KJ Selections

Lawrence Ferlinghetti & 50 years of City Lights

Fifty years ago -- in the same year that Eisenhower was elected President – Lawrence Ferlinghetti, visionary, poet, and painter, co-founded City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco's North Beach. A legendary meeting place, it became a literary beacon and an important gateway for the transmission of Japanese / Asian culture into popular Western consciousness. Soon venturing into publishing, City Lights printed Allen Ginsberg's epic Howl -- and successfully defended it in a widely-publicized obscenity trial. A later publication, Alan Watts' BEAT ZEN, SQUARE ZEN, AND ZEN counterpointed the new Eastern-influenced Beat writers and more traditional Zen sources.

Markedly different from the sojourns of other Beats in Japan, Ferlinghetti’s direct experience there was neither planned nor pleasant.  Stationed in Nagasaki as a young American naval lieutenant just days after the atomic bombing, he was shocked and changed by what he saw.  His ground zero experience in Nagasaki powerfully catalyzed his moral development and he became a radical opponent of war. Anti-war and anti-violence themes continue to play a central role in his contemporary poetry, such as "A Buddha in the Woodpile."

Ferlinghetti imbues all his work with strong moral and spiritual themes reminiscent of those of traditional Zen art. In his creative pursuits, he is very much like classical Zen artists who engaged in multiple arts instead of "specializing" in one form.  As a polyartist, he writes poetry and essays; paints and does sumi-e brushwork.

In Big Sur, Ferlinghetti had a small teahouse built, traditional Japanese style, next to his weekend cabin. He named it "Temple of the Zen Fool," and meditates there. Also, his lifestyle, in which personal and professional dimensions are integrated, reflects the spirit of Zen. Throughout his life, he has directed his creative energy towards the affirmation of the direct experience of life, unadulterated by systems of belief, and other social constructs. Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) is one of the most popular poetry books of the 20th century, with translations in nine languages and over a million copies printed. In 1998 he was appointed Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

At the age of 83, Ferlinghetti radiates a youthful luminosity reminiscent of Taoist and Zen sages.  He continues to write poetry, reflecting increasingly transcendental themes.  His How to Paint Sunlight was published in 2001.
 

Carl Freire: What have been the most important books you have published, in terms of making Eastern thought accessible to America (and the West)?

Laurence Ferlinghetti: I don't know whether we published any really important books making Eastern thought accessible... There was an East-West book that had nothing to do with Buddhism, or haiku — it was strictly political, by Felix Greene, that we published in 1959, a book on the political character of China at that time, What's Really Happening in China. In the same year we brought out Kenneth Rexroth's Beyond the Mountains. We did publish one prose book of Gary Snyder's, called The Old Ways. It wasn't particularly related to the East, except that it was by Gary Snyder. It was more about American old ways.

Did you do any haiku collections?

Haiku? No. That term has been picked up by American poets and they call any three-line poem or any short short poem a haiku -- which isn't the case. Allen Ginsberg had a very simple definition of a haiku, which none of these poets follow. He said, first you have the perception of an unrecognized, amorphous natural phenomenon, and then the second step is a recognition of what it is... You know what an American haiku is?

No, what is an American haiku?

It's a bird,
It's a man,
It's …Superman!

But that doesn’t fulfil Allen’s definition either, strictly. First there is an amorphous mass, second, a recognition of what it is, and third, an emotional response to that recognition. So it would be like:

A small distant cloud
It's a bird, it's a man
-- (Laughter...)

To be more serious, we should take one of the classic Japanese haiku that really made it --

For me that would be Basho's "The ancient pond / a frog jumps in / the sound of water…"

Well, Allen would add "Aha!" -- that would be the emotion, the third part of the haiku, the reaction to the observation.

And American poets just don't get it?

They should invent some other word for these poems. It's not the correct transmission of the Dharma (laughter). There was a very early American haiku magazine, and I can't remember who was the editor, the first one in this country who got onto the haiku horse. This was in the 60s, probably. He asked me for a haiku -- I sent him this:

    Ancient frog
    In ancient outhouse
    Plop!

And he rejected it, he said that won't do, it's too vulgar, it's obscene...

In the 60s, for example during the Vietnam war, did you notice any trends in the things people were coming in to ask for, any particular influences?

We always had a big interest in East-West books, or in Eastern philosophies. We have a huge section down in the basement; it used to be stocked by my original manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, a nisei, and that was his specialty. It still is a wonderful section, now stocked by Paul Yamasaki, who is second or third generation.

