Ferlinghetti at 91: "The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology" (2008)

"Don't use the telephone.
People are never ready to answer it.
Use poetry."
(Jack Kerouac to Edward Dahlberg)

The current release of the film Howl brings focus to the battles faced by small publishers in an earlier and conservative age, as well as being a timely reminder of continued threats to freedom of speech in our present one. The struggle for the Constitutionally-guaranteed right to free expression is never over.

The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology (City Lights Books, 2008; originally published in 1997) is a neat little square brick of a book that reminds readers how words can (and did) spark a revolution, not just in poetry but in the culture as a whole. Jonathan Williams, the North Carolina publisher of the Jargon Society, said he turned down the original manuscript of "Howl" -- it would have sold 500 copies at his tiny press, he said, and that would have been the end of it. Literary history, it seems, had other plans.

Poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned 91 this year, and his City Lights Press continues to thrive. His little books were portable enough to be taken everywhere, freewheeling enough to include poets from William Carlos Williams to Andrei Voznesensky ("like a huge bottle of kerosene" -- words as Molotov cocktails), and, eventually, threatening enough to bring a challenge to American obscenity laws. In the bare-knuckle brawl of the commercialized internet, the idea of poetry as a force this powerful seems like a miracle.

It was. And although the movement soon acquired a name, the resulting beat generation wasn't as unified as either its detractors or supporters claimed. There certainly were urban scenes that attracted the disaffected and the romantic, the seekers of soul, and left-leaning artists who congregated in like-misery. Yet it's striking to see the variety of expression represented here, from the apparently spontaneous combustion of Ginsberg's "Howl," to Robert Duncan ("Sleep is a Deep and Many Voiced Flood"), to Malcolm Lowry's near-painterly Joseph Conrad and "his coiled work:" Lowry's meditation on Conrad is far from the template of beat poetry or its hallmarks, but it's filled with the movement's twisting tension and energy, if not its imagery:

Yet some mariner's ferment in his blood

-- Though truant heat will hear the iron trevail

And song of ships that ride their easting down --

Sustains him to subdue or be subdued.

In sleep all night he grapples with a sail!

But words beyond the life of ships dream on.

From the beginning, Ferlinghetti writes in the introduction, his aim was "to publish across the board ... and not just publishing (that pitfall of the little press) just 'our gang.'" In a short span City Lights published Ponsot, Levertov, Corso, Ginsberg, Duncan. Beat's most enduring, emotional and romantic notion was that the personal was poetic, meeting injustice with righteous anger, confronting conformity with the individual vision. ("I have just realized that the stakes are myself / I have no other / ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life," from Diane DiPrima's "Revolutionary Letter No. 1.") All of these ideas, today, are so familiar as to seem obvious, if not second-hand. But the best poems here share an immediacy and sharpness of observation that remains in the mind's eye, like Ferlinghetti's

the El

with its flyhung fans

and its signs reading

SPITTING IS FORBIDDEN

Critics and readers have argued that the failure of beat poetry has been one of scale -- the personal somehow erasing the universal -- as if readers are waiting for a return of some idea of "the proper uses" of poetry. Yet there isn't a universal idea left untouched in the City Lights anthology. War and love and death and daily life have never been more topical, or dealt with more directly.

Near the end of an extremely important discourse

the great man of state stumbling

on a beautiful hollow phrase

falls over it

and undone with gaping mouth

gasping

shows his teeth

and the dental decay of his peaceful reasoning

exposes the nerve of war

the delicate question of money

(Jacques Prevert, "The Discourse on Peace," translated by Ferlinghetti)

More to the critics' point, beat poetry was an immediate reaction to the post-war politics of fear and annihilation; Kerouac's often-quoted observation, "first thought, best thought," was an acknowledgement that there may be no time left for second thoughts before the human slate gets wiped clean.

Consider the cold-war politics of the Cuban missile crisis against the Swiftian suggestion of Kerouac's "Poem" (1962): "I demand that the human race / cease multiplying its kind / and bow out / I advise it / And as punishment & reward / for making this plea I know / I'll be reborn / the last human / Everybody else dead and I'm / an old woman roaming the earth / groaning in caves / sleeping on mats ...."

