Ferlinghetti speaks out at 99, his voice as vital as ever
Lawrence Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights 65 years ago, in 1953.
“I’m there in spirit all the time,” he says of the beloved, world-famous bookstore on Columbus Avenue in North Beach.
How about in reality? How often is he at the shop?
“As a poet,” he says with a laugh, “I don’t deal in reality.”
Yes, Ferlinghetti has scaled back his involvement with City Lights, where he shares an office with former City Lights Publishers editor Nancy Peters, co-owner of the store. But the celebrated bookseller, publisher and former San Francisco poet laureate nevertheless maintains an active lifestyle — and life of the mind — that anyone far younger would envy.
Not bad for someone who, on Saturday, March 24, will turn 99.
On a recent rainy afternoon, Ferlinghetti warmly welcomed an interviewer at his second-floor apartment on a country-quiet street in North Beach. He was heading out of town the following day for a two-week stay with friends in Santa Cruz.
Over the decades, the poet has also taken time away from the city at an electricity-free cabin in Big Sur. He hasn’t been there in two years, however.
“I used to be a woodsman,” says the native of Yonkers, N.Y., who settled in San Francisco with his late wife, Kirby, in the early 1950s. Getting to his cabin these days, though, is a challenge.
Most of the walking that Ferlinghetti does now is near his rent-controlled apartment where he’s lived for 38 years, a couple of blocks from the Embarcadero and the bay beyond it.
Walking isn’t the only way he keeps fit. He has a rowing machine in a room crowded with books and papers that serves as a home office.
“I use it all the time,” he says. “Practically every day.”
The machine helps make up for no longer swimming at the Embarcadero YMCA. “I would do 30 laps in 30 minutes,” he says. “I had to knock that off 10 years ago.”
Also on the floor, not far from the rowing machine, is an open cardboard box that’s full of copies of “Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems.” The handsome, compact collection was published late last year by New Directions, the small, venerable house that in 1958 released “A Coney Island of the Mind,” Ferlinghetti’s hugely popular collection that sold more than a million copies.
“A Coney Island of the Mind” came out in the Eisenhower era, yet much of it — accessible, politically engaged, humorous and impassioned verse that has spoken to generations — remains embedded in Ferlinghetti’s memory. The poet eagerly volunteers to recite some of its lines, his scratchy baritone dramatically quiet at times and booming at others.
For more recent poems that he doesn’t know by heart, he reads from books, using a desktop electronic magnifier that helps offset his poor eyesight.
Other than trouble reading, and being a bit hard of hearing, Ferlinghetti seems remarkably healthy. He looks sharp, too, wearing a white box-print dress shirt, deep-blue sweater and round-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses. A stud in his right earlobe matches the blue of his eyes, and his shaggy white beard accentuates the air of a happily retired fisherman — fitting for someone who, before he served in the Navy during World War II, spent time as a lobsterman in Maine.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which he was put on trial for in 1957.
Fame first came to Ferlinghetti when he and City Lights clerk Shigeyoshi Murao were arrested and put on trial in 1957 for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” In a landmark decision, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the Beat poet’s work was not obscene.
Since then, Ferlinghetti’s activist voice has not softened. When speaking about President Trump, he is unequivocal: “Trump is an evil man,” he says. “He’s so dangerous. I think you’ve got to take this man seriously. I think he’s out to destroy democracy.”
Cheery as always, though, the son of an Italian immigrant doesn’t let a visitor leave without sharing an Italian proverb — “wisdom for future generations,” as he puts it: “Mangia bene, ridi spesso, ama molto.” (“Eat well, laugh often, love a lot.”) To which he adds, chuckling, “And don’t screw up.”
The interview with Ferlinghetti, below, has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What drew you to poetry as a young man?
A: Oh, some dame (laughs).
Q: Do you remember her name?
A: Well, uh ... no (laughs).
Q: When would that have been?
A: I really didn’t start reading poetry in depth until I was in Paris on the GI Bill. I was getting a doctorate at the Sorbonne, and that’s when I really got into it. I was in the Navy four years, and I never had a desk job in the Navy. I was one ship to the next. I was in the Normandy invasion the first morning. But there was no time for reading, really.
Q: You were kind enough last year to write something for The Chronicle about your time in the Navy. Actually, I remember you writing that you did in fact have some time to read books.
A: Yeah, we were a commissioned vessel, even though we were only 110 feet long. It was a subchaser. So we had all the nooks and crannies on the ship stuffed with Modern Library editions.
Q: Do you remember any titles?
A: Well, lots of James Joyce and lots of T.S. Eliot. And lots of Ezra Pound.
Q: I wonder if there are still Ezra Pound books in the U.S. Navy these days on ships.
A: I doubt it.
Q: So, before this, you earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of North Carolina, right?
A: Chapel Hill. I went to Chapel Hill because Thomas Wolfe, who wrote “Look Homeward, Angel,” had gone there, and he had a magazine at the university.
Q: Like a lot of great writers over the years, you got your start covering sports. Do you remember any of those stories?
A: They were forgettable (laughs).
