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Date Posted: 11:29:36 01/26/01 Fri
Author Host/IP: host-209-214-104-140.bhm.bellsouth.net/209.214.104.140
Updates for the Mind and Soul: Poet Laureate Shakes Up the Newsroom to Find a Cure
for "Poetry Blindness"
[San Francisco Chronicle, December 6, 1998]
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
When I was dubbed Poet Laureate of San Francisco last October at the Main Library, I made the
foolhardy proposal that I write a column called "Poetry As News" for a daily newspaper. Just my
luck that David Kipen, the new Book Editor of The San Francisco Chronicle , was there and
took me up on it. Now I'm faced with the challenge of substantiating the argument, that poetry can
be news, that there are poems written long ago, or yesterday, that can still be news to us. So here
goes, and I hope to hear loud cries of epiphany in the newsroom.
That the editor should ask me for poetry at all is itself surprising, given the notorious reluctance of
daily newspapers to publish poetry of any kind, much less review it. This is one reason why most
poets live in a kind of poetry ghetto, compared to their prose brothers. Having staggered through
journalism school, I understand the editors' poetry blindness. They as well as many book editors
and readers seem to have a block when confronted with the typography of poetry on a page, as if it
were some strange species of writing too difficult for the rational mind to decipher.
What must a poem have that would persuade newspaper editors to publish it and nonliterary
readers to read it? The answer must be that it has to be news of some kind, or have some news
hook to hang it on. ( The New York Times not so long ago sent me a note saying that its policy was
now not to print any poetry unless it was directly related to current events.)
Poetry is news, and news is poetry, if it conveys more than information, more than word of
happenings, if it is also news of the soul, news of the passions, news of living and loving and dying
in all its subjective depths. Which doesn't mean it has to be dead serious, though humor is "the
divine butcher" (as Gregory Corso said) since it destroys deep passion and sublimity in poetry.
The greatest poets of all ages have brought us news of the mind and soul of their times, just as
architecture reveals the soul of civilizations (and what will future archaeologists conclude upon
uncovering the ruins of our own heartless stone and steel?)
To begin with the very beginnings, with the Greek lyric poets five or six hundred years before
Christ (that beautiful early Christian hippie with the beat beard and sandals). Sappho of Lesbos, for
instance. Like Walt Whitman, like Dylan Thomas, like Allen Ginsberg, Sappho could write poems
that were both loud and soft, public and private. Her news of the heart (that involuntary muscle)
speaks to us today as it did long ago.
I have made my own version of some of her loveliest poetry, based on two modern translations of
it, one by Richard Lattimore and one by Willis Barnstone whose new Sun & Moon Classics edition
of Sappho is the most beautiful I've ever seen:
Lyrics by Sappho
He seems a god to me
he who looks in your eyes
who sits close to you to hear
your soft voice your low laughter
It shakes my spirit
Under my breast my heart is shaken
Let me but look at you
and my voice dies
My tongue struck silent
my skin afire
my eyes empty of light
my ears muted in thunder
and sweat breaks upon me,
fever shakes me,
and I turn paler than grass
as if death has brushed me
and forever changed me
*
Some say the fairest thing on black earth
is an array of horsemen
or soldiers marching
or a fleet of ships at sea
But I say the one you love
is the loveliest
And this so easy to show--
For fairest Helen forsaking
her husband king
fled away to warring Troy
forgetting daughter and parents
Aphrodite's hot gaze
having led her far astray
As I am, alone without my love
who has forsaken me
whose supple way of walking
whose lighted face
I for one would rather see
than all the glittering chariots and soldiers
armored for glorious battle
Copyright © 1998 Lawrence Ferlinghetti
All Rights Reserved
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