 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. There are some seats left, so please, they're scattered around, but please feel free to come and sit down, if you wish. Thank you. I'm pleased to welcome you here this evening. It's a really historic event. Our first poet laureate, who I will introduce in a moment, who of course needs no introduction to anyone who's lived in San Francisco for more than 10 minutes. My name's Regina Mnudry, and I'm the city librarian. And one of the wonderful things I get to do as city librarian is to officiate at some of these terrific events that we have at the library. And first of all, I would like to introduce this evening to you, Christopher Vroom. Christopher Vroom is the founder of the Arts Council, which is a private foundation, and this foundation is funding the poet laureate program that we're having at the library. And the mayor, as you know, will appoint a poet laureate every year, and then the poet laureate will do an address at the library and also work in the library with either literacy students or youth or other folks who are interested in poetry. And it's really so wonderful to have such a generous donor who is funding this program for us. So right now I'd just like Mr. Vroom to come up and tell you a little bit about what he's doing. Mr. Vroom? Thanks, Regina. Let me add my welcome to all of you who have come here tonight. The Arts Council, which I founded about a year ago, is a strong advocate for art education programs, especially in inner city neighborhoods where the need is the greatest. We also support individual artists. Our goal overall is to try and create community between artists and the public that fosters long-lived involvement and support for the creative process generally and the arts specifically. Our support for the poet laureate program of San Francisco reflects both the importance of the city as a cultural center and our belief that by championing poetry or greater public access to poetry, we can foster a greater understanding and appreciation for this diverse literary form, which we think is just wonderful. And by doing so, we hope to build a foundation for a whole new world of exploration throughout literature. So it's a tremendously exciting thing for us to be involved with. This is our inaugural effort in the community and there'll be more to come. It's especially gratifying that Lawrence Furlinghetti has been recognized as the first poet laureate of the city, as a poet, as an artist, Lawrence Furlinghetti has touched the mind and hearts of generations and we're extremely fortunate to have him in our lives and I'm pleased to help honor him today. Let me turn it back to Regina with that and thank you very much. When Mayor Brown was in Shanghai, I believe, last year, he got the idea that the city of San Francisco was a great enough city to have a poet laureate. One of the things that I get to do tonight is to have the pleasure of introducing to you this evening our Mayor, Willie L. Brown, Jr. Thank you kindly. And what I have in my hand is a proclamation that designates Sir Lawrence as a poet laureate for San Francisco. I must tell you, however, it was not Shanghai, it was actually Seoul Korea. We were there and as part of the duties in this job, you have to go represent the city all over the world. And of course, no question San Francisco is the greatest city on the globe. And you talk about the things, you don't say it's the greatest city on the globe. You kind of describe what goes on in your city versus all other cities and whether it's trade or commerce or education or what have you, you reference it. And of course, you always run down the cultural agenda for any given city and particularly a city that you believe to be absolutely great. And as we were doing that in Seoul Korea, one of these professors at the University of Seoul, where I was receiving an honorary degree, casually asked, and when will your arts person give his lecture? He says, let me arrange an appointment for you. My driver will be happy to take you. My driver will be happy to assist you if you'll just let us go on with the business. I think you might enjoy it. I think he'll say something that even might reach you. So just stick around. All right, just cool it, just for a few seconds. I'm going to listen to you in just a few minutes, but you don't need to tell all these people. They won't listen. They're really intolerant. I am very tolerant. So just cool it. I'm going to come right over there as soon as I leave here, all right? I'm going to come right to you. All right, now where was I? I was in Seoul. At any rate, when they ask, you know, when will your persons of letters be given your annual lecture? And of course, I looked at PJ, who was traveling with me on that occasion, and I said, then what date is that scheduled? This is my chief of staff on this issue. And he said, well, we don't know the date, but we certainly will tell you when. So we walked out together. He said, now, what am I supposed to do? I said, well, we just created a new commission. We are going to designate a portal area for San Francisco. And you've got the job, PJ. PJ has done a marvelous job. He pulled together the various persons. He came to our librarian. He went through the process. They selected the people who would participate in this effort. This effort was undertaken. And of course, Chris came along to do the appropriate funding so that there would not be a column saying that his majesty now has a port laureate. I can see Farley already. Lawrence, you're going to be, you know, his willingness has his own port. I mean, that's what you're going to see. So get ready for it. Get ready for it. But, but it's all here now. And it was no question. It was frankly for PJ and the people who served on the committee and absolute no brainer. They came to me and said, here's a revelation. This is what we should do. We had a press availability and so proclaimed it. And of course, the responsibility of the port laureate was to do exactly as the librarian is so outlined. My responsibility, of course, is to provide the appropriate proclamation, acknowledging the city's designation of Lawrence Rangetti for that purpose. And that's what the night is about. And that's what this is about. And when he finishes the lecture tonight, he will receive it. By then, he will have earned it. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Is there a more wonderful city than this? No, never. I was born and raised here. I have a little story to tell. In 1960 or 61, when Tropic of Cancer had just been published legally in the United States, I was a baby librarian. But oh, I knew about city lights. And I knew about upper grant. And I knew what was going on. And we thought we were so sophisticated we could hardly stand ourselves. But my library, which shall be nameless at that time, wouldn't buy the Tropic of Cancer. So I decided that I would buy it myself. And I think it was $7.95. Now that was a lot of money 30 some odd years ago. So where do you go to buy a book like Tropic of Cancer? I go to city lights. So I did. After, of course, having had coffee at one of the coffee houses on upper grant. So I went into city lights. Now, I did not know Lawrence Frill and Getty. I knew who he was, but I didn't know him. And I was buying this book. And somehow I start talking. I talk to everybody. Bad habit I have. And I told him what I was going to do with it. And he said, are you really going to put that in the library? And he said, well, if you promise me you'll put that in the library. I'll give this book to you, which he did. And I have never forgotten that. So here we are again, Mr. Frill and Getty. Lawrence Frill and Getty is known as a voice of dissent. And his works are often identified and concerned with politics and social issues. He is a literary legend, an internationally acclaimed writer, bookseller, publisher, and artist. And as the mayor just said, it was a no brainer. We had to select the first poet laureate. Who else would you think of? He's a champion of literacy, intellectual freedom, and the people's right to have access to literature. And I'm here to tell you this evening that the San Francisco Public Library is proud to be associated with this literary giant. Without further ado, Mr. Frill and Getty, please come up. I see the mayor got a little extra soul in Seoul, Korea. And appointed me mayor, appointed me. Let that one go. In as much as I'm in competition with the league championship, the Yankees versus the Indians, I've got to read my baseball canto from another era, as you'll see. Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn, reading Ezra Pound. And wishing Juan Marachel would hit a hole right through the Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first canto, and demolish the barbarian invaders from Los Angeles. When the San Francisco Giants take the field and everybody stands up to the national anthem, with some Irish tenor's voice piped over the loudspeakers, with all the players struck dead in their places, with great umpires like Irish cops in their black suits and little black caps pressed over their hearts standing straight and still, like at some funeral of a Blarney bartender. And all facing east, as if expecting some great white hope or the founding fathers to appear on the horizon. But Willie Mays appears instead in the bottom of the first, and Aurora goes up as he clouds the first one into the sun and takes off like a footrunner from Thebes. The ball is lost in the sun and maidens wail after him, but he keeps running through the Anglo-Saxon epic. And Tito Fuentes comes up looking like a bullfighter in his tight pants and small pointed shoes. And the right field bleachers go mad with chicanos and blacks and Brooklyn beer drinkers. Sweet Tito, suck it to him, sweet Tito. And sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket and smacks one that don't come back at all and flees around the bases like he's escaping from the United Fruit Company. As the gringo dollar beats out the pound and sweet Tito beats it out like he's beating out, usually not to mention fascism and anti-Semitism. And one marachal comes up and the chicanos bleachers go loco again as one belts the first fastball out of sight and rounds first and keeps going and rounds second and rounds third and keeps going and hits pay dirt to the roars of the grungy populace. As some nut presses the backstage panic button for the tape-recorded national anthem again to save the situation, but it don't stop nobody this time in their revolution round the loaded white bases in this last of the great Anglo-Saxon epics in the territorio libre of baseball. Now comes the hard part of the performance of reading prose, poetry and city culture. I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far out city on the left side of the world and I gratefully accept for as I told the mayor, how could I refuse? I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any place in the world but any city in the world. But we are in danger of losing it. In fact, we are in danger of losing much more than that. All that made this city so unique in the first place seems to be going down the tube at an alarming rate. This week's Bay Guardian has the results of a survey that reveals a city undergoing a radical transformation from a diverse metropolis that welcomed immigrants and refugees from around the world to a homogeneous, wealthy enclave. The Bay Guardian's issue this week is really extraordinary for a four month survey in detail of what I'm talking about. Showing a transformation from a diverse metropolis that welcomed immigrants and refugees from around the world to a homogeneous, wealthy enclave. The gap between the rich and the poor in San Francisco increased more than 40% in two years recently. San Francisco may soon become the first fully