Q: Did you envision a career in journalism at that point?
A: Oh, yeah, definitely. It seemed to me the only thing I knew how to do was write, the only thing I had any talent for was to write. And so I thought I would go where Thomas Wolfe went to college and maybe I could become like him. I mean, in my generation, his book “Look Homeward, Angel” was a very important book. It’s the kind of book that you have to read when you’re, say, 18. If you read it when you’re 40 or 50, it seems too effusive and too romantic.
Q: What made you decide to move to Paris after the war?
A: I spent about two years of my very early years with a French aunt. When my mother was sick and couldn’t take care of me, (my) aunt took me to France and we lived near Strasbourg, and lived there long enough to learn the language, so I still retain it. And so it took me years to get back there. So, after the war, I was 26, 27, and I went to France because I felt like I was returning to my second home.
Q: And you got some actual work done there, right? You were getting a doctorate, as you said.
A: Yeah, but I wrote the thesis in the back of a cafe — it was the Café Mabillon, which is on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
Q: Does it still exist?
A: Oh, yeah, but now it’s a tourist place. And I was hanging out at George Whitman’s bookstore, which was called la librairie Mistral at that time. He changed the name to Shakespeare and Company in about 1961. George was my oldest friend. I hung out at Shakespeare and Company in many, many visits to George — many, many times I stayed in the bookstore.
Q: So, you stayed upstairs, where they put people up?
A: Yeah.
Q: When would that have been?
A: Well, I was there first, it would have been 1947. And then I left Paris in 1950, on Jan. 1, and arrived here the next day.
Q: Why San Francisco?
A: It seemed like it was still the last frontier, which it isn’t anymore. I mean, in 1951, it was a wide-open city, and it seemed like you could do anything you wanted to here. It was like there was so much missing that if it was going to be a real city, there was so much that it had to get, that it didn’t have. And, for instance, as far as bookstores go, all the bookstores closed at 5 p.m. and they weren’t open on the weekends. And there was no place to sit down. And there was usually a clerk on top of you asking you what you wanted.
And so the first thing I realized, there was no bookstore to become the locus for the literary community. It’s really important if you’re going to have a literary community, it has to have a locus. It just can’t be out there in the air. So, from the very beginning, when we started City Lights in June 1953, the idea was to make it a locus for the new literary community that had developed out of the Berkeley Renaissance, so called, and it proved to be true. People just flocked to it because there had been no locus for the literary life.
Q: Back to San Francisco and how it’s changing. What has changed the most about the city, in your opinion, over those years?
A: You’d have to write a couple books to cover that. In 1951, San Francisco was a small, provincial capital. And it was provincial. For instance, there was no place in town to get a croissant, except in the basement of the City of Paris department store, where there was a cafe. And so that was a test of our provinciality (laughs).
Q: What needs to change in San Francisco, in the Bay Area in general, to keep artists here?
A: Well, San Francisco now, it’s Boomtown USA — it’s a bigger boom than after the Gold Rush in the 1850s and ’60s. The boomtown today is transforming San Francisco into something you’re not even going to recognize in another 15 years. It hasn’t quite hit North Beach yet, but the rest of the town, it’s just a huge traffic jam everywhere. The automobile is transforming and ruining most of the cities, not just San Francisco. I call it Autogeddon. Autogeddon is ruining the cities.
Q: Your poems are a singular mix of humor and pathos. Francis Ford Coppola has this great line: “Lawrence gets you laughing, then hits you with the truth.” Is it becoming more difficult for you to sustain the laughter?
A: Why, no! Francis was totally right, though. It seems that I have so many poems that do that.
Q: I wondered because I felt in this book, “Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems,” that there’s a lot of rapturous language early on, and as you age, and perhaps with the times, with the politics, the poems are a bit darker.
A: Well, yeah, lyricism is a part of the age of youth. When you’re a youth, you’re lyric. Later on, you become tragic.
Q: What’s the last poem you wrote?
A: It was published in the Nation magazine. It’s called “Trump’s Trojan Horse”: “Homer didn’t live long enough/ To tell of Trump’s Trojan Horse/ From which all the president’s men/ Burst out in the White House to destroy democracy/ And institute absolute rule by corporations/ Bow down, oh Common Man/ Bow down!”
Q: How will you celebrate your 99th birthday?
A: I don’t see any reason to celebrate getting older. It’s not a cause of celebration.
Q: What will you be doing that day, do you know?
A: Oh, I’ll have a little family gathering. That’s about it.
John McMurtrie is The San Francisco Chronicle’s book editor. Email: jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @McMurtrieSF
Lawrence Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights 65 years ago, in 1953.
“I’m there in spirit all the time,” he says of the beloved, world-famous bookstore on Columbus Avenue in North Beach.
How about in reality? How often is he at the shop?
“As a poet,” he says with a laugh, “I don’t deal in reality.”
Yes, Ferlinghetti has scaled back his involvement with City Lights, where he shares an office with former City Lights Publishers editor Nancy Peters, co-owner of the store. But the celebrated bookseller, publisher and former San Francisco poet laureate nevertheless maintains an active lifestyle — and life of the mind — that anyone far younger would envy.
