A Far Rockaway Of The Heart - Lawrence Ferlinghetti's speech as poet laureate of San Francisco - Transcript

Whole Earth,  Summer, 1999  

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A FAR ROCKAWAY OF THE HEART Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 1997; 150 pp. $10.95. New Directions

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's speech as the first poet laureate of San Francisco

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.

But we are in danger of losing it; in fact, we are in danger of losing much more than that. All that made this City so unique in the first place seems to be going down the tube at an alarming rate.

This week's Bay Guardian has the results of a survey that "reveals a city undergoing a radical transformation--from a diverse metropolis that welcomed immigrants and refugees from around the world to a homogeneous, wealthy enclave."

The gap between the rich and the poor in San Francisco increased more than 40 percent in just two years recently. "San Francisco may soon become the first fully gentrified city in America, the urban equivalent of a gated bedroom community," says Daniel Zoll in the Guardian. "Now it's becoming almost impossible for a lot of the people who have made this such a world-class city--people who have been the heart and soul of the city for decades--from the fishers and pasta makers and blue-collar workers to the jazz musicians to the beat poets to the hippies to the punks and so many others--to exist here anymore. And when you've lost that part of the city, you've lost San Francisco."

And Richard Walker, head of Geography at UC Berkeley, has said, "It means a one-dimensional city, a more conservative city--one that will no longer be a fount of social innovation and rebellion from below. Just another American city, a corporate city--a fate it has resisted for generations."

When I arrived in the City in 1950, I came overland by train and took a ferry from the Oakland mole to the Ferry Building. And San Francisco looked like some Mediterranean port--a small white city, with mostly white buildings--a little like Tunis seen from seaward. I thought perhaps it was Atlantis, risen from the sea. I certainly saw North Beach especially as a poetic place, as poetic as some quartiers in Paris, as any place in old Europa, as poetic as any place great poets and painters had found inspiration. And this was the first poem I wrote here ... a North Beach scene:

   Away above a harborful of caullkless houses among the charley noble
   chimneypots of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines a woman pastes up sails
   upon the wind hanging out her morning sheets with wooden pins O lovely
   mammal her nearly naked breasts throw taut shadows as she stretches up to
   hang at last the last of her so white washed sins but it is wetly amorous
   and winds itself about her clinging to her skin So caught with arms
   upraised she tosses back her head in voiceless laughter and in choiceless
   gesture then shakes out gold hair while in the reachless seascape spaces
   between the blown white shrouds stand out the bright steamers to kingdom
   come

But this past weekend North Beach looked like a theme park, literally overrun by tourists, and kitsch was king.

What happened to it? What makes for a free poetic life? What destroys the poetry of a city?

Automobiles destroy it, and they destroy more than the poetry. All over America, all over Europe in fact, cities and towns are under assault by the automobile, are being literally destroyed by car culture. But cities are gradually learning that they don't have to let it happen to them. Witness our beautiful new Embarcadero! And in San Francisco right now we have another chance to stop Autogeddon from happening here. Just a few blocks from here, the ugly Central Freeway can be brought down for good if you vote for Proposition E on the November ballot. [Proposition E passed with 53 percent of the vote--Ed.]

I could go on until I'm singing to your snores, but I'll mention just one more destroyer: chain stores, or chain gangs. Corporate chain stores wipe out long-established independents, killing off local color, local traditions, and--in the case of bookstores--literary history. I've been to other great cities on poetry tours and found not a single independent bookstore left in neighborhoods where chain gangs have moved in. It's an old story by now, but it's time to revise a lot of old stories! If so much of this City's population doesn't want chain stores, why can't the City government take a united stand against them?

I've proposed that North Beach, with its long literary history including Mark Twain, Jack London, Ina Coolbrith, William Saroyan, and many others, including Beat writers, be officially protected as a "historic district," in the manner of the French Quarter in New Orleans, and thus shielded from commercial destruction such as was suffered by the classic old Montgomery Block building, the most famous literary and artistic structure in the West until it was replaced by the Transamerica Pyramid. I do hope someone will pick up this ball and run with it.