Poetry Can Save the World

Poetry can save the world, by transforming consciousness.*

          Say something no one else is saying, 
          or say something in a new way ... or both.

 Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Illustration by

Akiko Kato, with permission

I am signaling you through the flames.

                    You have to decide if bird cries are cries of ecstasy
                     or cries of despair
                                                            
                                                         Be subversive!

          Strive to change the world in such a way
                    that there’s no further need to be a dissident.

                                    Read between the lives, and write between the lines.

                    Be committed to something outside yourself.
                                                Be passionate about it.

Speak up, act out! Silence is complicity.

Wake up! The world’s on fire!

 [Excerpts from "Poetry as Insurgent Art", 2007.]

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, today, has 

reached the age of 92!

 

In 2007, at the age of 88, Ferlinghetti was interviewed by Amy Goodman at Democracy Now.  Here are some excerpts.

Ferlinghetti, on nuclear warfare:

We took a train over to Nagasaki. It was just a few hours away. And I think it must have been about seven weeks after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. And there had been time to "clean things up" for some time, but still it was a devastating scene. It made me an instant pacifist. There was just three square miles of mulch with human hair and bones sticking out, and on the horizon a sort of—a landscape you’d find in the painting of Anselm Kiefer these days: blackened unrecognizable shapes sticking up on the horizon and teacups full of flesh, teacups with flesh melted onto the teacup. Oh, we had no idea what—no one knew what radiation was.

On the state of the world [four years ago]:

It’s rushing over the cliff... Congress is totally ignoring the ecological crisis fast ascending on us ... people think that, "Oh, the calamities aren’t going to happen in my little corner right now. It might happen fifty years or a hundred years from now. I mean, my house isn’t going to be swept away—or my life isn’t going to change. I’m always going to be able to drive to work." But it could change overnight. The ecosystem is so finely balanced that it could go out of balance overnight and crash like a computer by tomorrow morning.

Ferlinghetti tells Goodman he has written a new poem and "just has to get this out":

"Pity the Nation," after Khalil Gibran.

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,

and whose shepherds mislead them.

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,

and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice,

except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero

and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.

Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own

and no other culture but its own.

Pity the nation whose breath is money

and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.

Pity the nation—oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode

and their freedoms to be washed away.

My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

Advice to young poets:

Do you have to be a poet? If you don’t have to be a poet, be a prose writer. You’ll get further faster. Poetry—there’s probably more poetry published today than any time in the history of the world. Nevertheless, there is this—people think they have this blindness when they see a line in the typography of poetry, and it just blocks them. So if you can say the same thing in prose, you’ll probably be better off. For instance, this, my little book, Poetry as Insurgent Art, that’s written in prose, trying to break down the barrier.

[To hear an audio recording of the complete interview (where he talks about Kerouac, Howl, the Beats, and meeting Castro, etc. and reads several of his poems), click here.]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI!!!