POET LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI RESPONDS
by Victor Greentree

In his San Francisco newspaper column, Lawrence Ferlinghetti described a book by Pablo Neruda titled The Book of Questions—made entirely of "‘unanswerable' (poetic) questions": "Where is the child I was, still inside me or gone?" "Does sleep unravel the knitted sleeve of care?"

I immediately wrote to Lawrence informing him that, indeed, Neruda must have borrowed this idea from a University of California Extension course exercise I had created called "Poetic Riddles." Stealing art is a serious crime, one that is not prosecuted often enough in this country. But with all of our politicians suckling on the public's fears of drugs and abusers, what can our courts do? In my exercise, I would ask the adults in my classes to write poetic (nonscientific) answers to puzzling thoughts like:

• Why is it so quiet when the snow falls?
  Why don't spiders get caught in their own webs?
  Why do birds sing mostly at dawn and at dusk

In my thinking, the exercise wasn't about riddles really. It was about making contact with the natural world and SEEING ANOTHER REALITY. Each question expressed a true, observable fact about the earth and the "why" was asking why is this observable fact so? It was talking about something going on in all beneath the surface of things. It described a non-verbal experience—just the opposite of the abstracted state called "thinking in words."But answering these questions in words, I felt, might be a hint to some who could go from there.

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In his next column, Ferlinghetti, who by then had read the article on this website "Art's Connection to Nature and How It Was Lost," made the following reply:

Are the cries of birds really cries of joy and ecstasy, or are they cries of despair? Is life essentially tragic or comic, lyric or lurid? These are the master questions that have occupied master writers through the centuries. To laugh or not to laugh, to cry or not to cry those are the questions.

Perhaps Shakespeare said it better than anyone:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling/ Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;/ And as imagination bodies forth /The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen /Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing /A local habitation and a name.

There is nothing new under the moon, but poetry is news when it articulates some new interpretation of reality or voices an old vision in a unique and unforgettable way. In a time when all the conventional standards for judging poetry have been more or less abandoned, a writer's take on reality is indeed a litmus test of his relative importance. Trendy writers and artists fade into the woodwork, while voices we never noticed surge forward.

The stamp of radical imagination, of a unique view of reality, is unmistakable. It marks the genius and separates it from the pedestrian common denominator of consciousness. When one comes upon a great text for the first time (poem or prose or painting), one thinks, ``I never saw the world, I never saw life like that before!'‘

Many's the time someone has told me of some poem that forever changed his or her view of life. Often it's not a whole poem but just a line, a phrase, an image or a figure of speech that does it, when the poet makes us see what is really on the end of our fork.

Such original conceptions of reality are after all why we read poetry or look at art — to throw some light on our own lives and loves, or somehow to fathom man's fate, to find clues to the meaning of our still mysterious existence on Earth. We yearn for the epiphany that will reveal all.

The way poets see nature and love has traditionally shaped their world view, but modern industrial civilization has distanced us all from nature, if not from love. In the 19th century, poets relied heavily on the device of the ``pathetic fallacy,'‘ in which nature is given human traits and emotions. The English and German Romantic poets gave nature an almost human sexual anima. Goethe's ``Sorrows of Young Werther'‘ portrays nature as a mirror of the poet's unrequited love. And T.S. Eliot saw a dying nature in the modern metropolis, a wasteland in which his hero J. Alfred Prufrock led a life of ennui, frustration and sterility.
Since Eliot's ``defeated romanticism,'‘ modern poets have become ever more alienated from nature. Bertolt Brecht and Pier Paolo Pasolini saw the modern city as an inferno, while Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski and myriad younger Americans have had increasingly black visions, with more still coming in rap poetry at poetry slams, noir jazz and graffiti on subways and buses. Their alienation is not only from nature but from society.

Perhaps in the end it's up to the poets, songwriters, film makers and conceptual artists to save us from a violent noir world, with some new, truly lyric inspiration. The Beatles sang, ``We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine . . .'‘ Perhaps some new poetic genius will arise and invent a new poetic vehicle to transport us, a grand new ontological vision.

You could call this the ``lyric escape'‘—something that poets have always indulged in, creating their own illusions to live by and denying the darkening plain of the real world. But is some ecstatic epiphany, revealing an ultimate reality, too much to expect?
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

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So how might this all fit in with CircleoftheEarth™? And what we believe to be true?

Ferlinghetti begins with a Shakespearean quote:

And as imagination bodies forth /The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen /Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing /A local habitation and a name.

But concludes with his own thought:

You could call this the ``lyric escape'‘—something that poets have always indulged in, creating their own illusions to live by and denying the darkening plain of the real world.

While Shakespeare says "hey! nobody knows," ("imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown," "and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name"), Ferlinghetti is a lot more certain as to how he would vote ("poets . . . (create) their own illusions to live by and (deny) the darkening plain of the real world).

We cannot be certain we know anything beyond the confines of our minds. But we also know two other things: 1) That something within the human brain is programmed to be able to SEE and 2) that, although we can't know, we have the power to choose. How we choose makes all of the difference. For it is a choice between what is healthy for us as individuals and as a species and what is illness and disease furthering. So we, as New Artists, as shamans, seek to be healers.

So, the question being raised here is: do animals like or dislike being alive? Do they live in contentment or constant fear? Are they "happy?" I believe--based upon the vision that I have of things--that animals like being alive. Because they have an understanding of things that we, in developing our rational minds, have lost. They KNOW that they are a part of the Earth. A part of the whole. And that means death, dying and disease. That means being consumed by other animals, so that those animals may live; who will be consumed themselves by still others. Of course, that is going to happen to you and I because we are a part of the Earth. And when we can realize that and KNOW that, then we will love life too.

Lawrence and I have differing ways of finding out. He reads and shares Shakespeare and other poets. I learned what I know by stopping each day at the right time and going outside and watching the sun rise and then set. What I have always seen,at these times, are birds celebrating.