Not bad for someone who, on Saturday, March 24, will turn 99.
On a recent rainy afternoon, Ferlinghetti warmly welcomed an interviewer at his second-floor apartment on a country-quiet street in North Beach. He was heading out of town the following day for a two-week stay with friends in Santa Cruz.
Over the decades, the poet has also taken time away from the city at an electricity-free cabin in Big Sur. He hasn’t been there in two years, however.
“I used to be a woodsman,” says the native of Yonkers, N.Y., who settled in San Francisco with his late wife, Kirby, in the early 1950s. Getting to his cabin these days, though, is a challenge.
Most of the walking that Ferlinghetti does now is near his rent-controlled apartment where he’s lived for 38 years, a couple of blocks from the Embarcadero and the bay beyond it.
Walking isn’t the only way he keeps fit. He has a rowing machine in a room crowded with books and papers that serves as a home office.
“I use it all the time,” he says. “Practically every day.”
The machine helps make up for no longer swimming at the Embarcadero YMCA. “I would do 30 laps in 30 minutes,” he says. “I had to knock that off 10 years ago.”
Also on the floor, not far from the rowing machine, is an open cardboard box that’s full of copies of “Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems.” The handsome, compact collection was published late last year by New Directions, the small, venerable house that in 1958 released “A Coney Island of the Mind,” Ferlinghetti’s hugely popular collection that sold more than a million copies.
“A Coney Island of the Mind” came out in the Eisenhower era, yet much of it — accessible, politically engaged, humorous and impassioned verse that has spoken to generations — remains embedded in Ferlinghetti’s memory. The poet eagerly volunteers to recite some of its lines, his scratchy baritone dramatically quiet at times and booming at others.
For more recent poems that he doesn’t know by heart, he reads from books, using a desktop electronic magnifier that helps offset his poor eyesight.
Other than trouble reading, and being a bit hard of hearing, Ferlinghetti seems remarkably healthy. He looks sharp, too, wearing a white box-print dress shirt, deep-blue sweater and round-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses. A stud in his right earlobe matches the blue of his eyes, and his shaggy white beard accentuates the air of a happily retired fisherman — fitting for someone who, before he served in the Navy during World War II, spent time as a lobsterman in Maine.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which he was put on trial for in 1957.
John McMurtrie is The San Francisco Chronicle’s book editor. Email: jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @McMurtrieSF
Trump’s Trojan Horse by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Homer didn’t live long enoughTo tell of Trump’s White House
Which is his Trojan horse
From which all the President’s men
Burst out to destroy democracy
And install corporations
As absolute rulers of the world
Ever more powerful than nations
And it’s happening as we sleep
Bow down, oh Common Man
Bow down!
July 13, 2017
ORIGINAL IN "THE NATION"
Beat author William Burroughs with Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's most treasured book
Original in "The San Francisco Chronicle" January 26, 2017
T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” was given to me by the mother of my girlfriend in Greenwich Village in 1943. Since one part was full of great sea imagery, it resonated in me all across the Atlantic to the Normandy invasion. My subchaser (the USS SC1308) was a commissioned U.S. Navy ship, and we could stock everything that the big ships had. And so we ordered every book in Random House’s Modern Library. Every cranny and nook aboard our little ship was crammed with books — including “Four Quartets.”
“Four Quartets” has influenced everything I have written in poetry, ever since I first read it. It is more important than Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in the development of his thought and poetics. (It is still in print.)
Many years ago, I wrote a long poem called “The Sea and Ourselves at Cape Ann.” It’s my failed attempt to write like Eliot.
Michael McClure, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, & Lawrence Ferlinghetti. San Francisco, 1965.
One time, we were standing in line to mail a package at UPS and started chatting. I had written a positive article with poet Frank Walsh about Ezra Pound for a community newspaper where Pound went to college (the University of Pennsylvania). It had come to the attention of Pound's companion (and mother of his daughter) Olga Rudge, who wrote me. I called her when I was in Venice and we visited a few times. Once it was raining and she lent me Pound's raincoat and showed me a preserved "gadfly" (which is how Pound saw himself) she found on the day of his funeral and had saved. Ferlinghetti and I chatted while we waited about Pound, Olga Rudge, New Directions, and publisher James Laughlin.
Then, more recently, seeing him talk about his book of journals. He read "The Sea" for Pablo Neruda; a fragment is on the video I shot:
This is great Micheal yr keeping the beat alive here...lest we and the true world of art, music, poetry slip out into the shores of still other world that our not our own. While most of the sorry paradigms in Akirema are drowning and we allow ourselves to passby the new world youth and workers without them being aware of us, you are putting yr shoulder here-- beings that you area true ahistorical literary maven in yr own right-- so that this never happens without a fight,what an excellent project youve got cooking here. I feel inspired in the classicl sense, I was planing to go down into DC for the mass student protest this Saturday now Im sure of it-- and I will bring a packet full of verse approprate for the occasion and read aloud in front of the White House like in the early late '80s a couple time for the kids and edgy cherry trees!
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