Ferlinghetti at 90th birthday celebration, March 2009
(photo by Christina Koci Hernandez)

Ferlinghetti's selection is chronological, so that the poems can be read in their City Lights context; Corso and Kaufman, Patchen and Rexroth, plus a variety of poems by Yevtushenko and Garcia Lorca and Mayakovsky, frame a great deal of work by Ginsberg and Kerouac, of course. Any omissions are due to Ferlinghetti's own "ignorance, inattention, ill-timing, or bad luck," he slyly writes in the introduction -- fans will note this essential poem gone missing, or that one -- but there are surprises enough, though it's assumed that the anthology is meant for the general reader. And, wonder of wonders in this oversized and overstuffed age, it's a collection still compact enough to carry around with you.

Sixty years of The 'Paris Review' interviews (all of them) available online

That Kentucky man-of-rare-letters Ed McClanahan once remarked of his own method of writing that sometimes he followed his nose, sometimes his muse, and sometimes his muse's nose. One of the continuing pleasures of the internet's endless hall-of-mirrors is that occasionally one is able to reflectively follow all three at the same time. The Paris Review interviews -- nearly sixty years' worth -- are now all available online, and they are a pleasure to have available at last all in a single place to discover, or discover again.

Those who have wandered bookshops and old magazine stacks and stumbled on stray volumes of The Paris Review Interviews in their multi-part book form are now free to spend leisurely hours discovering that their literary heroes (and sometimes, villains) are just as they imagined -- or not as the reader imagined them at all.

As expected, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Nabokov, and Faulkner cast long shadows, while Auden, Cheever, Anthony Burgess, and Kingsley Amis best one another's observations sounding as if they had cocktails in hand. (“After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: ‘I just ferment my food now'": that's Terry Southern's witty 1958 talk with Henry Green.) In a unexpected wistful moment, tough-guy Hemingway lets his guard down: “. . . the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

A previously unpublished Ray Bradbury interview from the 1970s: "A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a high flame." Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut, and Woody Allen all make appearances. And here's Guy Davenport on his education, sounding a common note of many writers everywhere trying to find their voice: “I learned early on that what I wanted to know wasn’t what I was being taught.”

Aldous Huxley, Reynolds Price, V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Heller, John Steinbeck, Seamus Heaney: for any reader, spending an hour with a great author is easy; far more difficult is stopping at a sane and necessary point amid the sheer volume of interviews. One unexpected idea sparks another and sends a reader scurrying from Shelby Foote's ruminations on dip-pens to Sam Shepard's views on the terrible price of story endings: “I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.” Much the same can be said of Ted Berrigan's and Aram Saroyan's complete 1968 interview with an increasingly drunken Jack Kerouac, as the talk literally careens around served drinks and proffered drugs:

INTERVIEWER What do you think about the hippies and the LSD scene?

KEROUAC They're already changing, I shouldn't be able to make a judgment. And they're not all of the same mind. The Diggers are different . . . I don't know one hippie anyhow . . . I think they think I'm a truck-driver. And I am. As for LSD, it's bad for people with incidence of heart disease in the family [knocks microphone off footstool . . . recovers it]. Is there any reason why you can see anything good in this here mortality?

INTERVIEWER Excuse me, would you mind repeating that?

KEROUAC You said you had a little white beard in your belly. Why is there a little white beard in your mortality belly?

INTERVIEWER Let me think about it. Actually it's a little white pill.

KEROUAC A little white pill?

INTERVIEWER It's good.

KEROUAC Give me.

INTERVIEWER We should wait till the scene cools a little.

KEROUAC Right. This little white pill is a little white beard in your mortality which advises you and advertises to you that you will be growing long fingernails in the graves of Peru.

With an online collection as broad as The Paris Review interviews there are many surprises, and readers will bring their own judgements as to what can be glanced at or read in depth after a few interviewer's questions. I might have to read more of the stories of T.C. Boyle after reading his 2000 comments, and there are scores of writers whose work I'm just as eager to discover for the first time.

Other than some well-known names, the recent group of 2010 interviews is less interesting, but that's more than likely due to my own lack of reading than any fault of the writers being interviewed. Still, it may give the reader pause to consider that in the craft of writing, even Stephen King can have his moments of doubt no matter how unexpected:

"Every book is different each time you revise it. Because when you finish the book, you say to yourself, This isn’t what I meant to write at all. At some point, when you’re actually writing the book, you realize that. But if you try to steer it, you’re like a pitcher trying to steer a fastball, and you screw everything up. As the science-fiction writer Alfred Bester used to say, The book is the boss. You’ve got to let the book go where it wants to go, and you just follow along. If it doesn’t do that, it’s a bad book. And I’ve had bad books."

