Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghettiis an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind, a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of more than one million copies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 March 1919
CityBronxville, NY
CountryUnited States of America
There won't be any changes until we have another depression like in the 1930s, which we have not approached yet in the present recession.
I don't think our Beat Generation would even be known as that, had it not been for Ginsberg. You might say he put that whole concept together. Without it, we might have been known, but only as individuals. Separate, great writers, scattered across the landscape.
I greet you at the beginning of a great career,
I had a show at George Krevsky Gallery this past spring. That show traveled to Woodstock, New York where it showed for six weeks.
There are hardly any left in New York City. The San Francisco Bay Area is very fortunate to still have a lot of independent bookstores.
These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.
No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.
And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.
It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.
I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American
... there is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
I guess we all could have been put in jail for that. Do you think the statute of limitations has expired?
You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.
Communism wasn't a word that I thought of when I went to Cuba. The original Fidelistas were not Communists. They were graduate students at the university and law students. After the Fidelistas took over, they went to Washington and tried to get support from the U.S. government, which turned them down. They were in a desperate political and economic situation, so they took the offer from the Soviet Union. Communism was a matter of necessity.