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
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.
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
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.
T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
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.