma in French civilization

and he got very much advanced degree,

a doctorate

and I heard him defend his thesis

at the Sorbonne

on the image of the city and the of poetry of T. S. Eliot.

Which was an unforgettable experience.

- The thesis was on the subject of

"La Cite, Symbole dans la poesie moderne"

I knew more about American poetry I felt

than the professors on stage,

so I got away with murder with what I said about

various American poets.

- Neither of us knew we were gonna be booksellers.

All of us thought we were going to write

the great American novel, of course, like everyone else.

But, I ended up opening this bookstore in 1951

in Paris.

And he opened his bookstore in 1953 in San Francisco.

- The reason we have that sign saying City Lights Books

above Shakespeare and Company,

and the reason Lawrence has put Shakespeare and Company

above the doorway of City Lights is because

there's the long history of friendship between

two bohemian booksellers

that have made literature their life.

Lawrence told me that the original idea was that

George and Lawrence would work one year

in their own bookshop and then swap for a year.

But then they both got too big and it wasn't possible.

- And the Arabs ask terrible questions.

And the Pope didn't know what to say.

And the people ran around in wooden shoes asking

which way was the head of Midas facing

and everyone said no instead of yes.

While still forever

in the Luxembourg gardens

in the fountains of the Medici

were there fat, red goldfish

and the fat white goldfish

and the children running around the pool

pointing and piping

Les poisson rouge, les poisson rouge.

They ran off and a leaf unhooked itself

and fell upon the pool,

and lay like an eye winking circles

and then the pool was very still

and there was a dog just standing there

at the edge of the pool

looking down at the tranced fish

and not barking or waving its funny tail or anything

so that, for a moment then,

in the late November dusk,

silence hung

like a lost idea

and a statue turned its head.

That's perfect.

- Yeah, very nice.

- I finally arrived in San Francisco

in January 1951

and my real political education began

when I met Kenneth Rexroth.

He held Friday night soirees at his house,

250 Scott Street in the old Filmore district

and it was usually attended by a dozen poets or so.

He had program on KPFA where he reviewed many fields,

philosophy, geology, astronomy, the classics.

- Last week I talked about the anarchist.

You see, what is called society in capital letters,

usually feels that it has a certain cultural responsibility.

Now, this is one big factor in the cultural night

which is long since shut down over official

San Francsico, well, that's that.

- Rexroth considered himself

a philosophical anarchist.

And listening to KPFA in the 1950's

was a complete education.

From the dissident point of view,

from the anarchist point of view,

and when the war ended,

quite a few of the conscientious objectors

came to San Francisco on account of Kenneth Rexroth.

- Everybody talks about the excitement of North Beach

and it certainly was incredibly exciting.

Every writer and artist in the world

would come through somehow.

Lenny Bruce would wander in.

He'd just been arrested three times that week.

But, it was also wild and dangerous and crazy at times

and you get nuts coming through and drunks

and there would be fights, and you know,

it's the real world.

In the middle of this whole crazy zoo,

Lawrence always exuded a sense of calm,

he was always relaxed.

He always somehow saw a larger picture.

And I think he's had that impact on a lot of people,

and where it hit me, is this guy coming in,

he was looking for Lawrence.

He didn't want to leave town without

seeing Lawrence Ferlinghetti

to thank him.

And he said that he was at the Gate of Horn,

it was a famous place in Chicago.

They had one of these all night poetry things.

Ferlinghetti was the headliner and the reason people came.

Dylan was one of the last poets to read,

and no one was paying attention,

everybody was drunk by now.

And the way he told the story to me,

is Lawrence Ferlinghetti stood up and said,

"You should be listening to this guy's poetry.

"He's the best poet to read tonight."

And the crowd quieted down and they listened to him.

He said it just gave him the confidence to be a poet

and that his words mattered, and so forth.

- Next we have A Baseball Canto

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a well known poet,

who lived in San Francisco.

He started the City Lights Bookstore.

He was a brave man and brave poet.

Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,

reading Ezra Pound and wishing that Juan Marichal

would hit a hole right though the Anglo-Saxon tradition

in the first canto

and demolish the Barbarian invaders.

