Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....

 
From Poetry as Insurgent Art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Copyright © 2007 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Used by permission of New Directions. All rights reserved.

Poems by This Author

Americus, Book I [excerpt] by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
To summarize the past by theft and
The Changing Light by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The changing light at San Francisco
To the Oracle at Delphi by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Great Oracle, why are you staring at me,


Further Reading

Related Poems
Cameo One
by Michael McClure
Majakovskiiiiiiij
by Adriano Spatola
Poems about the End of the World
A Song On the End of the World
by Czeslaw Milosz
Apocalypse
by Gerald Stern
Apocalypse Soliloquy
by Scott Hightower
Continuity
by A. R. Ammons
Fire and Ice
by Robert Frost
in the ruins
by Mark Conway
The Truth About the Present
by John Lane
The Very Nervous Family
by Sabrina Orah Mark