Ferlinghetti: Last of the Bohemians?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is approaching 90 these days, but he’s still a practicing poet & painter, still puttering around City Lights Bookstore, still working on translations & essays & poems, giving readings & publishing books, still speaking out against censorship, corporate culture & oppression. He was the first Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 1998, and City Lights has published a series of books by the San Francisco Laureates. He wrote a new poem, “Are There Not Still Fireflies?,” for his acceptance speech when the National Book Awards recently named him recipient of the first-ever “Literarian Award” for service to the literary community -- an award that harkens back to the first source of his enduring fame, his publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1956 & the battle against U.S. government censorship that ensued, resulting in a landmark court decision that paved the way for the publication of books like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover & Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in the US.

Now, in this 50th year since The Poem That Changed America, Ferlinghetti is distancing himself from the Beats. In the interview for his recent profile in The Guardian by Nicholas Wroe, Ferlinghetti says: “The movement became public very quickly. Life magazine ran a headline saying ‘The Only Revolution Around’ and it’s never stopped. There is even someone in San Francisco trying to start a Beat museum, but I’m keeping well away because I think there’s been more than enough commercialisation.... When I arrived in San Francisco in 1951 I was wearing a beret. If anything I was the last of the bohemians rather than the first of the Beats.”

Related articles:
The Coney Island of Lawrence Ferlinghetti film broadcast on Comcast Cable in January 2006
Ferlinghetti awarded the first-ever “Literarian Award” in the 2005 National Book Awards, for service to the literary community
“The Beat Goes On: Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still a rebel,” interview by Victor Infante
Links to read Ferlinghetti’s poems online & to buy his books & CDs