Well, why don't I let Lawrence tell you the rest of it?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Baseball Canto.

- When the San Francisco Giants take the field,

and everybody stands up for the national anthem

with all the players struck dead in their places

and the white umpires like Irish cops

and facing east as if expecting some great white hope

or the founding fathers to appear on the horizon

but Willie Mays appears instead

in the bottom of the first and the roar goes up

as he clouts the first one into the sun and takes off

and the ball is lost in the sun

and maidens wail after him

and he keeps running through the Anglo-Saxon epic.

And Tito Fuentes comes up looking like a bull fighter

in his tight pants and small pointed shoes

and the right field bleachers go mad.

Sweet Tito! Sock it to him, Sweet Tito.

- Hot day, and I was wearing this very hot wool djellaba

from Morocco.

Someone at City Lights, maybe it was me,

reported a fire on the premises

and in the middle of this photo shoot,

whenever all the poets were gathered in front of the store,

this big hook and ladder

steams up in front of the bookstore

with the sirens screaming.

I didn't realize you could be put in jail

for turning in a false alarm.

Back then, what did we know?

Poets come out of your closets.

Open your windows, open your doors.

You have been holed up too long

in your closed worlds.

No time now for the artist to hide.

Above, beyond, behind the scenes.

Indifferent, paring his fingernails,

refining himself out of existence.

No time now for our little literary games,

no time no for our paranoias and hypochondrias.

No time now for fear and loathing.

Time now only for light and love.

Don't call me a beat! I never was a beat poet.

When I arrived in San Francisco,

I was still wearing my French beret, 1950,

long before anyone had heard of the beats,

and it wasn't until City Lights published

Allen Ginsberg's Howl in 1956, that

the Beats arrived.

- It's where all the guys from New York came through,

from Ginsberg to Kerouac,

And with Berman came Rexroth, David Meltzer, Ferlinghetti.

They all came down, they did poetry to jazz.

And that influx started a generation of artists here,

visual artists.

- News, the sort of trickle-down news

of what was going on in San Francisco in the early 50's

would be beginnings of the beat movement.

This stuff found its way down south

and did bring in an enormous cultural wake.

- There was this communication back and forth

between the poets and the visual artists in Los Angeles

who also thought of themselves as poets.

- Painters inspired poets,

and the poets inspired painters.

And that was a beautiful exchange.

- Ferlinghetti and that whole group were like interlocked

and inter-involved here, and I don't think the art movement,

the visual art movement in Los Angeles,

could have possibly happened without

the San Francisco poets.

- The role of the artists,

I mean there's all kinds of roles,

hot cross buns, there's

croissants.

Depends on whether you want to be a real genteel artist

or you want to be a hot cross bun artist

or you want to be a

delicate croissant artist.

There's all kinds of art and artists.

I mean, if you like mustard on your roll,

that's another kind.

I mean, I think most artists, if they're playing a role

they should put more mustard on it.

If you can't cut the mustard, then you know,

you're not much of an artist.

Put on my

proper painting hat.

I had this in my head all these years.

You see this?

This is the first line from Ezra Pound's

First Canto.

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly seas,

and we set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

Bore us out onward with bellying canvas.

We're trying to represent reality so-called,

quote, unquote in painting.

We're supposed to paint reality,

but it's really just another form of fiction.

The painter himself in various disguises,

disguising himself in various images on canvas,

just like in writing poems.

Nothing but masks.

I asked 100 painters and 100 poets how to paint sunlight

on the face of life.

Their answers were ambiguous,

whereas it seems to me, all you have to do

is conceive of the whole world and all humanity

as a kind of artwork.

An art project of the god of light,

the whole earth and all that's in it,

to be painted with light.

Did that butterfly ask me a question?

Only the Buddha can ask me a question.

I'm not a zen, and I'm not a banana,

and I'm not a

bug. I'm not a bear.

I'm not tree, I'm not a flower.

I'm a two-legged creature, lying on his back in the sun.

In the temple of the zen fool.

