50 YEARS OF CONFRONTATION The Art, Poetry, and Protest of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
	NOVEMBER 2005

by Bill Weber
Photos by Russell Byrne

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s art, poetry, and protest all began before the green, hippy, or even beat revolutions tried to confront mainstream culture. As a young man he joined the Bohemian movement, which included a revolt against materialism, favoring art and literature within a milieu of unconventional habits, dress, and morals.

The voice, pen, brush, and conscience of Lawrence Ferlinghetti have moved for five decades, pointing out what’s right about the natural world and what is unnatural and despicable about our desecration of it.

Portrait of the Artist
The life of Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been a secular pilgrimage in a quest for artistic, literary, and political relevance. He has woven the threads of aesthetic endeavors with environmental and political activism creating a cord of three strands with which he draws together his view of the world as it ought to be.

Ferlinghetti’s pilgrimage began in Paris following WWII where he spent 1947 to 1951 earning a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Paris at the Sorbonne. While in France, Ferlinghetti began to develop his artistic skills as the result of a random encounter with an American art student who had discovered his lack of talent, and gave Lawrence his paint box. Lawrence still keeps the palette from that paint box as a memento of that extraordinary encounter.

Ferlinghetti began a serious study of art at Academie Julien, which was an “open studio.” This particularly European fashion of art education, which cost him a few francs an hour, involved drawing a model without formal instruction. Ferlinghetti wasn’t far along in his artistic endeavors before he discovered that literature and art were two media appealing to a common sensibility based upon communication and aesthetics.

In 1951 Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco and began his initial literary efforts, creating and publishing translations of a French poet Jacques Prévert. In the best bohemian tradition he spent his early days painting, teaching French, and writing literary criticisms.

The shape of his life began to come into focus when an entrepreneur, Peter Dean Martin, approached him with the idea of opening a shop to sell the paperback books which at that time were just beginning to transform people’s reading habits. Peter also wanted to distribute his City Lights magazine.

Rebel with a Cause
Martin and Ferlinghetti became partners and co-founders in 1953 of the City Lights Bookstore. Peter was the son of Carlo Tresca, who was a notable Italian anarchist. The bookstore and magazine had an anarchistic slant from the very beginning, and promoted an unwavering anti-authoritarian and anti-government agenda.

When City Lights Bookstore opened it was the only place in the City where people could purchase quality paperback books. Ferlinghetti soon began publishing books, as well, under the title Pocket Poets Series.

Ferlinghetti claims that he was never a member of the beat generation, but remains true to his bohemian origins and, in fact, can still be seen walking through the streets of North Beach sometimes still wearing his beret.

He has referred to himself as a “community-oriented, ethical anarchist” and claims that anarchism has a long and honorable tradition, including such thinkers as Bertram Russell with a line of British and continental philosophers stretching back before him.

Anarchism was never an ideology, Ferlinghetti says, but is simply a movement promoting an ideal that society should exist without a large government controlling the thoughts and activities of the people. Anarchists share a belief that human beings are capable of governing their affairs without restrictive rules and regulations.

Anarchists are vociferous advocates of the Jeffersonian principle that “they govern best who governs least” and believe the principle to be applicable down through all levels of government.

At the beginning, City Lights bookstore was selling anarchist publications that weren’t available anyplace else except in New York. The publications found a ready market among the European immigrants that had flocked into the City. North Beach, for example, had a large working-class Italian community, and the Italian garbage truck drivers would rush into the bookstore to buy their newspapers and other literature.

Poetry without Rhymes
In Ferlinghetti’s opinion, poetry had been a mainly aesthetic and academic exercise until beat poets in the late 1950s transformed it into a tool of prophetic denouncement of a society that had created a status quo in which they were determined not to participate.

During City Lights’ early years, the poetry of Gary Snyder was raising the themes of ecological concerns, pacifism, and anti-militarism. Gary also turned towards the East and to Buddhism for the philosophy and meditation techniques that became an important part of the 1960s counter culture revolution. “Snyder and the other beats started all that,” Ferlinghetti said. “They were caveman hippies.”

Lawrence sees a parallel between what the Beat Revolution did to poetry in the 1950s, and what the rock revolution did to beat music in the 1960s. Beat music featured cool jazz, played before aficionados, wearing sunglasses, sitting in dark corners, and snapping their fingers.

“When the rock revolution started, you didn’t hear any cool jazz for a long time.”

In a similar way, American poetry was very conventional until poets like Kerouac, Diane DiPrima, Gregory Corso, and Ginsburg brought a new type of poetry, with strong European, anarchist, and French-surrealist roots. As San Francisco’s official Poet Laureate, Ferlinghetti himself called down the revolution in a Populist Manifesto that contained the lines,

Poets, come out of your closets….,
No time now for the artist to hide
above, beyond, behind the scenes,
indifferent, paring his fingernails,
refining himself out of existence.

