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“My poems are easy to understand,” says Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “Any fool can understand them.” Born in Yonkers in 1919, Ferlinghetti joined the Navy in 1941, then attended several universities on the GI Bill: the University of North Carolina, Columbia University (where his Master’s thesis was on John Ruskin), and the Sorbonne, where he received a Doctorat de l’Universite (with a mention tres honorable) for his study of the city in poetry. While in Paris, Ferlinghetti also began to paint and draw. In 1951 he moved to San Francisco, and two years later founded the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States, City Lights Books. In 1955, Ferlinghetti became a publisher, beginning with his own Pictures of the Gone World. Since then, he has published a remarkable group of American writers: Gregory Corso, William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, and of course Allen Ginsberg, whose Howl led to a celebrated obscenity trial. Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind was published by New Directions in 1958. Since then, he has put out more than 30 books of poetry and prose. In 1998 Ferlinghetti became the first poet laureate of San Francisco.

In recent years Ferlinghetti has received attention for his visual art. As part of the Woodstock Poetry Festival, the Kleinert/James Gallery will hold an exhibit of his work, August 9-September 15, entitled “LIT. PAINT”. A special opening reception with the artist will be held on Friday, August 23, from 5-8pm. The reception serves as the Gala Event of the poetry festival and is a fundraiser for the Woodstock Guild. Tickets are $35.

Recently, Ferlinghetti spoke to me by phone from City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.

—Sparrow

Chronogram: Have you been to Woodstock before?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Three years ago I did a poetry reading there; a benefit for the Woodstock Journal. But I was first on the Hudson on a Sea Scout canoe trip, when I was twelve years old. I was living in Westchester County. We stopped in places on the river with wonderful names like Coxsackie.

C: What is the Sea Scouts?

LF: The Sea Scouts were like Boy Scouts, for boys who are interested in being on the water. Actually, it was good training for being in the Navy for four years during the Second World War.

C: Is that why you joined the Navy, because you had a love of the sea?

LF: No, I just volunteered, cause I didn’t want to go to the Army. While I was in midshipman’s school in Chicago, Pearl Harbor happened.

C: You volunteered?

LF: I was a good American boy; I was an Eagle Scout. I was on small ships, sub chasers, the whole war—I never had a desk job.

C: So, did you catch submarines?

LF: My first ship, I was an ensign on J.P. Morgan’s yacht—J.P. Morgan III, I guess it was. He had leased his yacht to the Navy. The Navy gave it a coat of gray paint, and some sticks of dynamite that you threw over by hand—those were the depth charges.

C: Those were to destroy the submarines?

LF: Well, we were listening. We listened off Sandy Hook [New Jersey], without running our engines. We listened for submarines. Because there were ships being sunk right off Sandy Hook by German submarines, in the winter of ’41-’42. The Navy didn’t have anything to defend the coast with. The shipbuilding program hadn’t produced yet, so they took yachts like J.P. Morgan’s. That was the winter of ’41-’42. It was a rough winter—ice on the rigging, and…Then the next ship I got on was one of the first new sub chasers that came off the shipbuilding program in Portland, Oregon. I was on several SCs on the North Atlantic. On the North Atlantic we would convoy, not all the way across because we were too small, but halfway across we’d go. Sometimes half the convoy would be sunk by German submarines—winter of ‘42-’43.

C: Were you already writing then?

LF: No, I was too busy trying to keep up with the work on the ship. We were standing an eight-hour watch: eight on, eight off.

C: So you were never hit, your boat?

LF: No, but we saw a lot of other ships go down. We were in the Normandy invasion, the first morning, 5am. We were an anti-submarine screen around the beaches.

C: Did you see the devastation of the invasion?

LF: Sure, with the binoculars; we were just about a mile offshore.

C: Not many of the Beats served in the war.

LF: I don’t think any did.

C: I think Kerouac was briefly in—

LF: The Merchant Marine.

C: I read a story of him being in the Army for a week or so.

LF: Maybe. I never read that. Ginsberg was in the Merchant Marine briefly, too.

C: Right.

LF: But they didn’t go in any war zones. Ginsberg went to the Arctic.

C: And that might have been before the war, too?

LF: No, I think maybe that was after the war. They were a generation younger than me, Ginsberg and Kerouac. I became associated with the Beats by publishing them. My poetics were totally different. I was out here, anyway, not in New York. I grew up in New York, but I came out here in ’51.

C: You grew up in Yonkers?