Jack Kerouac had to arrive by taxi from San Francisco

at four in the morning with his brakeman's lantern

and stumbled around in the meadow trying to find the cabin

and finally flaked out in the meadow spread eagle

where we found him the next morning

in a full state of meditation

with tete de bois

with a tongue of wood, totally hung over.

Essentially came down here to recover from alcoholism.

But he didn't have a change to do that cause

various beatniks kept showing up

like Neal Cassady and

Michael McClure and me.

Kerouac and I were sitting on the beach,

and he out his little spiral notebook

that he always carried.

He said, what did the sea say?

And I said, "Le possion du mer parlent le Breton."

The fish of the sea speak Breton.

And said, "What was that? What was that?"

And I said, it's an old Brittany proverb.

The fish of the sea speak Breton.

And he wrote that down in his notebook

and that's on the last page of the book.

That's how the novel ends.

The Canticle of Jack Kerouac.

Far from the sea far from the sea of Breton fishermen

the white clouds scudding over Lowell

and the white birches the bare white birches

along the blear night roads

flashing by in darkness

where once he rode

in Pop's old Plymouth

And the birch-white face

of a Merrimac madonna

shadowed in streetlight by Merrimac's shroudy waters

a leaf blown upon sea wind

out of Brittany

over endless oceans.

- And I feel all in all that Jack simply was not

a committed political revolutionary.

- No certainly not, I mean...(obscured by others talking)

- ...thinking he was.

And I'm not for that matter, are you?

- I certainly would see this a a completely

different type of writing from my writing.

- Are you, Lawrence?

- I don't want to sound pretentious.

- That's not the question. Just a simple yes or no.

- Why, of course.

I was tourist at revolutions.

I was good at being where things happened in the 1960's

I was in Paris in '68.

I was in Mexico City in '68

when the students were shot down.

I was in Cuba in 1959, the second anniversary

of the Cuban Revolution.

And, 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, 1968.

And in the 1970s, I was a Sandinista.

And I went down to Nicaragua

to support the Sandinista Revolution.

And new Americans are coming.

New North Americanos,

the ones who are not like Reagan,

the ones who are not like Abrams,

the ones who are not like North,

the ones who are not like Bush,

the ones are who are not like the short-haired hyenas

of American business.

There are more Ryan Wilsons coming.

There are millions more like Ryan Wilson.

If only they awaken, if only they awaken.

Nica, nica

the flame trees,

the framboyan are blooming

and phoenixes rise up

out of volcanoes.

- Lawrence is basically,

an anarchoid, civil libertarian.

He's a man, let's say of the left.

He lived through the existential period.

That had big influence on him, actually, big influence.

- I was coming in the 40's, and I'm still coming from

a background of French intellectual

and going back to Albert Camus,

you can not cooperate with the state

because if you collaborate in any way

you are guilty my complicity.

And I find that 9/10 or 95%

of the supposedly dissident presses

and writers in the United States

in the last 20 years have cooperated

with the United States government,

by accepting grants from the National Endowment of the Arts.

I salute thee, national pilot of our destinies

in Air Force One.

I salute thee, mass murderer by complicity

while there is a strung out soul in Santa Rita prison,

I am not free.

While there is a napalmed class, I am of it.

I raise m y middle finger to you,

smiling supporter of benevolent, imperial nationalism

built upon political falses

which still rule Washington

and which you and every other politician

and president, including Kennedy,

were too political not to inherit.

Don't call me on your red telephone

war is good business, invest your son.

- Ferlinghetti was always the central caution

against government.

Never trust government, never trust power,

question it.

So when people on the lest would be more inclined

to sell out on some of the stuff and look the other way

when we shouldn't have,

or what so-called revolutionaries were doing,

Ferlinghetti never romanticized people in power,

of anybody.

He was always suspicious of it.

- The state encroached more and more worldwide

on the freedom on the individual,

the position of the poet as bearer of eros

and as such an anarchist against the state by definition

into the middle man in each of us,

the subjective in each of us,

which is so graphically illustrated by

Chaplin and his "little man."

