The Brockport Writers Forum Presents:

Lawrence Ferlenghetti  --      poet

Tape Number: VF-19-1

Hosted by: Allen DeLoach and A. Poulin, Jr.

Date Taped: March 13, 1973

Length: 62 min.

The Tape

Works read: "Spontaneous Activists, Pacifists, Buddhists Song," fifth poem from

"A Coney Island of the Mind," "In a Time of Revolution, For Instance," "Pound at

Spiletto," and "Baseball Cantos."

Works Referred To: "Tyrannus Nix," "Constantly Risking Absurdity," and Open Eye,

Open Heart.

Summary:

Ferlinghetti demonstrates the uses of poetry as performance, and talks about the

oral and heroic tradition of poetry in Russia as one of his models for what poetry

cab be.  He says that poets are supposed to show their audiences what people

wouldn't otherwise see, but that most contemporary poets in the U.S. have bland

visions of the world.  Ferlinghetti talks at length about Pound's influence on

the freeing of poetic forms; he also praises Pound's speaking against the U.S.

government, but condemns Pound's anti-Semitism.

Other writers mentioned: Vosnesensky, Yevtuschenko, P. Neruda, J. Skyler,

J. Prevert, R. Duncan, D. Thomas, A. Ginsberg, H. Marcuse, J. Dickey, W. Whitman,

C. Olson, E. Pound, R. Creeley, Brodsky, D. Berrigan, J. Joyce, C. Bukowski,

H. Miller, E. Hemingway, C. Shapiro, T.S. Eliot, L. Trilling, H. James.

"There's too much dead language in poetry these days; it's just

morbid sometimes...."

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