LF: Yeah, I was born in Yonkers, about 200 yards north of Van Cortlandt Park—South Yonkers. After the war I was in New York briefly working for Time magazine. I went to graduate school at Columbia, got an MA, after Time magazine. Then I went to Paris and got a doctorate at the Sorbonne. So I didn’t get out here till ’51.

C: ’53 is when you founded City Lights.

LF: That’s right.

C: That’s the year of my birth.

LF: Ah.

C: So for two years you were finding your way?

LF: I was teaching French here.

C: Where?

LF: At adult education. My mother was French-speaking, and I spoke French before English. I lived in France when I was a kid.

C: Where in France?

LF: Strasbourg.

C: So your mother was from France?

LF: French-Portuguese.

C: What does that mean?

LF: She was born in United States, but her family was Portuguese Sephardic Jewish. She met my father, who was an immigrant from Italy, in a French boarding house in Coney Island.

C: But did your father speak French?

LF: No. He didn’t speak English, either!

C: He was born in Italy?

LF: Oh, yeah. I’m going to receive the key to the city of the place he was from in Italy, this September. I’ll give a poetry reading there. The town is Brescia.

C: You’re popular in Italy, I get the sense from the Internet.

LF: Yeah, I get much more publicity there than here. I was just in a poetry festival in Genoa two weeks ago. There was a huge amount of press.

C: How did the festival go?

LF: Well, it was supposed to change the world, but I haven’t noticed anything different. You can let those poets spout off, they’re harmless.

C: You mean it was a political reading?

LF: Yeah. Italian poets are much more politicized than poets are here today. What happened? I mean, where is Allen Ginsberg when we need him?

C: Yeah, there’s very little political poetry now.

LF: Well, I sent a poem today that they’re going to reproduce for the Woodstock Poetry Festival as a memento, and it’s called “A History of The Airplane,” which is a political poem, written since 9/11.

C: It’s difficult now to have an anarcho-pacifist position.

LF: Why?

C: Well, between our own military and the suicide bombers in the—

LF: All the more reason to take such a position!

C: Well, it’s unpopular right now, I guess.

LF: Unpopular? Not out here!

C: Oh, really?

LF: The mainstream press is putting out pure lies on the amount of support for the administration. Right after 9/11, practically the next day, the national networks said they had conducted a poll which showed the president had 90 percent support of the nation. It was a pure example of manufacturing consent. You know Chomsky’s book, Manufacturing Consent?

C: Right, I know.

LF: This was it. That’s exactly what happened. And it’s bullshit! Out here, there’s not half as many American flags on display, not even a third as many as you see in New York City these days.

C: Right.

LF: I mean you have what’s called “totalitarian democracy” going on now, in Washington, DC.

C: [Laughs.]

LF: I’m not kidding! It’s not a laughable matter! No one realizes what the president is up to, what his real menu is. There’s a famous book called School for Dictators. It was written by Ignazio Silone in ’37 or ’38, published before the Second World War. It’s the story of an American who wants to be a dictator, who comes to Europe to interview fascists and find out how they seized power. And the parallels with today are astounding! For instance, one important thing was that the Fascist governments arrived in power with the full consent of the existing democratic institutions—which is just what’s happened today, with the elections in Florida and the cooperation of the Supreme Court. You have George II, who usurped the throne and is illegally occupying the White House. The parallels with 1938 are really astounding.

C: With Hitler.

LF: Hitler and Mussolini.

C: Why do you say “totalitarian democracy?”

LF: Well, because when a member of Congress dares to dissent with one of the president’s programs, the Republicans tell him he is disloyal and he’s aiding the enemy.

C: Right.

LF: `Cause we’re “in a war.” Well, we’re not in a war. The Congress has not declared war. We’re in what you call a “virtual war”—in the sense of “virtual reality.” But it’s enough to scare people into conformity. The president is using this to get all kinds of programs passed, including the restriction of First Amendment rights, writs of habeas corpus suspended, the privacy of citizens violated—all now done legally with the cooperation of the existing democratic institutions.

C: What do you think his ultimate goal is?

LF: Establishment of a plutocracy—a plutocracy being government by the rich. It’s obvious.

C: I wonder why they felt they had to seize power. I wonder if there’s some crisis in capitalism we’re not aware of, that made them feel that they couldn’t make profits through the normal democratic—

LF: Couldn’t make enough profits. It’s a decade of greed we’re in now. And it’s all coming out, what these big corporations have really been up to. It’s just the tip of the iceberg you’re seeing so far.

C: In some ways it’s hopeful, that perhaps the whole—

LF: Well, it’s hopeful for the Democrats, because, if they would only stop acting like Republicans, they could sweep the elections this fall. They could totally sweep out most of the Republicans.

