Bay Area’s Poet Laureate Should Have Declined Post

A front-page article in the Los Angeles Times recently celebrated at great length the fact that Willie Brown, up in San Francisco, has appointed Lawrence Ferlinghetti as the city’s “poet laureate.” No one who knows Ferlinghetti or his work can deny the appropriateness of the appointment or fail to understand why Mayor Brown acted as he did.

But it is not quite so easy to understand why Ferlinghetti accepted the appointment, coming as it did from Brown, who is presently using all the powers at his command, including the city’s police power, to drive the homeless from the city’s parks and streets while offering them no alternatives whatsoever.

Ferlinghetti is, after all, an anarchist; throughout his life he has been critical of organized and institutional power of all sorts, especially when it is used in the name of the state against the powerless.

In the present situation, Brown represents the city as the state; he uses its immense powers against the powerless in an apparent attempt to drive them from the city’s streets and into oblivion. This is, in essence, an attempt to “cleanse” or “purify” the city, and the ideology behind it is in many ways similar to the fascist dream of cleansing Germany of Jews, though Brown, of course, wants only to remove the homeless and not to kill them. And I know, too, that the homeless present a genuine problem to the city; they make its streets less pristine, maybe discourage tourists, etc. But we mustn’t forget that the Jews also presented “real” problems to the Germans as well and that in German minds the treatment of Jews was for the good of society or of cities in general.

Not long ago, I came across two entries in the diaries of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels that seem relevant here.

On May 10, 1933, he wrote about some of the goals he and the Fuehrer had: “We want again to devote our energies chiefly to fine arts, the films, literature and music. We want to be human again.”

Three days later, on May 13, Goebbels wrote: “There is . . . no recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew.”

My point? Human cruelty and a love for “high” culture often exist side by side, and the presence of a respect for beauty of the arts in no way counterbalances or excuses human cruelty, moral failure or the willed deepening of human suffering--all of which are unmistakable aspects of Brown’s policies toward the homeless. The fact that the mayor loves poetry or likes Ferlinghetti in no way counterbalances his treatment of the homeless, and Ferlinghetti, always on the underdog’s side, ought to know that.

Ferlinghetti would have done us all a service--and perhaps kept better faith with his own ideas--by refusing the mayor’s request and by choosing to be the people’s poet rather than the administration’s. Perhaps all of Ferlinghetti’s friends ought to have pointed out that he was already the poet laureate of the city and that the mayoral appointment, in its obscene monarchal largess, was not required to make it so.

As Ferlinghetti knows, all “official” positions are suspect; the same power that makes him the city’s poet is the power used against the homeless and in the creation of suffering and sorrow. None of us ought to forget that, including Ferlinghetti, who has often made the very center of his work a rebellion against the kinds of abuses of power now visible everywhere on San Francisco’s streets.