The Last Beatnik

You're forgiven if you thought Lawrence Ferlinghetti was dead. The Beats are already lore from the last century, as parodied as they are praised; and for the last 54 years Ferlinghetti has been based a continent away, in the same little bookstore from which he defended a poem called "Howl" from indecency charges (and which stands today only because the building was granted national landmark status in the midst of San Francisco's dot-com real estate boom).

But Ferlinghetti isn't dead. His life's work-crowned by Coney Island of the Mind (1958), currently the bestselling book in the history of American poetry with over one million slim volumes in various stages of decay-was recently enlarged by the publication of Americus, Vol. I (New Directions, 90 pages, $21.95), from which the poet will read this Friday at Gotham Book Mart.

I spoke to Ferlinghetti last week by phone.

How many volumes do you envision for the Americus series?

It could be three books or more, depending on how long I can keep going. I'm 86. The book is the story of a composite American. There's a small element of autobiography, but mostly I'm describing the American that exists today after three centuries.

There is a lot of New York imagery in the book, as with much of your work.

I was born in Yonkers before moving to France as a child. I moved to New York City in 1925, and went out west to San Francisco in 1951. The NYC I remember best is from the Depression era. Pre?WW II NYC was just so different than anything else. I remember the hard times. Bread lines right on Times Square, practically. The city is hardly recognizable to me now. I don't know a lot of people there anymore, other than my publishers and a few old Ginsberg friends.

You're still a major public figure in SF. Do you think you could have that kind of presence anywhere else?

It couldn't happen in New York, which is so huge, it would just swallow up a little scene like poetry. The St. Mark's Poetry Project is about as good as you can do for poetry in NYC. Second would be the YMWCA series that's been going on for many years.

You call poetry a "little scene," but these MFA programs and their graduates just seem to proliferate.

It's true, there are more published poets now than at any other time in the history of the world. Working in a bookstore, I can see the amount of poetry that goes through the store. It's really something.

How much do you think you and the Beats are responsible for this democratizing of poetry?

We started the whole thing. The idea was to get the words out there; publishing was an afterthought. Now they call it "spoken word." What the hell isn't spoken word? Every now and again a newspaperman will call me and ask me why all of a sudden there is a resurgence of poetry and spoken-word events everywhere, but it never went away. It's just that they weren't looking in this direction for many decades.

Who was the greatest live poetry presence you ever saw?

Allen Ginsberg. He was a genius as a performer. And he realized that with the growth of the rock scene he needed an instrument to back up the voice. I remember I once played between two sets by the Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore with the Russian poet Andre Voznesensky. We didn't stand a chance.

Your writing is still political. Do poets have any power worth wielding? Did they ever?

In Americus, I say: "The poet is the natural born non-violent enemy of the state." I laid this on the audience in a rich enclave near Santa Barbara recently, and there was complete silence. It was like, "We don't want to hear that stuff. Go away." They're too complacent. So is the country as a whole.

One of the main concepts of the Counterculture in the 60s was that you change the consciousness and thereby you change the world. And that's still the case. The greatest poets have done that.

Do you ever get tired of signing copies of Coney Island of the Mind?

No, because it's still in print. Has been continuously since 1958.

Have you heard about the redevelopment plans for the real Coney Island?

Yeah, it's a different world, a different age. My father, you know, met my mother in a French boarding house in Coney Island shortly after he came over from Italy. I think that was 1902.

Last year a documentary about Charles Bukowski came out with footage of an interesting reading you sponsored for him in SF.

He didn't make the literary scene. He went to the racetrack. But we had one big reading for him here in San Francisco in a gymnasium. He ended up throwing beer bottles at the audience, and they were throwing them back at him. Everyone had a great time. We had this old refrigerator set up on stage that he could reach into from where he was sitting. He kept drinking Heinekens and getting more hostile, and so did the audience.

Any chance of that happening this Friday at the Gotham reading?

I'd say it's unlikely.