C: Yeah.

LF: It’s very hopeful, but where are the leaders in the Democratic Party?

C: What about the role of the poets? Is there a role for poets in changing the world?

LF: With poetry, we can’t change the world. We can change the world by changing the consciousness of people, which was one of the basic concepts of the 1960s, the “expansion of consciousness.” The whole idea was if you can change the consciousness of, say, the militarist leaders, that was the only way to bring peace on earth. This was exemplified by things like putting flowers in the barrels of guns. You’ve seen those famous pictures?

C: Right.

LF: And changing consciousness by not exuding hate and hostility. This was one of Allen Ginsberg’s principles: If you exuded hostility, you were going to get hostility back! It was a workable thesis, in Ginsberg’s case. It often was very successful. For instance, I’ve seen him in interviews where the interviewer was quite hostile at the beginning, like with William Buckley.

C: Yeah, I saw that interview, a famous interview.

LF: At the end, Buckley was practically eating out of his hand! Buckley starts off with these snide remarks about beatniks and how they probably didn’t take enough baths, and while he’s making this introductory statement, Allen is looking directly into the camera and making a mudra sign with his hand. And from that moment on, he has control of the interview—and this is all based on not exuding hostility. So we’d have peace marches where the idea was not to goad the police, or put out hate, but rather to try and be totally pacifist and open to them. That didn’t often work, but...I mean, it’s the Gandhian principal, actually.

C: Do you try to write your poems from a higher consciousness?

LF: [Laughs.] I don’t want to sound pretentious...I certainly try not to exude hate. I can be awfully satirical, however.

C: Right. I guess humor is not vicious—

LF: But it can make the point just as strongly.

C: There is, in your poetry, I’ve always felt, a real friendliness.

LF: That’s right.

C: Are you writing to someone? Like when you say, “I’m leading a quiet life/at Mike’s Place, every day.”

LF: My God, that poem is over 40 years old.

C: You don’t remember what you were thinking when you wrote it?

LF: No.

C: Frank O’Hara has the theory of “personism”. He says you should address the poem to the person you love the most. I can imagine that your poems are written that way.

LF: No. They’re addressed to as wide a public as I can potentially reach.

C: That was a conscious—?

LF: This is where my poetics are totally different from all the Beats, except Allen. Allen has a huge, what I call, “public surface” to his poems. He was a great communicator. But most of the Beat poetry didn’t have that much public surface. A lot of the Beat poetry was private conversation between the poets. Or private thoughts, which most poetry is. But when I say public surface, I mean poems should be available and comprehensible by anyone without a literary education, so that you can reach people on the most basic level, on a sensual level, based on sensual experience which anyone could get. Then, if poetry is gonna be really poetry, it should have a deeper level of subjective and subversive elements. Practically all my poetry has this public surface. My poem about the dog walking down the street, or the poem you’re quoting, “I am leading a quiet life ...”—the whole poem has a public surface.

C: What do you mean by subversive?

LF: Have you got a good dictionary handy?

C: You mean politically subversive?

LF: Of course.

C: I thought maybe you meant subversive in a literary sense.

LF: Both.

C: Did you develop the idea of the public surface from Jacques Prevert?

LF: No. Jacques Prevert is child’s play. I translated him when I was a student at the Sorbonne. He was very important to the French during the German occupation; that’s when he first made his mark. The book I translated, Paroles—some of those poems were passed around in the French Underground, on paper tablecloths and things like that. “Paroles” meant “words”, and it also meant “passwords”.

C: Was he in the Underground, Prevert?

LF: Oh, yes.

C: Do you trace yourself back to other poets, I mean your poetic lineage?

LF: Sure.

C: To Whitman?

LF: Myriad poets. Not particularly Whitman, and definitely not William Carlos Williams. William Carlos Williams is someone that Allen Ginsberg promoted as developing the “American language,” as distinct from the British or European, and the “American lingo” in poetry. But I just don’t see it, half as strongly as I see it in, for instance, E.E. Cummings.

C: Oh, that’s right!

LF: Or Kenneth Patchen. After all, the good doctor Williams is living in the suburbs of New York. It’s not city poetry. It’s definitely suburban poetry. And it’s not particularly the American lingo. It sounds American; it’s definitely not T.S. Eliot. In fact, that was the big dispute between Eliot and Williams. Williams said that The Wasteland set back American poetry 50 years.

C: I’m surprised you quote from Eliot in one of your paintings—I was reading the press release—one of them is based on Eliot.

