Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry as insurgent art

Michael Springer

i will not walk this path with you
Ferlinghetti, 

i will not swallow
your self-aware self-

important sense of self-
worth as you swear in so many words

the world will be saved by poetry.
and i spent summers in sweltering

coffeehouses with cigarette smoke
dense and packed as the words

of amateur after amateur patting the backs
of other amateurs in an amateur display of

"we are poet, hear us roar,"
but i will not swallow this splenda-made sweetness

that poetry is saving the world.
i won't swallow that kool-aid.

i remember in cloewes hall in 2000, your grip
on a starbucks vente, as you preached

the evils of autos and corporations as 
you pushed your sequel to your most successful book so snidely.

now your pint-sized collection of pretensions
previously published and stale on the shelf

cancels out its message by its existence.

if you believed these words, they wouldn't be printed
in limited edition and signed and sold,

they'd be echoing across internets. they'd be 
screaming from graffittied walls and they'd

be tattooed across your bookstore. so,
i will not walk that path with you, that dead end

path of poetry being the salvation of this country.

salvation is protest in the streets. salvation is blocked intersections and the intersections of ideas in genuine debate, salvation is in escaping the screaming heads that pretend to communicate on television. salvation is not poetry. it is the feminists who insist the way we think about thinking is wrong, salvation is somewhere beyond that place where we think differently. 

salvation doesn't wear tweed and read from old yellowed pages. salvation doesn't produce postcards, it can't be sold for 12.95 
to fauxrevolutionaries and tourists with fanniepacks taking pictures
next to cardboard ginsbergs. i've seen good minds of my generation

distracted by pseudophilosophical bullshit
by spouting slam on stages, their rage

flayed upon appearance because every mother-
fucker in the room already agrees.

i've seen them muted by their chap-books that sit
in piles of rebellion unbought on apartment floors.

i've seen some of the good minds of my generation 
in bland rebellions by bong and by song 

but rebellions don't stay in apartments on couches under marley flags. rebellions don't simmer in coffeehouses before pouring out momentarily satiated into apathetic streets. poetry is a non-rebellion when it doesn't invade the vision of those who don't want to see it.

you snidely look down your nose at academics
who place thoughts of doubt like seeds in minds 

while you stew in your own juices and make money
off echoes of your revolution that is over.

the revolution won't hold tight to reveries of the past.
it won't fear the internet; it won't run from technology.

the revolution will be in minutea, as every generation
is less locked into the fears of the past, as gay

is legalized, as more people realize how this country
treats other countries, as more eyes open to injustice. 

Howard Zinn's prose (which you look down upon) opens eyes.
The web opens eyes as we see further, learn faster, 

travel the globe in seconds, as it becomes closer and closer
to impossible to deny we're all human and no one is "other."

you sung the song of the revolution, ferlinghetti,
but now your revolution is rapidly aging. 

get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand.

Poetry as insurgent art

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