It's hard to have a revolution when the counterculture of the past has become the mainstream. As William S. Burroughs put it in his poem, "Remembering Jack Kerouac," "Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and/sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes./Woodstock rises from his pages."
No one understands the ironies of this truth better than poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Back in the days when paperbacks could only be found at dime stores on spiral racks, Ferlinghetti's San Francisco bookshop, City Lights, became the intellectual watering hole for beatniks like Kerouac and Burroughs. The store was open late, encouraged browsing, and delivered good books at a cheap cost.
Now this formula sounds suspiciously like a precursor to what has made chain stores so successful. "They're copying us!" the tall, eternally hip poet joked recently. Still, at 86, Ferlinghetti won't lose any sleep waiting for some credit. He's too busy publishing his own poetry, as he told me on the eve of accepting a lifetime-achievement award from the National Book Awards.
Ever since City Lights published Allen Ginsberg's Howl, landing you in an obscenity trial, you have been associated with the Beats. Does the shadow grow too large?
Well, it put us on the map, courtesy of the San Francisco police department. It's hard to get that kind of publicity. But I predate the Beats. When I arrived in San Francisco, I was still wearing my French beret. The beats hadn't arrived yet. I was seven years older than Ginsberg, and Kerouac, all of them except Burroughs. And I became associated with the Beats by later publishing them.
And you appear in several of Kerouac's novels—in Big Sur especially.
That novel was sad. He lost all his gusto. If you compare the limp prose in that to some of his early short stories, like "October in the Railroad Earth," it's just busting with energy and joie de vivre. By the time he wrote Big Sur in the '60s, he was an alcoholic, and he came to my cabin to dry out. Of course, he didn't dry out because Neal Cassidy kept dropping in. He got wetter.
Your best-known work, Coney Island of the Mind, sold 1 million copies in your lifetime. Are you ever surprised by its reach?
Yeah, if I give a poetry reading at a university these days, some middle-age woman will come and say, "I was 14 and I read your book Coney Island of the Mind when I was in junior high school in Des Moines, or whatever, it changed my life." And I always say, "Oh, oh. Was it a good change or was it bad?"
You have a new volume out called Americus, which is written in such a different voice. Why has your style changed so much over the years?
My style has changed a lot. I've tried, but I can't write poems like I wrote in Coney Island of the Mind. It's just not there anymore. I wrote [those poems] in a few months—at least the 29 of them in the part that's really Coney Island. They just came out of nowhere. It's like a mysterious hand wrote them. That hand doesn't exist anymore.
In recent years, City Lights has moved away from poetry somewhat and is publishing more fiction and nonfiction—often in translation. Is there a reason why?
It seems to me and my co-editor Nancy Peters the most interesting writing today is coming from either women authors or from Third World authors. It'd be great to publish a new revolutionary American poet, but actually you can't publish a revolution when there isn't any happening.
But your poems seem to have become more political recently.
I keep trying not to write political poems, they're a drag. Politics is a drag. I mean, I'd much rather be writing love poems all the time. But under the Bush administration, the rich are getting rich and the poor are getting poorer. That's the shape of things these days, even in New York. Even taxi drivers say it.