gentrified city in America. The urban equivalent of a gated bedroom community says Daniel Zoll in The Guardian. Now it's becoming almost impossible for a lot of the people who have made this such a world class city, people who have been the heart and soul of the city for decades from the fishers and pasta makers and blue collar workers to the jazz musicians to the beat poets to the hippies to the punks and so many others to exist here anymore. And when you've lost that part of the city, you've lost San Francisco, unquote. And Richard Walker, head of geography at UC Berkeley said, it means that one dimensional city, a more conservative city, one that will no longer be a font of social innovation and rebellion from below. Just another American city, a corporate city, a fate it has resisted for generations, unquote. When I arrived in the city in 1950, I came overlanded by train and took the ferry from the Oakland mole to the ferry building and San Francisco looked like some Mediterranean port. A small white city with mostly white buildings, a little like Tunis seen from the seaward. I thought perhaps it was Atlantis risen from the sea. I certainly saw North Beach, especially as a poetic place, as poetic as some Calciers or neighborhoods in Paris, as poetic as any place in old Europa, as poetic as any place where great poets and painters had found inspiration. And this was the first poem I wrote here, a North Beach scene. Away above a harbor full of cockless houses, among the Charlie Noble chimney pots of a rooftop, rigged with clotheslines, a woman paced up sails upon the wind, hanging out her morning sheets with wooden pins. Oh, lovely mammal, her nearly naked breasts throw taut shadows as she stretches up and bang at last the last of her so white-washed sins. But it is wetly amorous and winds itself about her, clinging to her skin. So caught with arms upraised, she tosses back her head in voiceless laughter and in choiceless gesture then shakes out gold hair. While in the reachless seascape spaces and blown white shrouds stand out the bright steamers to kingdom come. But this past weekend, North Beach looked like a theme park. Literally overrun by tourists. And Kitch was king. We won't mention the destruction of the old U.S. restaurant. The tragedy. What happened to North Beach? Just as an example of one neighborhood. What makes for a free poetic life? What destroys the poetry of a city? Automobiles destroy it. And they destroy more than the poetry. All over America, all over Europe. In fact, cities and towns are under assault by the automobile. They're literally being destroyed by car culture. Cities are gradually learning. They don't have to let it happen to them. Witness our beautiful new embarked arrow. We tried for years to get it torn down and we always lost in the election. Finally the earthquake did it for us. And in San Francisco right now we have another chance to stop auto-getting from happening here. Just a few blocks from here the ugly central freeway can be brought down for good if you vote for proposition E on the November ballot. For another destroyer of poetry and peace how about those killing machines the Navy's blue angels who have just carried out their annual attack on the city. But the poetic life requires peace not war. Poetic life of the city our subjective life that is. The subjective life of the individual is constantly under attack by all the forces of materialist civilization the forces of our military industrial perplex. And we don't need these war planes designed to kill and ludicrously misname the blue angels. They dive upon our city every year in a frightening militarist and nationalist display of pure male testosterone. I've seen old Vietnam ladies in Washington Square diving under the benches. We need to be reminded yearly how our planes have bombed third world countries back to the Stone Age. In San Francisco of all places do we really need quote bombs bursting in air to prove that our flag is still there? What would St. Francis say? Perhaps the city could disinvite them this next year. I could go on until I'm singing to your snores but I'll mention just one more destroyer chain stores or chain gangs is the Bay Guardian column. Corporate chain stores wipe out long-established independence killing off local color, local traditions and in the cases of bookstores literary history. I've been to other great cities on poetry tours and found not a single independent bookstore left in neighborhoods where chain gangs have moved in. It's an old story by now but it's time to revise a lot of old stories. If so much of this city's population doesn't want chain stores as the Bay Guardian suggests why can't the city government take a united stand against them? But to get to the positive side of things I have quite a wish list for the city. I propose at North Beach with its long literary history including Mark Twain, Jack London, Ina Kulbryth, William Sirion and many others including the Beatwriters be officially protected as a historic district in the manner of the French Quarter in New Orleans and thus shielded from commercial destruction such as was suffered by the classical Montgomery Block building the most famous literary and artistic structure in the west until it was replaced by the trans-America pyramid. I do hope someone will pick up this ball and run with it. And I propose that a small wooden house on Treasure Island or in the Presidio be made a poet's cottage where future laureates might live or work and conduct poetry events or even an annual city poetry festival. The mayor the mayor and the important poetry journal Poetry Flash are already behind it so I hope it will happen. And since we're in the main library let's remember that the center of literate culture in cities has always centered in the great libraries as well as in the independent bookstores. This library should have ten million dollars a year to spend on books more than twice