LF: I have a couple that are based on Eliot.

C: Do you like Eliot’s poetry?

LF: Definitely. The Four Quartets is much greater than The Wasteland, I think. I was writing—it’s a good thing I didn’t publish any—when I was living in France on the GI Bill, I was writing poetry [that was] very much imitation T.S. Eliot. I had to put Eliot’s books out of the house! Literally! I have a poem about this in a book that came out last year from New Directions. It’s called Far Rockaway of The Heart. No, Eliot was a very important influence on everybody! You couldn’t get away from him in the ’30s and ’40s. And it wasn’t William Carlos Williams that finally got rid of him, but Allen Ginsberg.

C: And E.E. Cummings, like you, is also a painter.

LF: Oh, yeah. He was a pretty good painter, too.

C: Have you been a painter your whole life?

LF: Oh, yeah. I was drawing the model at the Academie Julien in Paris, starting in 1947, ’48.

C: Do your paintings influence your poems and vice versa?

LF: Well, it’s really all the same thing; it’s just two different mediums, with the same message. The same message is the same point of view. It’s quite obvious in this present show, which is called “LIT.PAINT”.

C: Right.

LF: It’s taking the literary consciousness and applying it to painting, and vice versa.

C: I wanted to ask, are you influenced by Eastern religion?

LF: No. Allen Ginsberg used to try and get me to “sit”. I always thought that was a peculiar word for meditation, to “sit”. I think his “sitting” did his poetry a lot of harm.

C: Everybody thinks so.

LF: You do?

C: Everybody I talk to. Even Buddhists, I think, admit it.

LF: Allen used to ask me to meditate, and I’d say, “Well, I’m in a steady state of meditation most of the time anyway, so I don’t really feel I need it.” But Allen needed it to reign in his gregariousness. And he would go on a retreat and he would write 1,000 postcards. On the retreat.

C: While he was silent.

LF: But he was a great poet, no doubt about it. I mean, he had a larger influence with a larger number of people than either T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. I mean, he really sparked a youth revolution around the world!

C: You credit him in particular?

LF: Oh, yeah. The influence of his poetry in places like Prague, especially, these countries that were under dictatorships. It had enormous influence. Ever since the dictatorships fell, since they got liberated, people would come to City Lights and they’d say, “This is the dream of my life, to come here. You were a light on the horizon.” Ginsberg’s books were in everybody’s backpack that could steal one or find one somewhere, in these countries.

C: And he was translated into a lot of languages.

LF: Yeah. He traveled incessantly. He went everywhere.

C: Right.

LF: Everywhere from China to Budapest.

C: Yeah, when I was in India, I met the poets of Calcutta and they still remembered him.

LF: Yeah. Bengali poets.

C: I went to this Bengali reading and I was surprised. I pictured Indian poets as blissful and yogic, and instead they looked sort of depressed and smoked cigarettes. And I asked them why and they said, “Ever since Ginsberg came through town, we all started smoking cigarettes and looking miserable.” Later I told Allen about it and he completely denied it.

LF: Well, quite often people would misinterpret what he was saying. They thought they had to smoke dope and wear dark glasses, which wasn’t what he was trying to tell them to do.

C: But you must have seen, being in San Francisco, the development from Beat into hippie.

LF: Well, the Beats had enunciated all the main shibboleths of the 1960s counterculture. For instance, in ecology. The first stirrings of an ecological consciousness were in poets like Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. The first antiwar position, pacifism. The turn toward Far East consciousness, Buddhism. These were all present in the 1950s, in the Beat writers. Kerouac’s Buddhism, which was a Catholic Buddhism, but nevertheless. This [was] totally new in American culture. It’s really the beginnings of the 1960s consciousness, which was eventually absorbed into the middle class, but...

C: Something changed in the sixties, though. The Beats became a mass culture.

LF: There was a revolution of consciousness, but the political revolution was aborted, and therefore we have the mess we have today. There was a real hope that corporate capitalism would be turned back. But now we have the full flowering of corporate capitalism, so that you have corporations that are larger than many countries in the world. GM or the Ford Motor Company or General Electric are larger than most Third World countries. This is government by corporation. And it’s all coming apart at the seams right now, with the accounting scandals. This is the direct result of the hope and the opening that were a part of the sixties going down the drain, and corporate capitalism triumphing.

C: What was the mistake the sixties counterculture made?

