'He's no revolutionary. Obama is a centrist'
Half a century after the fact, one of the Beat movement's few surviving stalwarts is turning 90 - and still in no mood to join the herd. For example, anyone expecting great things from the rise of Barack Obama 'will be sadly disappointed,' he tells Calvin White
CALVIN WHITE
The Globe and Mail, March 7, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO -- Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were the Beat Generation's most famous figures, but without the supportive and stabilizing intellect of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, it wouldn't have been nearly as influential as a literary movement.
A D-Day veteran (he commanded a vessel that guarded the invasion against submarines) with a PhD from the Sorbonne, he is a painter, a writer of plays, novels and poetry, and a translator of works from French and Italian. In 1998, he became San Francisco's first poet laureate.
As well, he has helped other artists find an audience since 1953, when he co-founded City Lights, the local bookstore and publishing house that vaulted to fame when it put out the poetic (to some, obscene) Ginsberg opus, Howl.
Today, of course, Mr. Ginsberg and Mr. Kerouac are long gone, but the acerbic wit and incisive observations of Mr. Ferlinghetti are alive and well. The upper windows of City Lights are plastered with hand-painted signs that declare: "Bring back the New Deal", "Single payer health care for all" and "U.S. out of Iraq now."
The owner is about to turn 90, but the Beat goes on.
I got a copy of A Coney Island of The Mind at a second-hand bookstore and was startled to see how prescient your poems were. It's remarkable how something 50 years old could be right on the money for today.
Yeah, there's this little poem in there called And The Arabs Ask Horrible Questions [laughs].
You've been through the Vietnam era, D-Day before that, communism falling. You've been through 9/11 and now Iraq. Where does your direction come from, the meaning in your life?
I didn't go through it. I was out here on the sidelines.
But you were involved. You were an activist. Your store today is an activist statement.
Did you see the signs in the windows? They say San Francisco is supposed to be the "Left Coast," but you don't see any political signs in any of the windows. I think ours is the only one. Like, "Indict and jail Bush and Cheney." ... I hope they don't let them get away with it, just say, "Let the past be bygones," that they have more important stuff to do .... let them get away with breaking international law and the U.S. Constitution and a few other things.
More philosophically, what sense of meaning or purpose has directed your life?
I don't know. This is like a graduate seminar. ... That's kind of impossible to answer. I'm trying to find out myself. ... No, seriously I'm more interested in my own creative work than being a social or political leader. Politics is a drag. It's a big bore. I write political poems or paint political paintings only when there's no alternative, when it has to be done. Though I'd rather not.
For one thing, if you write a political poem, you more or less condemn yourself to obscurity in a few years because the issue goes away. People don't even remember what the issue was and they read the poem and it doesn't mean anything to them. Quite often.
Do you think that's happened with your poems?
Yeah. I mean, my poem A Tentative Description of a Dinner To Impeach President Eisenhower, people wouldn't get it today. They say, "Well, he was a good guy - he looks like an angel compared to Bush."
You have a new President. Do you have hopes for him?
You know, just because he is black, everyone thought he was a revolutionary. He's no revolutionary. Obama is a centrist. And as far as any on the left who thought he was a revolutionary, I think the air is going out of his revolutionary balloon daily.
If there were three things you could have him do ...
Well, like some of the signs I have in the window. The direction he's already going wrong on is the total support of Israel and having appointed Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State. This is more of the same. This isn't change.
He said long ago during the campaign, you had to change the set of mind about things like war. Well, with Hillary Clinton, you're getting the old set of mind.
One of the things Obama has done, he's captured the interest of the young.
I'm afraid a lot of the young who think he is a revolutionary will be sadly disappointed. ... I was in France this spring and summer and there were newspapers like our own Life magazine, complete issues devoted to Obama. On the covers they had "Obamamania" and "Revolution Obama."
I was at a literary conference and they had one after another speaker praising Obama, so I had to get up and say, "Well, I'm from the Left Coast and we have a different view of Obama and, if you notice, the word revolution is never used by the Obama campaign, and in fact, no matter how many bad things the government does, the American people do not want to be disturbed in their pursuit of happiness. They're not going to have a revolution."
The young of the Sixties gave it a shot.
Well, the cultural revolution happened. The cultural revolution was ingested into middle-class mores, into the lifestyle of the middle class, but the political revolution never happened. It almost happened in France, came much closer to happening. They almost took over the government in France in 1968.
So, is there hope for the future?
I don't know. It's pretty dim these days. Well, there's some hope with Obama. He's going to be a centrist and he might get some stuff done. Obama should try to rewrite the law on corporations. It really needs to be done. They have too much power over the people.
Also, we need to have elections by popular vote; in other words, abolish the Electoral College. The Electoral College was set up by the founders of the United States to protect the interests of the landowning class. ... If you want true democracy, we need to have elections by popular vote. And it's possible that, if Obama gets two terms, some time in the second term, we might be able to change things like that.
FDR was not at all radical when he first took office. He actually said to people who wanted radical change, "Well, make me do it." I hope that's what happens with Obama, that they'll make him do it. It depends on the youth to do it though. The whole new generation's got to do that.
Where do you think the young are going? Can they be engaged?
Well, that remains to be seen. If the blog generation that was turned on to Obama are going to stick to it and really be activists in his favour, or whether they're just going to retreat into their cubbyholes with their computers ... That's why Obama won, on account of the blog generation.
So many of your comrades, kindred spirits, have passed on and you're still here. What is it like when you watch them leave?
Well, some I miss more than others. Some I don't miss at all. I never had much empathy with William Burroughs. And I could have published Naked Lunch. I had an early version of the manuscript ... before William Burroughs had written anything else, so we had no idea at City Lights that he would develop into a great writer with his other books. But Naked Lunch itself was a junkie vision of existence, junkie consciousness. And generally junkie consciousness was a death consciousness. I didn't want to publish a book with that consciousness.
Buddhism has been directly connected to Ginsberg, but in some of your poems you refer to Buddhist terminology. What is your view of death?
I prefer the Buddhist idea of reincarnation. It's only an idea. It can't be proved. I much prefer that to Christian ideology because as far as Christianity goes, there's lots of fairy tales in the world. There's Grimm's fairy tales, Cinderella and then there's the Bible, among others. If you want to believe in myth, in that fairy tale, okay, but I think the Buddhist concept is much more profound.
Do you think about death much?
Well, no use thinking about it. You can't do anything.
Do you fear it at all?
I don't know. Naturally you fear the unknown. A friend of mine just died in his sleep, which is the way to go.
What are your thoughts on God?
Who? [laughs]
Let me go back to your political poems. I haven't found your poems out of date at all. You're almost 90 and you've been through all these different stages and it's all still appropriate.
Remember the Sixties? There was a popular slogan in the hippie consciousness: Be here now. In fact, it was the name of a book by Baba Ram Dass. And now with the computer and with e-mail and with fax and cellphones and TV, it's "be somewhere else."
You go to a restaurant, see a couple dining and they're both on their cellphones, so they're being somewhere else now - the opposite of the Sixties.
Getting back to hope, you've been through all these eras ...
What, errors? [laughs] Yes, I've been through all these different errors. That reminds me: I was on the stage with Allen Ginsberg in the [1967] Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park and we're sitting there looking out at 10,000 people and the sun is setting and there's a parachutist coming down. ... Timothy Leary is on the stage and Gary Snyder, and Allen turns to me and he whispers, "What if we're all wrong?"
Calvin White is a poet and counsellor in Salmon Arm, B.C.
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