Allen Ginsberg had a strong influence. He had a lot to do with the famous book on how Buddhism came to America -- How the Swans Came to the Lake, by Rick Fields [reviewed in KJ#38]. That's an important book. Ginsberg went to India in I think 1963, and it completely transformed his consciousness. After that he had an influence on the Beatles; he helped to transmit Indian music, for instance he had something to do with the Baul singers coming from southern India, to perform here at the Fillmore. And then there was the Ali Akhbar Khan school of music in Marin County, in San Rafael. Ali Akhbar Khan is a sarod player, totally devoted to Indian classical music, and has produced generations of American players of Indian classical music. He's now approaching 75 or 76, and he's still there!

And Richard Baker -- the head of the San Francisco Zen Center, who was canned for sleeping with the boss’s daughter, essentially. But he received direct transmission from Shunryu Suzuki-roshi. The Zen Center had tremendous influence on Buddhism in America, and it is still doing that. And of course Gary Snyder was in Kyoto for many years, and also Philip Whalen was there, who ended up an abbot in the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco, and died just last year.

One thing in the 70s and 80s that sparked a lot of interest was this whole idea of Japan as an economic miracle — people were reading a lot of politics and economics. Do you notice a pick-up of interest in Japanese or Asian cultural matters?

Ever since the 60s there has been a constant interest in Eastern philosophies -- I mean that was part of the counterculture revolution of the 60s. In fact the Beats articulated that before the hippies were turning to Far East philosophies -- Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, and others.

We can track how many books get sold on our computer, and the amount of books on the Far East that go through this bookstore in one month, its enormous.  But the East Coast is a long way from the West Coast, and this news hasn’t reached Washington D.C. yet -- unfortunately. I mean, Middle America starts just the other side of Berkeley, and the Great Divide is also an almost impervious wall for cultural ideas such as Buddhism, except for New York City -- Columbia University has had some great Asian scholars, and Japanese scholars. I went there, I remember the faculty was fantastic -- D.T. Suzuki, right?

Among US writers, who do you feel have most successfully represented or interpreted Eastern ideas?

Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac -- strained through the sheet of Catholicism -- he was more a Buddhist Catholic than a Catholic Buddhist. Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible, that was the book that turned him onto Buddhism. I should add Rick Fields to that list. And Ram Dass, whose name was originally Richard Alpert; he and Timothy Leary were editors of the Psychedelic Review... Ram Dass is still alive, in Marin County.

Are you aware of any significant misunderstandings or generalizations that have been made about Zen or other Eastern ideas in transmission to the West?

I think Alan Watts was particularly good at piercing the misunderstandings and generalizations about Zen. But I don't know -- I don't read very much Buddhism. "In the summer I'm a nudist; in the winter I'm a Buddhist..." As Alan said, if you say you're Zen, you're not Zen. There's a misunderstanding in the West that people can spend all day sitting on a cushion looking at the wall and thinking of themselves as Zen, but according to Alan Watts, if you do that, you're not really Zen.

At Kyoto Journal we sometimes wonder whether we are in fact some kind of agent of cultural globalization. Seeing its downside, MacDonalds everywhere, Coca Cola...

That's economic imperialism. Kyoto Journal is engaged in a cultural globalization which is totally opposed to the American corporate globalization that is sweeping around the world. Now if we could get President Bush -- who is the most uneducated President who has ever been in the White House -- if we could get him to read the Kyoto Journal, he might get some faint glimmer of light through his medieval skull...

City Lights is now nearing its 50th anniversary -- do you have any thoughts about the big picture of East-West transmission?

In the present American corporate culture, the technocratic culture, the electronic culture, the mercantile mentality, Buddhism is a dissident movement against all of that. So what the Kyoto Journal is doing is part of this dissident movement against the American corporate monoculture and the prevailing militarist McCarthyite semi-fascist government that is now in power in Washington D.C. and has hijacked our democracy.

We have banners on the front of the store, and the set before the present ones said "DISSENT IS NOT UN-AMERICAN." You may have to say, "Buddhism is not un-American" -- when the new McCarthy Committee comes after you.

This interview was accompanied by reproductions of a series of color etchings by Stephanie Peek, incorporating nine poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Back Roads to Far Places: After Basho, published in April 2003 by Tokugenji Press, Nara.

Copyright held by the author

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