It's as if the state and modern civilization in general

were out to destroy the subjective in each of us.

Constantly risking absurdity and death,

the poet like an acrobat balancing on eyebeams

performing entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks.

And other high theatrics

and all without mistaking anything for it may not be.

Then he a little Charlie Chaplin man

spread eagle in the empty air

of existence.

- I think that one of the things that's not understood

about Lawrence,

is Lawrence is probably the most popular, modern poet

in the entire world.

The popular poets of today would be Pablo Neruda,

Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

And I strongly suspect that Lawrence,

in terms of book sells,

is the most popular.

And one of the most powerul things that he's done,

not for politics, but for poetry itself,

is that he turned on two generations of young people

to poetry

and they went on from his work to reading others.

- He superseded E. E. Cummings as a poet who

probably inspired more young people of the generation

after 1955.

He's done more than okay in that sense.

I mean, he's the only poet, I think,

in the United States with a book,

A Coney Island of the Mind, I think

there are a million copies in print.

That's almost inconceivable.

- The title of my book, A Coney Island of the Mind,

is taken from Henry Miller's book, Into the Night Life.

And it's used out of context,

but expresses the way I felt about these poems

when I wrote them.

As if they taken all together, were a kind of

Coney Island of the mind, a circus of the soul.

Coney Island was first published in 1958.

The first edition was on cheap newsprint, not many copies.

Now it's in the hundreds printing.

In the process,

it was busted in various parts of the country,

once by the American Legion in Woodstock, New York,

and my publisher, James Laughlin, had to come up there

and assure the American Legion that I, indeed,

was not a member of the Communist party.

The poem that probably upset the American Legion and

the Catholic Church the most was a poem on the crucifixion

which as based on a rap by Lord Buckley called The Nazz.

This was a poem in what was called hip lingo in those days.

Sometime during eternity

some guys show up and one of them who shows up real late

is a kind of carpenter

from a square-type place called Galilee

and he starts wailing and claiming that he is hip

to who made heaven and earth

and that the cat who really laid on us is his Dad.

You're hot, they tell him and they stretch him on a tree

to cool

And everybody after that

is always making models of this tree

with him hung up

and always crooning his name

and calling him to come down and sit in on their combo

as if he is the king cat who's got to blow

or they can't quite make it.

Only he don't come down from his tree.

Him just hang there looking real petered out

and real cool.

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a painter

as well as a poet and publisher.

And he holds a doctorate from the Sorbonne.

His book, A Coney Island off the Mind,

was first published 1958 and is now in it's 14th printing

by New Directions.

It is one of the most widely read books of poetry today.

One of the poems concerns this very dog,

whose name is Homer.

- The dog trots freely in the street

and sees reality

and the things he sees

are bigger than himself

and the things he sees

are his reality

Drunks in doorways

Fish on newsprint

Ants in holes

Chicken in Chinatown windows

their heads a block away

The dog trots freely in the street

and the things he smells

smell something like himself

The dog trots freely in the street

past puddles and babies

cats and cigars

poolrooms and policemen

He doesn't hate cops

He merely has no use for them

and he goes past them

and past the dead cows hung up whole

in front of the San Francisco Meat Market

He would rather eat a tender cow

than a tough policeman

though either might do

And he goes past the Romeo Ravioli Factory

and past Coit's Tower

and past Congressman Doyle of the Unamerican Commmittee

He's afraid of Coit's Tower

but he's not afraid of Congressman Doyle

although what he hears is very discouraging

very depressing

very absurd

to a sad young dog like himself

to a serious dog like himself

But he has his own free world to live in

His own fleas to eat

He will not be muzzled

Congressman Doyle is just another

fire hydrant to him

The dog trots freely in the street.

that's a good dog.

- I went to a happening with Lawrence in Paris.

It was arranged by Jean-Jacques Lebel

who was a well-known French beatik.

The happening included mice being thrown at the audience.

Crabs being thrown at the audience.

The door was locked so people couldn't get out.

A band was playing.

A couple people were beating on a VW, destroying it

with huge mallets.