LF: They imported a foreign ideology, not having one of their own; they adopted Marxism in various forms. Either Marxism or Maoism. And philosophers like [Herbert] Marcuse were chosen as primary philosophers of the movement. Marcuse was a professor at the University of California/San Diego, but he was a leading Marxist philosopher. The sixties counterculture was not able to develop a theology of its own, an ideology of its own. So one wing split off into Maoism and violence, and another part went off in the pacifist direction, one part went off in a Marxist direction.

C: What do you think they should have chosen as an ideology?

LF: For decades the motor of the Left was labor. It wasn’t Communist with a capital “C”, it was socialist with a small “s”. It was basically populist. There was a Populist Party in this country; it almost took power in the thirties. Earl Warren, who became governor of California, was originally in the Populist Party. There was a whole populist movement coming out of the Midwest, in Chicago—very important. Unfortunately in the sixties, they didn’t pick up on this tradition. Today we have a government with two right wings. What’s needed is a Democratic Party in the tradition of FDR and his New Deal. The Democrats totally capitulated. They’ve gone along with Republican programs since the beginning of the Reagan Era, when an unspoken agenda of the Republican party was the complete dismantlement of the Welfare State and the New Deal. The Democrats allowed this to happen—including Clinton, who cut down on welfare programs.

C: Do you feel that the present era is like the fifties?

LF: It’s completely a new world. Now you have a corporate monoculture that’s sweeping the world, making every place the same. You can go to Sumatra to see skyscrapers. You can go to Tokyo and think you’re in New York. It’s the American corporate monoculture. Not at all like the fifties.

C: The fifties in comparison, there was still a native culture.

LF: Definitely. We were in the heart of it. So was the sixties, so was the seventies. There’s a new ballgame now. You could say that the Twin Towers debacle was the first strike in the Third World War. The emphasis is on the words “Third World.” This is the war of the Third World, not in the sense of number three World War.

C: An attack on this global corporate culture.

LF: That’s part of it. They’re attacking much more than that. I don’t know what you’ve been reading lately.

C: But City Lights has been there all these years, and still seems to have a vital purpose.

LF: Some. I should hope so. If you look on our Web site [www.citylights.com], you’ll see a photograph of the front of the building on which there are five banners, each with a picture of an American with an American flag over his mouth. And on each banner there’s one word, and the words are: “Dissent is not un-American.” And this gets enormous reaction. Thousands of people see it every day, because we’re at the crossroads of Columbus and Broadway, and the commuter traffic goes by here twice a day—literally thousands of people. And we get an enormous amount of feedback from these posters. People write and call saying: “You made me not feel so alone in the world,” etc. And the ironic thing is it’s not a radical statement.

C: You refer to Ginsberg as changing the world, but your own book A Coney Island of the Mind sold millions of copies.

LF: Not millions, but it’s up to a million.

C: A million now?

LF: It sold more copies than Howl, but after all I had a bigger publisher with better distribution. New Directions is the great avant-garde publisher after the Second World War, you know. They’re the ones that brought over for the first time Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams—you name it. That early New Directions list was phenomenal, say, of 1946.

C: How did you get published by them?

LF: I sent in my manuscript blind, with no letter or anything.

C: Really!

LF: And James Laughlin picked up on it.

C: He himself read it?

LF: He and his wife.

C: Do you feel that your poetry affected a lot of people?

LF: Well, at the time, I didn’t. Coney Island was selling a lot, but I didn’t know, till many years later, just the last few years. Middle-aged women, or middle-aged men, will come in the store and say, “You know, when I was in high school I read your book and it really changed my life.” I get this all the time. And I didn’t even know it was happening back then. I was wandering around Mexico, hitchhiking or in my VW bus, without a girlfriend. I wasn’t having much fun. I didn’t know anything like this was going on with my poetry!

C: This was in the sixties?

LF: Yeah. And then City Lights, too. Now, we receive letters saying, “I got my whole education reading in the basement of City Lights bookstore. It was the only place I could hang out, because I was penniless. I used to stay there from 10 a.m. to midnight, reading. I will always remember it. And thanks a lot.” Sometimes we’ll get 10 dollars enclosed, and the guy will say, “Yeah, I used to steal books from you, too, and here’s a small repayment.” I have one guy, he sends me 10 dollars every few months.

C: But you try to prevent people from stealing?

LF: Well, we don’t encourage it. We always had a policy of never calling the police. We had a sign at one time that said, “If you’re caught stealing, we won’t call the police, but you will be publicly humiliated.”

C: And did you humiliate them?

LF: I had one manager who used to pull down their pants. But I have to get going now—

C: Let me just say before you go, that your books changed my life.

LF: [Laughs.] Thank you.