The power of the new poetry derived from its method of transcribing thoughts into words without censorship. The ideas came bursting over the levee of the conscious mind in an ungoverned rush, with no attempt to polish the result or to make it attractive in any way. The poems were naked, confessional, and revolutionary.

Standing up to Moloch
Ginsburg’s long poem Howl, which Ferlinghetti called “a vast castigation of American consumer society,” burst over the American literary scene like red paint splashed across some stuffy portrait. City Lights was the first to publish Ginsburg’s poetry in 1955, with the result that San Francisco Police barged into the bookstore bearing the authority to confiscate the stock and to charge Ferlinghetti with publishing obscene materials.

The ACLU successfully defended the little bookstore or it would have been out of business. In upholding the publisher’s first amendment rights, the court created a precedent that was to put a crimp into government censorship from that point on. The judge’s ruling allowed the New York publisher, Grove Press, for example, to publish such books as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

The court established the principle that a work cannot be censored as being obscene if it has the slightest redeeming social significance. The principle of uncensored communication became one of the streams flowing into the counterculture revolution of the 1960s.

A lengthy section of Howl shakes its fist against Moloch, which is the name Ginsberg gave to the dehumanizing industrial culture. After four decades the movement is still relevant, in Ferlinghetti’s opinion. In fact, he claims that there is more need now than ever for the message.

Ferlinghetti, himself, wrote a book of poetry called A Coney Island of the Mind that has been translated into nine languages, with nearly one million copies in print. He won a lifetime achievement award from the Author’s Guild, the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Ferlinghetti continues to bring a prophet’s pacifistic fury to bear upon what he characterizes as the dominant American corporate consumer culture, with an anti-materialist, anti-militarist, anti-technocratic message.

Ferlinghetti confidently maintains that the descent into darkness is both incorporated within and inculcated by the American mass media. In particular, he believes that the American consciousness is informed and malformed by huge daily doses of television.

He believes our cultural malaise to also be fomented by our cell phones, computers, fax machines, and (of course) the Internet. “The whole communication system is just the opposite of what the 1960s youth revolt was about,” Ferlinghetti says.

One of the slogans from the 60s, for example is Rom Dass’s “Be Here Now.” Today you can see two people at dinner, both of them in animated conversations on their cell phones or pecking away at their Bluetooth devices. Ferlinghetti claims that they’ve reversed the attitude into one of “Be somewhere else now.”

Mourning Mother Nature’s Coming Demise
Ferlinghetti’s greatest passions these days are poured into efforts to counteract what he sees as the planet’s slide into ecological self-destruction. In fact, he thinks that every other concern fades into insignificance compared to the imminent catastrophes threatening our planet.

Ferlinghetti entertains very bleak apocalyptic expectations about the near future of our planet. He firmly believes that the recent Hollywood movie, The Day After Tomorrow, showing the destruction of major American cities due to a catastrophic shift in global weather, is a likely depiction of at least the magnitude of the disaster that is bearing down upon us, even if the actual environmental holocaust itself, when it arrives, will be different in details from the movie.

He’s convinced that ecological disaster will overtake us in our lifetimes and that the handwriting is on the wall as far as our world is concerned. He believes that our society is being foolish and blind in not preparing for the crises.

Ferlinghetti recently created a typically provocative and confrontational painting, called Homo Sap as a ten-foot acrylic on canvas in the tradition of Picasso’s Guernica. The painting contains recognizable figures and forms so that the message of the piece is easily accessible.

In order to aid the understanding of any viewer who might miss the point of his piece, however, Ferlinghetti has scrawled across the work the unambiguous message, “Man is too stupid and too greedy to save himself from eco-oblivion.”

Ferlinghetti has created several hundred oil-on-canvas works and has used various media to create paper-based art. He admits that not all of his works bear the same prophetic burden as his “Man is too stupid...” piece. Sometimes he creates a purely esthetic work, just for the joy of the art.

Ferlinghetti’s art was displayed in an important show at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 1996. His art has been shown more recently in Antwerp, Belgium, Woodstock, and at the San Jose Museum of Modern Art.

And now Ferlinghetti’s art is coming to the Brentwood Art Gallery, in the Business and Technology Incubator, 101 Sand Creek Road. The show will run from November through January. The pieces in the show are managed by San Francisco’s prestigious George Krevsky Gallery at 77 Geary Street.

You can meet Ferlinghetti in person by attending the wine and cheese reception that will be held in his honor, on Tuesday, November 1, from 6-8 p.m. at the Incubator.

Don’t miss this opportunity to encounter an important slice from the past five decades of our national and local heritage!