And someone came out and chopped off the heads

of some chickens

and it looked as if they were dancing

to rock and toll music and Lawrence was calmly reading

a long poem.

- Talk a little bit about what happened

to the beat movement.

It sort of gave way eventually to

the free speech movement,

which you were very much a part of, Lawrence,

and then to hippies and then to the New Left.

But, how did it sort of end.

- Well you can say all the main shivements of the 1960s

counterculture were first enunciated by the beats.

The early, the first ecological consciousness

in writers such as Gary Snyder and political points of view

all became mainstays of the 60s counter culture.

- You think this is a liberated society we live in today?

- You have like my kids, they grew up,

they were already liberated by the time they

have reached

20 years old.

Whereas in my generation, it took us 20, 30 more years

to get to that point.

- The younger generation, say 15, 24, high school kids,

realize that when they get to be my age,

it'll be 2050.

What kind of world are they going to have to live with?

Already the official stereotype is quote

"diminished expectations"

which is a euphemism for saying that the world is going

to be a horrible mess, that the ozone layer holes

and the brimstone in the atmosphere

is going to make life unbearable,

that we're running out of water,

we're running out of arable land, which is diminishing.

Species are being killed.

There's desertification and deforestation everywhere.

And that hyper technology has led us to an abyss

which may be like an Armageddon.

And everybody knows it from old grandmothers

to young kids.

- The 60s stuff came out of the beats more directly

than that of any other influence.

City Lights Books and Ferlinghetti

really were a very important way station

between the beats and the hippies

and the politics of the 60's,

I mean in a very critical way.

- In 1967, the counter culture, which was very powerful,

in San Francisco and in California,

and growingly more powerful about the country,

decided to celebrate itself by having a Human Be-In,

in the which the super normal tribes would come together

and listen to music, perform arts

and communicate their lifestyle with one another.

There was a big stage.

Hot bands of the times played, The Grateful Dead,

Quicksilver Messenger Service.

On the stage was Lawrence Ferlinghetti

and Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg

and myself.

I read a poem and then I sang another poem

using the autoharp that Bob Dylan had given me earlier.

And, the people celebrated themselves.

- At the Human Be-In, in Golden Gate Park,

I was up on stage next to Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary

and we're facing out to about 10,000 turned-on people

and a parachutist descending from the sky

and Allen turns to me and says,

"What if we're all wrong?"

Revolution of consciousness happened in the 60s

with expansion of consciousness

but the political revolution never happened.

It was aborted,

like after Kent State, that was the end of it.

The state clamped down

and Marcuse said it all back then.

He talked about the enormous capacity

of the dominant culture to ingest

its most dissident elements.

The left really has no organs of communication now.

In the 20s and 30s, and even in the 40s,

the left was powered by the labor movement.

And the workforce of the United States was maybe

60 or 70 percent unionized.

The labor movement became ingested by

the dominant culture

so that the labor movement as a motor to the left

doesn't exist anymore.

I did a painting recently called

"Arles n'existe plus," my Van Gogh series.

In other words, "Arles doesn't exist anymore."

Where's Gauguin or Van Gogh?

Where are they gonna go today?

If Gauguin goes to Tahiti, he'll have to stay in the Hilton.

Those grass shacks aren't there anymore.

We used to think, oh, there's always an island

still further out,

where we can still get away.

But, the island further out has a Club Med on it now

at Moreo.

So that's what this painting was all about.

There isn't any away anymore

and the dominant mode of force behind this

is the American mono-culture.

We've talked about ecology and ecological crisis,

but the problem of problems

is the overpopulation.

And that's the...

You can't solve any of the other problems

until overpopulation is controlled.

I get solicitations from places like Greenpeace

or any ecological organization

and what I write back now,

I write on the face of the application:

You should redirect your efforts to over population control.

Cause that's below everything else,

nothing else is solvable without solving that.

Why are the rain forest being cut down?

Population, et cetera.

- What'll be the role off the American right wing in that?

They'll be trying to keep the United States

from participating in it,

some kind of population education and reduction.

- Right on abortion and on birth control and...

I mean, I think the Pope is in the middle ages.