Barry Hannah: "Language and memory are what it's all about"

"This Sunday morning Man Mortimer and Max Raymond sat in the pews of the same church, a little white steepled one in a glen set among live oaks and three acres of clover. The jungle swamps encroached on and squared the glen, deep green to black. Loud birds and alligators groaning in their mating season roamed in songs from bayou to bayou. Some fish walked on land in this season."

(from Yonder Stands Your Orphan)

Barry Hannah's novels are a traveling circus, full of wonders and (luckily for readers) writing that is just as entertaining. He wanders a Southern route this side of Gothic, but that faded and overworked territory -- land of the Jim Beam dysfunctional, the bloody macabre, or the just plain good-ol'boy weird -- really doesn't contain him.

His first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), was a funny coming-of-age tale nominated for the National Book Award. He achieved some fame with his book of stories, High Lonesome (1996); his last, Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Grove Press, 2001), a lyrical tale of murder and mayhem, evoked comparisons to "Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Peter Dexter and Clyde Edgerton all squished together." That's some company, and each with their own potent mix of summer honeysuckle and rye whiskey.

Hannah has gone on ahead to scout new and even more mysterious locations (the Oxford, Mississippi writer died unexpectedly March 1, at the age of 67). He should enjoy discussing the dissipation of family and kin with Mr. Faulkner himself after having won the Faulkner Prize for Geronimo Rex. Here he talks to Fiona Maazel in an excerpt from a 2001 interview published in BOMB magazine, and in it he describes the idea of the novel's small town characters -- a group that gathers on a pier to trade boasts and outright lies, that is aging rapidly but not yet wisely, and familiar to themselves in their habits.

Barry Hannah: I wanted to get a grouping. It’s kind of an Our Town. Only darker. And more conscious of real evil. These folks appeared in my stories. I already had a cast, except for Man Mortimer and a few others.

Fiona Maazel: Right, the pier crowd. Why do you keep returning to them, to these old cranks who figure in so many of your other stories?

BH: Obviously, I’m obsessed with the people on the pier. People desperate and older and almost frantic to have a moment of clarity and some peace. I just found it to be a comfortable theater to work in. I also wanted to see how they would react to modern, true evil.

FM: They are all old, but they seem to lack the one thing the old are supposed to have, namely wisdom.

BH: They are the uneasy old.

FM: You do have a lot of stuff in the novel about how people need to seek out evil and hurt and pain to feel vivified, to feel alive, uneasy or not.

BH: That’s right. Max Raymond certainly does. He even says so. It does seem strange that one would make that conscious choice. I actually believe that’s why people live in big cities. They kind of like the idea of the Mafia around.

FM: Funny, I actually think evil is more likely to find me out where you live in Mississippi—that if I were a homicidal maniac, I’d do my worst in the country. But I think that’s a city phobia.

BH: Nothing bad has ever happened to me in Manhattan. But nothing like what’s happened in my book has ever happened to me in Mississippi, either.

FM: At least one of the organizing principles of the book seems to be the lake where all these old zombies congregate. I know that lakes and water in general show up a lot in your work.

BH: You’ve got it. Water is contemplative. It’s a magnet. Except for Dr. Harvard, none of these characters are well-off vacationers. It’s not a high-scale lake, you know. It’s a fishing lake. It’s more rural, more isolated. It’s more possible for evil such as Man Mortimer to exist there. And nobody seems able to strike against it. There’s no organization. The sheriff himself is unqualified and inept. It’s a kind of backwater place where the civilized codes don’t work. ...

FM: On some level, though, isn’t there fear that you will end up laughing at your characters instead of with them?

BH: You do both. You laugh with them and at them over the course of a novel, certainly. But it seems like I just cannot write in a straight, stern manner for very long before I find that these are human beings, and that the things you read in the paper will always surpass everything you put down. That’s why I don’t feel like I’m a master of the grotesque. I think I’m exploring through human comedy. ...

Hannah's dark humor comes from simply not looking away: "Those that don't avert their eyes are the real artists," he told an interviewer in 1997. "A man will reveal himself quickly, as if a witness at a trial. ... They say that the most natural writer born in America was Mark Twain. He just seems to have begun talking. I think that’s what I’m after."