Lawrence Ferlingetti 's Advice to Young Poets

Look, I love you Larry, but this is ridiculous.  

On February 18, 2001, the Chronicle newspaper featured Lawrence Ferlingetti's advice to young poets when he appeared as San Francisco's "Poet Laureate" at the: City Wide School Poetry Festival

His own words follow,  in "poet purple". My words follow. Even fessing up to being a rotten poet, which is saying a lot for a wannabeatnik, this takes the cake. Please spend more time working on your next speech, okay man.  As part of the awards ceremony, Ferlingetti offered the following wisdom to budding school poets:

Invent a new language anyone can understand.

Pretty good I suppose. I like that one best. 

I say write fifty poems a day and one of them might have a good line or two. Never give up. Keep writing every day like a metrosexual cafe-slave for the rest of your piteous chapbook life. Oh, and steal from other poets too, like Ginsberg and Bowie.

Leonardo da Vinci said: "Make one thousand drawings and ONE of them MIGHT be good". Ditto. That's my advice.

Climb the Statue of Liberty.

I don't get it. So fine, climb down the Statue of Liberty then take the elevator back up?  

Reach for the unattainable.

Why do that? Reach for the attainable and you will be amazed where it will take you.

Kiss the mirror and write what you see and hear.

Larry is a Beatnik ... watch out for him.  

Dance with wolves.

The Poet Laureate of San Francisco does Kevin Costner?

Count the stars, including the unseen.

With a computer telescope I hope. 

Be naive, innocent, uncynical, as if you had just landed on earth, as indeed you have, as indeed we all have, astonished by what you have fallen upon.

Write living newspapers.

But, you said I could be a poet.

Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for hot air.

Okay, I'll do it.

Read between the lines of human discourse.

Fine, we all do that everday as a natural human attribute. We're born with it. We don't have to be advised of this Larry.  

Avoid the provincial, go for the universal.

Hey, go for the gritty detail. The waitress with a mole on her eyelid that flashes when she blinks. We identify the so-called UNIVERSAL, in  gritty detail --- the chipped shell, not the ocean.

Think subjectively, write objectively.

What, ride a camel to the Great Pyramid and spray your name on it?

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

if you are lucky enough to have critics, pay attention, they're often right.

Work on a frontier if you can find one, go to sea, or work near water and paddle your own boat.

 Paddle your own boat? Bartlett's Quotations here I come.

Associate with thinking poets, they're hard to find.

Well ...

Don't be so open minded that your brains fall out.

Students were thinking, " ... when's lunch".

Be a poet, not a huckster. Don't cater, don't pander, especially not to possible audiences, readers, or editors, publishers,

Or young poets.

Come out of your closet, it's dark in there.

Go back in your closet, it's dark in there.

Jeeze, do I have to explain everything. The mystic source of poetry and art is down and dark. We know that. Roots plunging into the black blood of Earth, where the slimmest nutrients are sucked up into Quaking Aspen leaves.

Be committed to something outside yourself. Be militant about it. Or ecstatic.

Ecstatic! Yes. And become committed to having the office of Poet Laureate of San Francisco abolished through a City Wide School Poetry Contest where the winning student gets to fire the Principle Poemaster, with a poem, of course.  Just kidding.

To be a poet at 16 is to be 16. To be a poet at forty is to be a poet. Be both.

Well, okay I guess ... but, I'm 69 ...  and I'm still a lousy poet ... 

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