I was just in Rome and I was interviewed on this,

about this,

I mean the Pope is

being really

ignorant and sinful.

This is a sinful position he has on population control

And so, I've got the Breeding Blues.

Sew, sew your seed

plant your seed

and who's to stop it?

Who's to say don't do it?

Who has the right to say that it's a sin

that love is our blight in the night?

It's a natural thing

the most natural thing

the most heavenly thing

the most blessed thing

so do it and sing.

- One of the most important things, I think,

is the way he distinguishes between

political and lyrical poetry.

Very important in understanding his work.

And this came up when we were in Bigsby Canyon

and suddenly he jumped up and said,

"I'm going to tell you why I hate writing political poetry."

I said, wow, one of the most famous political poets

in the world is going to tell us

why he hates writing poetry.

This is a scoop.

He told us in no uncertain terms.

He's a lyric poet, which is different.

Political poetry he says

really concentrates on things that are passing.

They come, they go.

And next year it's another political situation.

But he and many lyric poets try to find

the timeliness and timelessness in subjects

that have a longer lasting quality.

And these are the subjects of his poetry,

but the fascinating thing, you find in most of his poetry,

that there's crucial political ideas embedded in them.

Sometimes they seem to want not to be heard

and sometimes they're right on the surface,

yelling out at you to understand it.

They're an expressive element that represent

some of the most crucial political ideas that he has.

And that's what you find in many poems

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

- Now we bring you this,

courtesy of Wheaties and the American Boy Magazine,

Dissidents, Big Sur.

January bright sun

tiny hummingbirds in the willows

suddenly flittering up

as an ordinary American monster 4-door sedan

barrels up the canyon road

back-firing and farting carbon monoxide

and the hummingbirds take flight in a flurry of fear

a cloud of them all at once humming away

into deep blue air

where the skies sucks up their winged hum

and in the infinite distance, eats them

as a crowd of huge, defiant, upstart crows

sets up a ravening raucous, Caw! Caw! Caw!

And screams and circles overhead

and pickets the polluted air

as the metalled monster power-drives on up the canyon

and over the horizon

and the crows now too, wing away on wind

and are sucked up and disappear

into the omnivorous universe,

even as any civilization

ingests its own most dissident elements.

It's right on the tip of the peninsula.

That's where Lorenzo grew up mostly

and Julie too.

Smile you're on camera.

Happy 45th Lorenzo birthday.

- Okay, I gotta make a wish.

It's gotta be a secret, though.

I can tell you one of them.

To live a long and healthy life with my family.

Okay, 45 years young.

- Where was this one?

- That was out at the coast of Australia.

- Oh, yeah.

- Here's another.

- I didn't know you had these.

- Kept them. Mom kept them. Yeah.

Here's one in Big Sur.

This is a classic one.

I was watching Dad first thing in the morning,

as soon as the sun made it over the top of the bluff,

he would stand there chanting the sun mantra.

Sun, sun, sun.

And that's where he thought of the symbol.

The early days on Potrero Hill

probably 1963, sitting on the front steps

of 706 Wisconsin Street with Dad and Julie, my sister.

Called the ghost house of Potrero Hill when Dad bought it

and it was completely dilapidated, no foundation,

holes in the roof, front steps were falling down.

Had some great memories in that house.

My room was the upstairs.

I had the best view of the city.

And you could see, as a child, I remember watching

a whole skyline of San Francisco go up.

- I wanted to mention a little about this Price Row

that is losing it's name for mine.

I find out by talking to the boys at Trigoni Hardware

who grew up here, during prohibition, Price Row

was where the bootleggers trucks backed up.

And also, it was the back door of an undertaker's.

So, we had bootleggers trucks and hearses.

It's a fitting place for poets to hang out.

I was 30 before I saw San Francisco for the first time.

And I've spent most of the last 40 years

walking up and down the streets,

of little old wooden North Beach.

I know the streets and alleys around here

like the palm of my hand, to coin a cliche.

And it's truly unbelievable to have a tiny line

in that palm named after me.

Grazi!

