We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
Lawrence FerlinghettiThe real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.
Lawrence FerlinghettiWestern Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.
Lawrence FerlinghettiIn Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.
Lawrence FerlinghettiTo say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.
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[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
Lawrence FerlinghettiCommunism wasn't a word that I thought of when I went to Cuba. The original Fidelistas were not Communists. They were graduate students at the university and law students. After the Fidelistas took over, they went to Washington and tried to get support from the U.S. government, which turned them down. They were in a desperate political and economic situation, so they took the offer from the Soviet Union. Communism was a matter of necessity.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti