SOURCE: An interview in Poetry Review, Vol. 82, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 22-27.

[In the following interview, Curtis and Ferlinghetti discuss a wide range of topics, including the poets Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg, and the status of the anti-war movement.]

[Curtis:] Lawrence, you were last in Wales briefly in 1989 when you were on tour promoting your novel Love in the Days of Rage. But you had a connection with Wales many years before that, didn't you? Weren't you close to us during the war?

[Ferlinghetti:] Well, I was in Plymouth harbor the night before the first day of the Normandy invasion, D-Day, and I was in Milford Haven one night, the night before that, I believe. And we were here in Cardiff the week before. I was in a small anti-submarine vessel and so on D-Day itself we left Plymouth at two in the morning, I guess, and what was memorable was coming up to Normandy and the beaches—the ships were steaming from all ports, as you know, and as the first light came up in the English Channel you could see the tops of the masts of ships in at least a hundred and eighty degree arc, all around you, behind you, just the masts of the ships silhouetted against the horizon getting light. And as the light grew, the masts became higher and more visible and came in around you like the whole horizon was this forest of masts advancing and converging on this one point off the Normandy beach-head. It was a sight I'll never forget, it was …

Rather like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane?

Well, yes, and another parallel from Shakespeare was that the night before in all the lanes and alleys, behind all the hedgerows leading down to all the little ports the transport was packed, just lorries and lorries and American trucks and all kind of armored vehicles jammed full of soldiers, jammed full of men sitting. I remember after it got dark you could see these fires where there were encampments, camp fires, and no noise and the fires were hooded and you weren't supposed to show any light. And you had this feeling that the whole landscape was sown with troops waiting in the darkness. And I remember it was like before the battle of Agincourt. You felt that their officers were like the King himself stalking about from campfire to campfire. And it could very well have been. Well, those are the two main memories of that time. Except there were other pleasant memories after we got back to England. We were shipwrecked in the enormous storm that came up in the week after the Normandy invasion and we had to put into Cowes. We were in a shipyard in Cowes and I got to go up to London and enjoy myself in the middle of the war for a couple of weeks. That part was, oh what a lovely war. Even though there were buzz-bombs falling in London.

Do you know the poet Alun Lewis from the Second World War? From the British perspective the two major poets of the War are Keith Douglas, who died in the desert in North Africa, and also this Welshman Alun Lewis who died in Burma. He has a poem called "All Day It Has Rained" which is something along those lines in that it's that awful feeling of being in a bivouac tent of maneuvers and not actually getting to grips with the fighting. That awful lull which is worse than the fighting itself in a way.

I know that there was a lot of raining at that stage. For one thing the invasion was scheduled to start on one day. The troops started to get onto the ships stood out of the various harbors, and then Eisenhower called back the whole operation on account of the threatening weather.

Have you written about all those experiences?

No, I haven't. I mean to get back to it someday. Well it's a thing to do in prose and I … well, I hope to do it.

We were at Laugharne today, which is a place you were looking forward to going to. But while we were there, there was the distant sound of jet planes and cannon fire. It seems that you can't escape from that anywhere.

Well, that's different today from 1944. I don't know whose those planes were buzzing us today. But I have a feeling it's the American Empire—the frontiers of the American Empire. We were in Iraq just recently.

So you were against that war?

Oh, it was insane. There was absolutely no reason for that war. Bush painted himself into this corner so that there was no way out. He wanted war, he ignored all the proposals and overtures for peace that were made. They were barely reported in the American press. And he is also responsible for the million Kurds who were rendered homeless. He is directly responsible in his encouragement of their uprising. As far as I'm concerned he did it. Practically single-handedly. Even General Schwarzkopf is rumored to have been against it, and wanted to do it with sanctions. The sanctions worked in Nicaragua, but no one pointed that out. The economic sanctions worked perfectly well down there.

But, from Britain at least, it seemed the anti-Gulf War protests were short and ineffective.

Well, that's what we got in reports over here. I just came back from Spain and there they had the impression that there had been no anti-war movements in the States, and that the large majority of the population agreed with Bush's war policy. It simply wasn't so. In San Francisco alone, and in Washington, D.C. and in New York City and in Chicago there were enormous anti-war demonstrations. In San Francisco there were demonstrations of 200,000 people. Two or three of them in the course of a week. Hardly reported at all in the press. Some in the local newspapers but not on the national television. And what you have is the mainstream media completely controlled by the government. Not the way it's done in a totalitarian country, where you have absolute repressive restrictions between law and force, but by a hand-in-glove co-operation between the government and the large corporations who own national TV networks. For instance, General Electric owns national armaments plants, including nuclear armaments plants in Pennsylvania. These huge corporations own many other types of businesses apart from television, so there is a clear conflict of interest. So you're not going to have national television news reported objectively when you have an arms manufacturer who is selling arms to the Middle East owning the stations. When you have that close co-operation between corporations and governments-in Mussolini's Italy that was known as Fascism. We have a brand of corporate Fascism going on now. I'm just giving the line, the theories of Noam Chomsky, especially his book "Manufacturing Consent." The only way for this to be stopped is for laws to be passed saying that broadcasting companies cannot own types of businesses. But they'll never pass laws like that, because in the USA both parties are agents of corporate capitalism.

In your opinion does this also apply to American publishing?

Oh, no. But the trouble is that the television audience is, say, twenty times the number of people reading a daily newspaper.

So, if the newspapers aren't having a big effect, what effect can poetry have?

The poets remain as the only people who have the possibility of remaining not compromised. The poets are the only ones free to speak the truth, in a way. And yet so many of them give away that birthright by taking grants from the National Endowment. Or whatever they call it over here.

The Arts Council. You don't agree with that?

Well, it depends on whether you have a benevolent government which doesn't commit crimes against humanity. You see, in the United States you have a government which may be beneficent in giving out grants to artists and writers, but with its other hand it's killing millions of people in illegal wars overseas.

But it's difficult to find a government that didn't.

Well, that's the anarchist position.

But if you take the Guggenheim, the National Endowment or whatever, you are then able to bite the hand that's fed you. That's justified, isn't it?

I'm going from the point of view of Albert Camus who said that you're guilty of complicity if you go along with the system that operates like this. So many supposedly dissident writers and artists in the United States take the government money.

W.H. Auden said that poetry made nothing happen. When the Beats in the '50s and through the 1960s had those enormous performance audiences, wasn't there a sense there that poetry could make something happen?

Well, it did make a lot happen. For instance, when the Congressional Un-American Activities Committee came to San Francisco they had such a hard time they never came back. It was about the last appearance of that committee in the late 1950s or early 1960s in San Francisco. But remember that Plato banned the poets from his Republic as being too dangerous. The poet is, by definition, someone who is challenging the status quo, challenging the common accepted view of reality. That's the real function of the artist. By this definition the poet is an enemy of the state, and has to be if he's worth his salt.

We've been on a pilgrimage to Laugharne today and Dylan Thomas is about the most apolitical poet you could think of. He writes about childhood; he writes about rural Wales; he writes often in a Biblical language about things.

His poetry will last longer than the political poets. I mean as soon as we write a political poem we condemn ourselves to a short life. For instance, I wrote a tirade, a book about Nixon called Tyrannus Nix, and who wants to read that now? Who wants to read about the werewolf himself today? I mean that werewolf face of Nixon was enough to scare anyone. But no one wants to hear about that today—"Go away, don't give me that stuff." But Thomas is above all that stuff; he could get away with being above all that, you might say. A minor poet who ignored the world situation would be nowhere; there wouldn't be any reason to listen to him poetically. But it happened that Thomas was a genius with language and I don't understand what seems to be the current attitude to Dylan Thomas in both the United States and Britain, and Wales even. People put him down for having been too Romantic, too plush, too posh, too fulsome. And I don't understand that at all. This is one of the great voices of the century; poetically, probably the greatest to write in English.

And you heard him in '53 at the end?

Yes, I heard him twice in San Francisco, both times he was quite lushed up. His voice was very plush and very posh and his second reading was mostly devoted to poems about death by other British poets—everyone from Beddoes to Clough. And he was obsessed with death—I think he knew he was going to die. Couldn't stop drinking. And that was his last reading in the States. But I heard all the great poems in the first reading-"Fern Hill" and "On his Thirtieth Birthday." I was just young then—well, I was young as a poet. About thirty. I reviewed his readings for the San Francisco art magazine at the time. And I reviewed it for the San Francisco Chronicle—and I said, "There is nothing like Dylan Thomas in poetry today." I still stand by that. So I don't understand why people are not imitating him still. But for one thing they can't imitate him because they don't have his talent. It was more than talent, it was genius. It was something you can't teach or learn yourself if you haven't got it, I feel. It's an intangible something that comes over the poet when he's writing, it just poured out in his case. From the stories I've heard about Thomas being a bad boy personally, it reminds me very much of the American poet Gregory Corso, who is also a bad boy, and doesn't treat his friends so well sometimes, or his women. But Corso too is an original American genius, he's an American primitive. He's never derivative of anybody. He's always completely original. I don't know whether he ever read in Wales, but he was in the famous Albert Hall reading in 1967 with Allen Ginsberg and myself and other British poets including Adrian Mitchell and Michael Horovitz.

But the great art can't, in the immediate sense anyway, excuse the bad behavior, can it? When people are hurt? Are they casualties of literature, the bystanders?

Well, the bad boys pay for it. I mean it's the classic Romantic profile of the poète maudit who dies early. Dylan, like so many others of the genre, dying at 39.

Did America kill him?

Well, that's what Kenneth Rexroth said in a great poem called "Thou shalt not kill: an elegy on the death of Dylan Thomas." He condemns the consumer society in general, and in particular the man in the Brook Brothers suit, or the ugly American, for having killed Thomas. Of course, he drank himself to death, so he killed himself really. There's nothing like Rexroth's poem for a really vituperative castigation of American culture in particular which is now sweeping the world. It should be much better known.

Perhaps Dylan's reputation has taken a down-turn because we find the rhetoric too embarrassing. We want to be more streetwise. It's the Biblical echoes, the Shakespearean echoes, the big language, which, perhaps, we can't handle. Perhaps we are, both of our countries, a small screen nation now.

He's too rhetorical for the postmodern period. He's like the last of the classical poets.

In the '30s when he first appeared they tried to pigeonhole him, as critics do, as a surrealist for a while. It hardly fits. Perhaps that was their way of saying, "We don't know what the hell he's doing."

No, I think he was much greater than them. You have to be quite specific in saying the French Surrealists. There were American and British followers—at City Lights we republished David Gascoyne's book on Surrealism. But the surrealists I never thought were great poets per se. I never thought Andre Breton himself was a great poet. But Apollinaire and Cendrars were the greatest of twentieth-century French poets as far as I was concerned.

Coming out of a Dylan Thomas reading you were obviously affected by the sense of occasion as well as the quality of the language. Did that make you want to be up there and perform your writing?

Oh, definitely. Dylan Thomas had a very definite effect on the San Francisco Renaissance which began in the early 1950s when the Beat poets arrived from New York—I'm talking about Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and others that my little publishing house ended up publishing. When they arrived in San Francisco they were all kind of New York carpet-baggers, including myself, and they were very much turned on to what's called "performance poetry" today. Up till that period poetry had been dead on the printed page. It was a very dead poetry scene with old poetry magazines like Poetry (Chicago) publishing these precious little anthologies—poetry about language, poetry about poetry—like it is today. It was really a dead period or a gestative period; so in the 1950s, after the war, the population flowed towards the West as though the continent had tilted, there was a deracination, an uprooting of everyone by the Second World War. Half the guys who went off to the war never stayed back home anymore. How you gonna keep the boys on the farm after they've seen Paris? But it took up until the 1950's for this fantastic deracination to coalesce into the new configuration of literary elements. Naturally, it happened in San Francisco, which is sort of the last frontier. And the idea of most of the Beat poets was oral messages, poems that had to make it aloud first; the printed page came later, that would be incidental. It had to make it without explanation. I've always felt that the poem that had to be explained was a failure, to the extent it had to be explained. We were used to hearing the poets in the universities before that giving a five or ten minute explanation for a two minute poem. There's plenty of that right now. Our idea was to kick the sides out of all of that. If you heard Allen Ginsberg read "Howl" you'd slap yourself on the head and say, "I never saw the world like that before." That's what a great poet has to do, but how often does it happen—same with Dylan Thomas—you'd say, "I never saw reality or heard reality like that before," like it's a great new vision. So the oral bardic tradition which Thomas carried forward when he read was fantastic for many of the local San Francisco poets there.

So who was there? Can you name names?

Well, all kinds of poets were in San Francisco at the time—I'm not sure who went to the Dylan Thomas readings. And then the Caedmon recordings of Thomas were wonderful, a miracle that they survived.

But I would have thought that the major influence on a lot of American poets of the 1950s was Whitman. Though, of course, not for the oral presentation of readings.

Well, Allen Ginsberg claimed Walt Whitman for his homosexual side, but generally for his universal side. Allen had the same compassion that Whitman had.

It's the principle of "Song of Myself"—morally you start here, you sort yourself out and then move outwards.

No, with Allen it wasn't really the song of yourself—as a Buddhist you have to suppress yourself; you can't really go around singing songs of yourself. But you can say that he sang a song of humanity. And he sang William Blake. When Allen sang "The Songs of Innocence and Experience" it was really beautiful to hear. These are songs of humanity. I think Allen Ginsberg is still the greatest living American poet. No doubt about it—a great world view. He paid homage to Dylan Thomas; he came to Wales and he wrote a long poem of his own at Fern Hill—he happened to write it on LSD but it's a wonderful long poem in homage to Dylan Thomas. One master recognizes another. And all the minor poets don't recognize this—can't hear the eternal voice in there. You know, Allen read that on the William Buckley show on TV and Allen is such a powerful reader that Buckley could not interrupt him.

I think the problem in Wales is that Thomas is the only writer of ours who has had world recognition and, in a sense, he doesn't recognize Wales. You come away with a very limited sense of what this country really is.

You mean James Joyce wasn't Welsh? (laughs). "Well you know it, and don't you ken it, and that's the he and the she of it."

Well, perhaps we are being too chauvinistic. We ought to be grateful for Dylan Thomas. He is a world poet—he starts with a small canvas and it becomes enormous and important.

Of course, he wasn't political in any way. Some people claimed that he was religious. I don't see that at all. I think he was basically a pagan poet.

But you can certainly hear the preacher when he's performing and you can locate the Bible, "the ear of the synagogue of corn" and so on.

But that was just because he grew up with those images in his head from being around church services and Welsh preachers.

Is Allen Ginsberg a religious poet?

Allen is Jewish for one thing and yet his poetry is not Jewish. Even though he wrote a long book-length poem to his mother, Kaddish. Allen has never been classed as being a religious poet, his poetry is not predominantly characterized as being Jewish, it seems to me.

But that's what I mean. There's the sense that the term "religious" is used with regard to a poet such as Dylan Thomas because he celebrates life.

Ginsberg was closer to being a religious poet for his Buddhism. I don't know about Allen Ginsberg celebrating life: I think sometimes Allen celebrates death. His poetry since the death of his mother, since the big book Kaddish, has increasingly celebrated death. He has a song he sings called "Father Death," he does it with his Indian music-box, like an accordion. It's like a Blake song, "Father death be kind to me." And he has many poems that are really obsessed with death. He's been celebrating death for a long time now.

One of the things that I respond to strongly in Dylan Thomas is the refusal to mourn or accept, you know, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Is there something about clenching the fist in a cold northern European way about that? Like some crude Viking warrior, some macho hero saying. "Fuck you Death—I'm not going to take it."

He's not accepting it at all. He's not celebrating it and he's not using some religious escape. He's not saying, "And death shall have no dominion because Christ the Lord is going to save me." You never hear that from Dylan Thomas.

No, but there's some sense of a resurrection, but perhaps only as the flowers come up. Perhaps it's that kind of idea.

I don't think you get any feeling of resurrection in Dylan Thomas' poems. I haven't.

I was telling you that Vernon Watkins taught me for a while in Swansea University and Vernon, as a Christian, wanted to argue that Dylan was a Christian. I find that hard to accept, though I find that he is religious in the broader sense. But you could say that about almost any poet, couldn't you? Your own poem, "Christ climbed down / from his bare tree this year / and ran away to…."

Well, that's a satire on what modern society has done to the conception of Christ, but I also have a satire on the Lord's Prayer.

And there's that hip crucifixion in A Coney Island of the Mind isn't there?