as much as presently allotted. It also needs more space already. Since evidently this new state of the computer postmodern masterpiece doesn't have as much shelf space as the old library next door. And I believe the people made a great mistake in passing the proposition to remove the old library building from the library system. It might not be too late to reclaim it as a library annex even though the granite signs on the front of it have already been changed even though the proposition to get rid of it has already been partially implemented all it would take would be another proposition on the ballot to reverse the old library building being taken out of the library system maybe someone would like to mount a proposition the next time around. Other outrageous things on my wish list include one, give bicycles and pedestrians absolute priority over automobiles give absolute priority to bicycles particularly over automobiles and close much of the original inner city to cars completely including upper grad avenue which we tried to do years ago two, make the city a center for low power alternative radio and TV with tax breaks for the broadcasters three, uncover our city's creeks and rivers again and open up the riparian corridors to the bay paint the Golden Gate Bridge golden really disappointed when I came out here it's painted red lead and I had enough of that in the Navy finally, number six tilt coy tower think what it did for Pisa just a half an inch that's all I'm asking where's Galileo? and speaking of the literary culture of the city finally I'd like to announce that city lights is just now attempting to create a non-profit foundation so that city lights may continue through the next century as a literary center and poetic presence in the city for such a foundation we need help philanthropic literary angels are invited to descend upon us poets come out of your closets open your windows, open your doors you have been holed up too long in your closed worlds no time now for the artist to hide above, beyond, behind the scenes indifferent, pairing his fingernails refining himself out of existence no time now for our little literary games 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 etc. this is the first part of a really long really long diatribe the end in this populist manifesto in the 1970s was proposed to stop mumbling in their beards to private audiences and say something important to the world a few years ago I gave a talk in Michael McClure's class at the California College of Arts and Crafts the title of which was why don't you paint something important there was a graffiti on the wall that said you're so minimal anyway it was an attempt to pry the artist poets out of their hermetic worlds parenthetically I must say that my manifesto called for such a cacophony of bad poetry that some editors felt like chanting poets go back in your closets the manifesto was not a very original Whitmanian call for universal poetry with what I call public surface a poetry very accessible to the common sensual surface that can be understood by most everyone without a very literary education but of course if it was to rise above the level of journalism it must have other subjective and or subversive levels well I'm still on the same kick most poets today still exist in a kind of poetry ghetto how to get pittances to publish poems compared to prose writers even in mass media if they manage to get in at all and poetry readings don't begin to pay the rent for most what to do about it how to get poetry out of the poetry ghetto the answer is obvious write poems that say something supremely original and supremely important which everyone aches to hear it cries out to be heard poetry that's news and is it naive to think that even the mass media might print it or air it if it were a new kind of news perhaps the poets would still be ignorant be ignored by our dominant culture because they're saying just what our materialist technophiliac world doesn't want to hear and the messenger with the unwelcome message will continue to be killed I would like to propose a regular monthly column in a daily newspaper with the title poetry is news it would begin with great poems of the past but still are news I think right off of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach I love let us be true to one another for we are here as on a darkling plane swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight where ignorant armies clash by night I think also of Whitman's I Hear America singing of poems by Homer, Shakespeare, W.B. Yates, Kavafi Pablo Neruda, Marion Moore E. E. Cummings, Kenneth Patch and Kenneth Rexraw Alan Ginsberg, Adrian Rich I think of Bob Dylan's early songs and of the Beatles Yellow Submarine of the Great Parameter Sutra and perhaps of the latest rap poetry at the New York and Cafe on the Lower East Side and I think of the French poet Jacques Prévert whom I translated when I was a student in France two of his near the end of an extremely important discourse the great man of state stumbling on a beautiful hollow phrase falls over it and undone with gaping mouth shows his teeth and the dental decay of his peaceful reasoning exposes the nerve of war the delicate question of money the free zone I put my cap in the cage and went out with a bird on my head so one no longer salutes asked the commanding officer no one no longer salutes replied the bird ah good excuse me I thought one saluted said the commanding officer you are fully excused everybody makes mistakes said the bird I love and beyond all this poetic intuition and the intuitions of great poetry still remain our best medium for fathoming men's fate in this vein here are a few proposed subjects for poets to ponder why is it dark at night why is there darkness at night is every orgasm a little death or a little birth is death male or female or neither la vida es sueño is life literally a dream and if so when will