- Allen Ginsberg Dying

Allen Ginsberg is dying

It's in all the papers.

It's on the evening news.

A great poet is dying,

but his voice won't die.

His voice is on the land.

In lower Manhattan

in his own bed

he is dying.

He is dying.

There is nothing to do about it.

He is dying the death that everyone dies.

He is dying the death of the poet.

A recent New Directions book of mine is called

Poetry as Insurgent Art.

And it more or less sums up what I've always considered

the role of the poet.

Poetry should be dissident and subversive

and an agent for change.

It begins, I am signaling you through the flames.

The north pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest destiny is no longer manifest.

What are poets for in such an age?

What is the use of poetry?

Create works capable of answering the challenge

of Apocalyptic times

even if this means sounding Apocalyptic.

And the great spaces that open out upon the sea

high tide and the herons call

and the people, the people, yes

all around the Earth, speaking babel tongues.

You must decide if bird cries are cries of ecstasy

or cries of despair.

Question everything and everyone,

including Socrates who questioned everything.

Strive to change the world in such a way

that there's no further need to be a dissident.

The idea of poetry as an arm of class war

disturbs the sleep of those who do not wish to be disturbed

in their pursuit of happiness.

The natural born, non-violent enemy of the state.

It is the ultimate resistance.

It is the voice within the voice of eternal.

It is the face behind the face of the race.

It is the voice of the fourth person singular.

Poetry, the last lighthouse in rising seas.

- He once said all I want to do is write light

on the walls of life.

I think this applies to all the media he works in.

He's such a great observer.

Of people,

of events.

Probably what he would call little episodes

in the tragic comedy of existence.

I guess I would call him a romantic idealist

who accepts living in an imperfect world

with humor and good grace.

- All these years,

while I've been pursuing the art of writing

and the art of painting,

I've had this day job at City Lights Bookstore.

And so, here we are, well into the 21st Century.

In the upper windows of City Lights right now

is my personal blog in handwritten signs

such as turn left,

indict and jail Bush and Cheney

for crimes against humanity,

total gun control now, abolish the death penalty,

universal single-payer health plan for everyone,

rewrite the law on corporations,

the Middle East, Obama's Vietnam, et cetera.

But what is really needed these days,

is a national debate on socialism and whether

America should adopt

some form of civil libertarian socialism

instead of capitalism.

This is a historic moment to do it.

However, the press has made socialism a dirty word

and not a single politician will utter it,

much less Obama.

And that's where we are today.

Still waiting for Obama's nirvana.

Yes, the world is the best place of all

for a lot of such things as making the fun scene

and making the love scene

and making the sad scene and singing love songs

and having inspirations

and walking around looking at everything

and smelling flowers and goosing statues

and even thinking,

and kissing people and making babies

and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing

and going swimming in rivers on picnics

in the middle of the summer

and just generally living it up.

Yes, but then, right in the middle of it,

comes a smiling mortician.

- C'est mon grand plaisir de célébrer

ma liaison

avec le France

et la culture française.

Well, I've been getting a lot of awards lately

which would make you think I've been ingested by

the dominant, industrial, commercial society

but I haven't.

I may have been swallowed but I haven't been ingested.

And I'm indigestible.

- His particular brand off highly recent,

highly intelligent, but highly witty political activism

he has carried that in his life and in his poetry

effectively and lightly through his whole life career

right up til now.

- Ferlinghetti and City Lights is sort of the

guiding light of this city

and created the literary atmosphere that everbody's

attracted to.

This is the best literary environment in the world.

It's the most supportive.

It's the most engaged.

It's the best example of writers being

involved in their community

and not necessarily drawing a line

between art and politics

and thinking that, you know,

artists have a voice and have a place.

This is all because of City Lights.

- Ferlinghetti not only has continued to write,

and there's this very steady outpouring of verse,

but he has retained his political edge

and it's gotten sharper by being honed by

not just time, but American politics.

It's admirable, I think, that Ferlinghetti is still

speaking out and using poetry

as the ultimate freedom of speech.

- [Lawrence] So now is the time for you to speak

before they come for you, oh silent majority.