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.
Lawrence FerlinghettiDon'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.
Lawrence FerlinghettiI was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."
Lawrence FerlinghettiI 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.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti