Populist manifesto
(For Poets,
with Love)
Poets, come out of your
closets,
Open your windows, open
your doors,
You have been holed-up for
too long
in your closed worlds.
Come down, come down
from your Russian Hills
and Telegraph Hills,
your Beacon Hills and your
Chapel Hills,
your Mount Analogues and
Montparnasses,
down from your foothills
and mountains,
out of your teepees and
domes.
The trees are still
falling
and we’ll to the woods no
more.
No time for sitting in
them
As man burns down his own
house
to roast his pig.
No more chanting Hare
Krishna
while Rome burns.
San Francisco’s burning,
Mayakovsky’s Moscow’s
burning
the fossil-fuels of life.
Night & the Horse
approaches
eating lights, heat &
power,
and the clouds have
trousers.
No time now for the artist
to hide
above, beyond, behind the
scenes,
indifferent, paring his
fingernails,
refining himself out of existence.
No time now for our
literary games,
no time now for our paranoias
and hypochondrias,
no time now for fear and loathing,
time now only for light
and love.
We have seen the best
minds of our generation
destroyed by boredom at
poetry readings.
Poetry isn’t a secret society,
it isn’t a temple either.
Secret words & chants
won’t do it any longer.
The hour of oming is over,
the time of keening come,
a time for keening &
rejoicing
over the coming end
of industrial civilization
which is bad for earth
& Man.
Time now to face outward
in the full lotus position
with eyes wide open,
Time now to open your
moths
with a new open speech,
time now to communicate
with all sentient beings,
All you ‘Poets of the
Cities’
hung in museums, including
myself,
All you poet’s poets writing
poetry
about poetry,
all you poetry workshop
poets
in the boondock heart of America,
all you housebroken Ezra Pounds,
All you far-out
freaked-out cut-up poets,
All you pre-stressed
Concrete poets,
All you cunnilingual
poets,
All you pay-toilet poets
groaning with graffiti,
All you A-train swingers
who never swing on birches,
All you masters of the
sawmill haiku
in the Siberias of
America,
All you eyeless
unrealists,
All you self-occulting
supersurrealists,
All you bedroom
visionaries
and closet agitpropagators,
All you Grouch Marxist
poets
and leisure-class Comrades
who lie around all day
and talk about the workingclass
proletariat,
All you Catholic
anarchists of poetry,
All you Black Mountaineers
of poetry,
All you Boston Brahmins
and Bolinas bucolics,
All you den mothers of poetry
All you zen brothers of
poetry,
All you suicide lovers of
poetry,
All you hairy professors
of poesie,
All you poetry reviewers
drinking the blood of the
poet,
All you Poetry Police—
Where are Whitman’s wild
children,
where the great voices
speaking out
with a sense of sweetness
and sublimity,
where the great new
vision,
the great world-view,
the high prophetic song
of the immense earth
and all that sings in it
And our relation to it—
Poets, descend
to the street of the world
once more
And open your minds &
eyes
with old visual delight,
Clear your throat and
speak up,
Poetry is dead, long live
poetry
with terrible eyes and
buffalo strength.
Don’t wait for the Revolution
or it’ll happen without
you,
Stop mumbling and speak out
with a new wide-open
poetry
with a new commonsensual ‘public
surface’
with other subjective
levels
or other subversive
levels,
a tuning fork in the inner
ear
to strike below the
surface.
Of your own sweet Self
still sing
yet utter ‘the word
en-masse’—
Poetry the common carrier
for the transportation of
the public
to higher places
than other wheels can
carry it.
Poetry still falls from
the skies
Into our streets still
open.
They haven’t put up the
barricades, yet,
the streets are still
alive with faces,
lovely men & women
still walking there,
still lovely creatures
everywhere,
in the eyes of the secret
of all
still buried there,
Whitman’s wild children still
sleeping there,
Awake and walk in the open
air
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, (1975)
No comments:
Post a Comment