Yes, I stole that from Lord Buckley, who was a hip white man. The first white man I ever heard talk black hip talk. He was a man who called his wife "Lady Buckley" and he called you "His Highness" and he was a kind of circus performer, charlatan in the way he dressed with robes and he swept them around him. His everyday dress was a robe or perhaps a crown or a turban. At City Lights we published a book of his jazz monologues. It was called The Hiporama of the Classics. He did hip versions of "Friends, Romans, countrymen," and things like the Declaration of Independence in jive-talk. And he did one called "The Naz" which was about Jesus Christ and I ripped it off for my poem on Christ.

That poem is still used in school assemblies, I can testify to that. I must confess that I pinched "Christ came down" earlier this year because my writing students were very concerned about the Gulf War and I showed them your poem and suggested that they could use your first five lines as a starting point for a structure into which they could fit specific Gulf War images. It seemed to work very well, as a kind of hook. It has a strong choric force. Is that satisfying for you? I mean, this is a poem that dates from A Coney Island of the Mind in 1958.

Oh yes, that book is still in print—about a million copies sold. They have a public surface that anyone can understand. And then they are supposed to make it aloud, without explanations. Of course, poetry has to have several other levels—a subversive level and a subjective level—otherwise it's just journalism.

Oddly, it seems to me that the quality of Dylan Thomas is that, although he sounds like a preacher, he's got this BBC veneer over his natural, though middle-class, Welsh accent. Although he sounds like a voice of authority he is, of course, radical in what he is saying. Some of the images are quite startling in the way in which they deconstruct conventional religion and conventional belief.

I can see how people would start to use the word "surrealist" in talking about him because "surrealist" has been misused as meaning any kind of disparate conjunction of imagery. I mean "Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle-tree" in the Four Quartets—is that surrealist? I always thought that was Eliot's best poetry, not The Waste Land.

The great American poet who didn't want to be American.

Oh yes, when City Lights published Allen Ginsberg's Howl I wrote the jacket blurb and the first thing I said was that this was the greatest long poem to be published since Eliot's Four Quartets in 1943. There was a now famous reading in San Francisco in what was called the Six Gallery; it was a gallery in a garage, with maybe a hundred people at the most, half of whom were poets maybe. And Ginsberg read Howl for the first time there and I sent him a telegram that night using the words that Emerson used in writing to Whitman when he first received a copy of Leaves of Grass. He wrote to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." And that's what I sent to Allen. I added, "PS—when do we get the manuscript?"

That sold hundreds of thousands of copies didn't it?

Yes, courtesy of the San Francisco Police Department and the US Customs which busted the book. And my partner and myself were put on trial and we were defended by the American Civil Rights Union—thank God for them otherwise we'd have gone out of business. And we had a criminal lawyer called Jake Ehrlich who latched onto the case when he thought he was going to get his picture in Life Magazine, which he did. It's hard to get that kind of publicity, especially these days. I mean, if you took your clothes off at a poetry reading today, do you think anyone would notice?

So Howl sells because it's supposed to be outrageous, Dylan Thomas attracts attention because he's supposed to be a drunk and a womanizer—is that what you have to do to get poetry noticed, for goodness sake? It's depressing.

Well, given the universal brainwash by television these days, I don't think we could do very much about that. You just have to realize that television is just this electronic gadget that has somehow managed to capture the consciousness of two-thirds of the people on earth. You don't have to be slaves to this thing. Poetry—with all the media that you have these days—the single unaccompanied voice doesn't have much of a chance. If I were a young, twenty or twenty-five year old poet I would go into film and video. In fact, I think that's where all the young poets are going in the States. The ones who would have become poets are all doing video. They're video-poets.

So is poetry weak at the moment in the States?

It's very academic. There's a lot of language about language, poetry about poetry. But some new young turk will come along and make a great new barbaric yawp.

But what about some of the old turks doing that, Lawrence? What about that? You obviously felt strongly about the Gulf War—did you write about that?

Well, no. It seems like older poets are baffled into silence (laughs). It seems like it's impossible to utter some great, all-encompassing statement these days. But even as I say that I realise that one of these days some turk is going to come along and give out a new, barbaric yawp (that was Whitman's term) and knock the sides out of everything again. And everyone will stand around saying, "Gee, why didn't I think of that—it was so obvious—it was just waiting to be said."