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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I would like to propose a regular monthly column in a daily newspaper with the title "Poetry As News." [Lawrence now writes "Poetry as News" in the Book Review section of the San Francisco Chronicle--Ed.] It would begin with great poems of the past that still are news. I think right off of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach":

   Ah love let us be true to one another! For we are here as on a darkling
   plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant
   armies clash by night....

I think also of course of Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," of poems by Homer, Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, Cavafy, Pablo Neruda, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich. I think of Bob Dylan's early songs and of the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," of"The Great Paramita Sutra," and perhaps of the latest rap poetry at the Nuyorican Cafe on the Lower East Side. And I think of the French poet Jacques Prevert whom I translated when I was a student in France:

   The Discourse on Peace

   Near the end of an extremely important discourse the great man of state
   tumbling on a beautiful hollow phrase falls over it and undone with gaping
   mouth shows his teeth and the dental decay of his peaceful reasoning
   exposes the nerve of war the delicate question of money

Poetic intuition and the intuitions of great poetry still remain our best medium for fathoming man's fate.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was named the first poet laureate of San Francisco by Mayor Willie Brown in August 1998. His inaugural speech, printed here in slightly edited form, was delivered to an enthusiastic, full house at the San Francisco Main Library in October [for the full text, see the City Lights Web site, www.citylights.com]. In her introduction, city librarian Regina Minudri told a marvelous story about being a "baby librarian" in the fifties, trying to get her library to purchase a banned Henry Miller book. After her request was turned down, she went to City Lights, determined to buy it with her own money to place it in the library. She told Ferlinghetti why she was buying ti; it was an expensive book at that time. Lawrence said that if she would truly put it into the library's collection, he would give it to her, and then did. That says it all.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti today is the author of fourteen books of poems, as well as fiction, translations, plays, and essays. He is also a committed painter, a renowned publisher, and co-proprietor of the irreplaceable City Lights Bookstore, which he co-founded in 1953. His latest book, A Far Rockaway of the Heart, just out in paper, is a kind of sequel to his A Coney Island of the Mind. That book, first published in the fifties, has been called the best-selling poetry book of all time, pushing the million mark. Along with Michael McClure, David Meltzer, and Gary Snyder, he guest-edited CoEvolution Quarterly No. 19, "Journal for the Protection of All Beings." Lawrence Ferlinghetti has created a place to be a poet on this west edge of America, writing in a voice that has particularly inspired the young, setting the stage for generations yet to come.