Poetry: The lively art

Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned 88 this year, but that doesn’t mean he’s calming down. His latest book, "Poetry as Insurgent Art" (New Directions: 90 pp. $12.95), is a nifty little call-to-arms espousing the radical position that poetry not only matters, but also might actually save us in the end. "If you would be a poet," Ferlinghetti writes, "create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.... If you would be a great poet, strive to transcribe the consciousness of the race." Very Joycean, those final sentiments, but then Ferlinghetti’s always been a modernist, albeit a modernist who knows how to get up and dance.

"Poetry as Insurgent Art" is, in its author’s words, "still a work-in progress," consisting largely of writings from the 1970s and before. Don’t let that put you off, though; his insights are as relevant as they ever were. "Modern poetry," he warns, "is prose because it doesn’t have much duende, dark spirit of earth and blood, no soul of dark song, no passion musick. Like modern sculpture, it loves the concrete. Like minimal art, it minimizes emotion in favor of understated irony and implied intensity. As such it is the perfect poetry for technocratic man. But how often does this poetry rise above the mean sea level of his sparkling plain? Ezra Pound once decanted his opinion that only in times of decadence does poetry separate itself from music. And this is the way the world ends, not with a song but a whimper."

David L. Ulin