Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes

My country tears of thee.

And balancing on eye beams/ above a sea of faces/ paces his way/ to the other side of day
pg. 30// // A Coney Island of the Mind

It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

Watching the world walk by
in its curious shoes
pg. 61// A Coney Island of the Mind

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail

The poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation - oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.

Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'
One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.
One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.
One fine day.

In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.

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.

Her eyes downcast all the while/ and singing to herself
pg. 18// A Coney Island of the Mind

When I was a boy I was my father.

Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds ... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it ...

Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country

I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.

Cast up
the heart flops over
gasping 'Love'
a foolish fish which tries to draw
its breath from flesh of air
And no one there to hear its death
among the sad bushes
where the world rushes by
in a blather of asphalt and delay

Our government is a bird with two right wings ... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.

I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got to go a long way from here.

If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.

The Cat
The cat licks its paw and lies down in the bookshelf nook. She can lie in a sphinx position without moving for so many hours and then turn her head to me and rise and stretch and turn her back to me and lick her paw again as if no time had passed. It hasn't and she is the sphinx with all the time in the world in the desert of her time the cat knows where flies die wees ghosts in the motes of air and shadows in sunbeams. She hears the music of the spheres and the hum in the wires of houses and the hum of the universe in interstellar spaces but prefers domestic places and the hum of the heater.

This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I'm not so interested in nostalgia. I'm interested in the future.

I have seen the Virgin
in an appletree at Chartres
And Saint Joan burn
at the Bella Union.
I have seen giraffes in junglejims
their necks like love
wound around the iron circumstances
of the world.
I have seen the Venus Aphrodite
armless in her drafty corridor.
I have heard a siren sing
at One Fifth Avenue.
I have seen the White Goddess dancing
in the Rue des Beaux Arts
on the Fourteenth of July
and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy
picking her nose in Chumley's.

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.

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.

Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.

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.

To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.

It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light
'We think differently at night'
she told me once
lying back languidly
And she would quote Cocteau
'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
'whom I am constantly shocking'
Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me
sigh and rise
and stretch
her sweet anatomy
let fall a stocking

Invent a new language anyone can understand.

Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hep
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.

I have a feeling I'm falling on rare occasions but most of the time I have my feet on the ground I can't help it if the ground itself is falling.

As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.

Communism wasn't a word that I thought of when I went to Cuba. The original Fidelistas were not Communists. They were graduate students at the university and law students. After the Fidelistas took over, they went to Washington and tried to get support from the U.S. government, which turned them down. They were in a desperate political and economic situation, so they took the offer from the Soviet Union. Communism was a matter of necessity.

Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.

We'd like to just write nothing but lyric poetry. The trouble is, the individual is going along intent on his own personal gratifications and love affairs and financial affairs and everything else. But loping alongside him is this fascist lout who keeps trying to take over. And if you keep ignoring him, he gets bigger and bigger, so every once in a while the free individual has to turn away from his private pursuits and give this fascist lout a few clouts, and beat him down to size.

Fuck Art, let's Dance!

Telling over to myself/ how beauty never dies/ but lies apart/ among the aborigines/ of art/ and far above the battlefields/ of love
pg. 23// // A Coney Island of the Mind

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.

These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.

I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication.

I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.

Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

And I am waiting/ for Alice in Wonderland/ to retransmit to me/ her total dream of innocence
pg. 52// A Coney Island of the Mind

Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.

I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.

I have seen giraffes in junglejims
their necks like love
wound around the iron circumstances
of the world.

It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.

I am waiting for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe for anarchy

I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale
pg. 65// A Coney Island of the Mind

We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.

I too have drunk and seen
the spider

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.

Truth is not the secret of a few'
yet
you would maybe think so
the way some
librarians
and cultural ambassadors and
especially museum directors
act

you'd think they had a corner
on it
the way they
walk around shaking
their high heads and
looking as if they never
went to the bath
room or anything

But I wouldn't blame them
if I were you
They say the Spiritual is best conceived
in abstract terms
and then too
walking around in museums always makes me
want to
'sit down'
I always feel so
constipated
in those
high altitudes

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Not like Dante
discovering a commedia
upon the slopes of heaven
I would paint a different kind
of Paradiso
in which the people would be naked
as they always are
in scenes like that because it is supposed to be
a painting of their souls but there would be no anxious angels telling them
how heaven is
the perfect picture of
a monarchy and there would be no fires burning
in the hellish holes below in which I might have stepped
nor any altars in the sky except
fountains of imagination

And heard the green birds singing/ from the other side of silence
pg. 36// A Coney Island of the Mind