http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/03/138216]
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Especially since Khalil Gibran has been in the news lately, including yesterday or the day before on your program. “Pity the Nation,” after Khalil Gibran.
- 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.
AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Ferlinghetti. So what about the state of the world today and our role in it?
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: It’s rushing over the cliff. I think practically all of Congress is totally ignoring the ecological crisis fast ascending on us. I mean, and so many people have even refused to see Al Gore’s movie -- and I’m looking forward to seeing the new one, The Eleventh Hour -- because people think that, “Oh, the calamities aren’t going to happen in my little corner right now. It might happen fifty years or a hundred years from now. I mean, my house isn’t going to be swept away. Or my house isn’t -- or my life isn’t going to change. I’m always going to be able to drive to work.”
But it could change overnight. The ecosystem is so finely balanced that it could go out of balance overnight and crash like a computer by tomorrow morning. And not a single presidential candidate for the next election seems to have any really potent ecological program to save the world from this ecological disaster.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think poetry is a tool to save the world?
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Well, that’s about -- I think it’s quite possible. But, as I said, poetry has to strive to change the world in such a way that we don’t have to be dissident anymore. Now, can you imagine Democracy Now! not having to be dissident anymore?
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of dissidence, I have to ask you about your visit with Pablo Neruda in Cuba.
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Oh, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: When was that?
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Well, I was there -- I went to the Virgin Islands to trace down my mother’s Sephardic Jewish Portuguese family. The name was Mendes Monsanto, and I found many of her ancestors’ Mendes Monsanto tombstones in St. Thomas.
But on the way back, I stopped in Cuba. It was perfectly legal. I’m talking about 1959, late ’59. And it was the first or second anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, and they had invited Pablo Neruda to come to address a convocation of the Fidelistas in the great assembly hall, legislature, where the dictators, senators, had sat in velvet armchairs. And so, we went into the hall, and there’s 10,000 Fidelistas sitting there. And there was this atmosphere, this fantastic throbbing atmosphere in this hall. It’s what -- it was obviously -- it’s a revolutionary euphoria, the early days of any revolution. And in this one, it was fantastic. The whole place was throbbing with this vitality and, of course -- I mean, the Fidelistas were in there still in their combat boots, sitting in these velvet armchairs with their feet up, smoking cigars. And then when Neruda came on stage, of course, he got an enormous ovation.
And so, I had met him at his hotel before. He was staying on the top floor of the Habana Libre, which had been the Havana Hilton, and he had huge notebooks spread in front of him -- I think his eyesight must have been bad by then -- I mean, big quarto-sized books like that that he was writing in with very big handwriting. And his wife [Matilde], who was French-speaking, she was there. And so, I was there about twenty minutes with him before he had to go to the reading.
But he was well acquainted with the Beat poets evidently. That’s how I happened to be able to meet him, because some of the young Cuban poets were working on the Monday literary supplement of the daily newspaper, Revolucion. Lunes de Revolucion had a lot of young poets working on it, and I met a couple of them in a waterfront dump where I was staying, and they took us -- took me to a restaurant, where -- a cafeteria, where they said Fidel Castro often came to eat. And sure enough, halfway through the meal, this big guy in combat fatigues and a hat came out of the kitchen. And I said, “Isn’t that Fidel?” And they said, “Yes, that’s” -- “Well, how about introducing me?” And they said, “Oh, we couldn’t do that. We don’t know him.” So like unknown poets in front of any celebrity. So I just walked up, and I could have been -- he was completely unarmed and nobody with him. I could have been a hired assassin. It would have been all over. And at that time my Spanish was very limited, and all I could think of to say was “Soy un amigo de Allen Ginsberg,” because he had met Ginsberg --
AMY GOODMAN: “I am a friend of Allen Ginsberg.”
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Yeah. He had met Ginsberg at the Hotel Lenox. So Castro gets a very silly smile on his face and shakes my hand. He had a very limp handshake, which I was surprised. I thought he would have this enormous militaristic shake or something. And that made me realize that he and his original group were students when they started the revolution. They weren’t necessarily communists. They had gone to New York and Washington to get money, financial aid, and they were turned down, and then he was desperate for money, and he turned to the Soviet Union for money.
Bob Scheer wrote his first book, Cuba: An American Tragedy, when Bob Scheer was working as a clerk at City Lights in the 1960s. It was the first pro-Fidel book published, and “an American tragedy” was the tragedy of our stupid foreign policy. And, for instance, when I was in Nicaragua years later, I read in a Spanish newspaper in Nicaragua an interview with Fidel Castro, in which he said, “I am not a follower of Moscow. I am its victim.” This was like 1979, he said this. So that’s where we are today with him, continuing our murderous policies.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as we wrap up this hour, your advice to young people, young poets, to citizens of the world.
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: Do you have to be a poet? If you don’t have to be a poet, be a prose writer. You’ll get further faster. Poetry -- there’s probably more poetry published today than any time in the history of the world. Nevertheless, there is this -- people think they have this blindness when they see a line in the typography of poetry, and it just blocks them. So if you can say the same thing in prose, you’ll probably be better off. For instance, this, my little book, Poetry as Insurgent Art, that’s written in prose, trying to break down the barrier.
AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights Bookstore and City Lights Publishing in San Francisco. His latest book is Poetry as Insurgent Art. If you’d like to see photos and videos of Lawrence Ferlinghetti through the years, you can go to our website. There, you can also get the DVD of today’s broadcast, at democracynow.org.
Labels: LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI, Poetry, Prose, City Lights Publishing, Beat Generation,
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