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
The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.
A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.
Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country
[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world.
Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.
the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.
I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I'm not so interested in nostalgia. I'm interested in the future.
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
We'd like to just write nothing but lyric poetry. The trouble is, the individual is going along intent on his own personal gratifications and love affairs and financial affairs and everything else. But loping alongside him is this fascist lout who keeps trying to take over. And if you keep ignoring him, he gets bigger and bigger, so every once in a while the free individual has to turn away from his private pursuits and give this fascist lout a few clouts, and beat him down to size.
In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see the people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of 'suffering humanity