Poetry Lives!

In one of the highlights of my year my kids and I ran into the great poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti at a San Francisco Giants baseball game. Lawrence, the poet laureate of San Francisco, is the owner of City Lights Books and publishing company http://www.citylights.com/. Please read Lawrence's latest poem White Horse http://www.citylights.com/beat/LF/CLLFwhite.html. Lawrence published Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308. The poem's opening line seems more appropriate than ever "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix ..." I feel like I'm mad and dragging myself through the streets these days as I try and understand how our civilization can be devolving into an armed camp with hostilities on all sides. Is this how we're supposed to live? Lawrence lived through the depression, WWII, McCarthyism, the "red scare", civil rights, Viet Nam, Watergate, et al. The attached photo has my daughters Kendra age 11 on the left and Shane age 14 on the right. Lawrence is the gentleman on the right and the man on the left is a San Francisco art dealer who was taking Lawrence to the game. Seeing Lawrence at a baseball game made me feel maybe, just maybe there's enough poets and artistic expression left to save this planet.

@Copyright 2003 Howard Fallon