Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the 50th Anniversary of "On The Road"

Legendary Beat Generation Bookseller and Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books on the 50th Anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Poetry As Insurgent Art

 

" ...  AMY GOODMAN: Fifty years ago this week, Viking Press published Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. The book was an immediate hit and remains one of the key works of the Beat Generation. On the Road was a fictionalized account of Kerouac’s travels across the country in the late 1940s. He originally wrote the book over a three-week stretch in the early 1950s. Kerouac typed it on a scroll, single-spaced with no margins or paragraph breaks.

JACK KEROUAC: So Dean and I raced on to the East Coast. At one point we drove a 1947 Cadillac limousine across the state of Nebraska 110 miles an hour, beating hot-shot passenger trains and steel-wheel freights in one nervous, shuddering snap up of the gas. We told stories and zoomed East. There were hobos by the tracks, wino bottles, the moon shining on wood fires. There were white-faced cows out in the plains, dim as nuns. There was dawn, Iowa, Mississippi River at Davenport, Chicago by nightfall. “Ho, man,” said Dean to me as we stood in front of a bar on North Clark Street on a hot summer night, “Dig these old Chinamen that cut by Chicago. What a weird town! And what women in that window up there, just looking down, you know, and they’re standing there in the window, those big wide eyes waiting. Sal, we’ve gotta go and never stop going ’til we get there.” I said, “Where we going, Dean?”

AMY GOODMAN: Jack Kerouac. As the literary world marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road, we will spend the hour with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, leading literary figure of the Beat Generation. He’s part-poet, bookseller, book publisher, artist and activist. In 1953, with Peter Martin he founded City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. Two years later, Lawrence Ferlinghetti launched the City Lights publishing house. Both institutions are still running half a century later.

City Lights might be best known as the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl.” It revolutionized American poetry and American consciousness, but it also led to Ferlinghetti and his publishing partner being arrested and put on trial for obscenity.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a poet himself, and his 1958 collection, A Coney Island of the Mind, has sold over a million copies. And he’s a former Poet Laureate of San Francisco. At the age of eighty-eight, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still going strong. He continues to write poetry and run City Lights.

I met up with him recently in San Francisco. He gave me a brief tour of his bookstore, City Lights.

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: This is a section called “Stolen Continents.” In other words, books like Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America—that’s a great book—and generally the results of colonialism and imperialism.

You can see this is a huge section of muckraking, anarchism, class war, political science, sociology: people’s history.

AMY GOODMAN: Just before he took me on that tour, I sat down with Lawrence Ferlinghetti for an extended conversation. I began by asking him to read an excerpt from his new book, Poetry as Insurgent Art.

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: And the book begins—this is a prose book, Poetry as Insurgent Art:

I am signaling you through the flames. The North Pole is not where it used to be. Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest. Civilization self-destructs. The goddess Nemesis is knocking at the door…

What are poets for in such an age? What is the use of poetry? If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of Apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic. You have to decide if bird cries are cries of ecstasy or cries of despair, by which you will know if you are a tragic or a lyric poet. Conceive of love beyond sex. Be subversive, constantly questioning reality and the status quo. 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. But don’t destroy the world, unless you have something better to replace it.

If you would snatch fame from the flames, where is your burning bow, where are your arrows of desire, where your wit on fire?

The master class starts wars. The lower classes fight it. Governments lie. The voice of the government is often not the voice of the people.

Speak up, act out! Silence is complicity. Be the gadfly of the state and also its firefly. And if you have two loaves of bread, do as the Greeks did: sell one with the coin of the realm, and with the coin of the realm buy sunflowers.

Wake up! The world’s on fire!

Have a nice day!

This is coming out in a little smaller format than this. This is a proof copy. It’s actually going to be close to the size of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. ... "

 

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