we truly awake I'll read some more San Francisco poems they were putting up the statue of St. Francis in front of the church of St. Francis in the city of San Francisco in a little side street just off the avenue where no bird sang and the sun was coming up on time in its usual fashion and just beginning to shine on the statue of St. Francis where no bird sang and a lot of old Italians were standing all around in the little side street just off the avenue watching the wily workers who were hoisting up the statue with the rain and other implements and a lot of young reporters in button down clothes were taking down the words of one young priest who was propping up the statue with all his arguments and all the while well no bird sang any St. Francis passion and while the lookers kept looking up at St. Francis with his arms outstretched to the birds which weren't there a very tall and very purely naked young virgin straw hair and wearing only a very small bird's nest in a very existential place kept passing through the crowd all the while and up and down the steps in front of St. Francis her eyes down cast all the while and singing to herself the statue was taken down years later the head priest changed there and he knew and didn't like the statue by Benny Bufano and it was removed and it now graces the parking lot at the Long Charmins Hall down by Fishman's Wharf now this dog really existed he got kind of notorious in North Beach because well you'll see this dog trots freely in the street and sees reality and the things he sees are bigger than himself and the things he sees are his reality drunks in doorways moons on trees dog trots freely through the street and the things he sees are smaller than himself fish on newsprint ants in holes, chickens in Chinatown windows their heads a block away the dog trots freely in the street and the things he smells smells something like himself the dog trots freely in the street past puddles and babies, cats and cigars pool rooms and policemen he doesn't hate cops he rarely has no use for them and he goes past them and past the dead cow's hung-up hole in front of the San Francisco meat market he would rather eat a tender cow than a tough policeman though either might do and he goes past the Romeo Ravioli factory and past Coyt's Tower and past Congressman Doyle of the Un-American Committee he's afraid of Coyt's Tower but he's not afraid of Congressman Doyle although what he hears is very discouraging very depressing very absurd to a sad young dog like himself to a serious dog like himself but he has his own free world to live in his own fleece to eat he will not be muzzled Congressman Doyle is just another fire hydrant to him the dog trots freely in the street and has his own dog's life to live and to think about and to reflect upon touching and tasting and testing everything without benefit of perjury a real realist with a real tale to tell and a real tale to tell it with a real live barking democratic dog engaged in real free enterprise with something to say about ontology something to say about reality and how to see it and how to hear it with his head cocked sideways at street quarters as if he is always just about to have his picture taken for Victor Records listening for his master's voice and looking like a living question mark into the great gramophone of puzzling existence with its wondrous hollow horn which always seems just about to spout forth some victorious answer to everything I'll show at George Kravsky's art gallery a couple years ago I guess I got this poem out of it except it actually goes back to the figurative painters that I knew I had a studio in 9 Mission Street where Frank Lobdell had a studio and Marty Snipper and I got my studio from I got my studio from House of Smith and those guys were heavy drinkers and they played jazz they had big parties and most of them blew some instrument and the openings in the galleries were falling down affairs the artist the party hoppers wolfing down the wine and cheese without a glance at what might be considered art at all those Thursday evening openings in San Francisco galleries and the critics and the crickets and the singles out to score and the docents of the donor classes sheathed in silk and Christian jor holding long stem glasses with the tide of tinkle voices rising and the painter to one side uprising the whole uprising as if from a most distant shore and saying to himself is this what I am painting for no wonder then that he adrift in this society doth drink too much and roll upon the floor this happens all the time in North Beach the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band marches right down Green Street and turns into Columbus Avenue where all the cafe sitters at the sidewalk cafe tables sit talking and laughing and looking right through it as if it happened every day in little old wooden North Beach in San Francisco but at the same time feeling thrilled by the stirring sound of the gallant marching band as if we're celebrating life and never heard of death and right behind it comes the open hearse with a closed casket and the big frame picture under glass propped up showing the patriarch who has just croaked and now all seven members of the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band with the faded gold braid on their beat up these hats raise their bent axes and start blowing all more or less together and out comes this onward Christian soldiers like you heard it once upon a time only much slower with a dead beat and now you see all the relatives behind the closed glass windows of the long black cars and their faces are all shiny like they've been weeping with washcloths and all super serious like as if the bottom has just dropped out of their private markets and there's the widow in weeds and the sister with the bent frame and the mad brother who never got through school and Uncle Louis with the wig and there they all are assembled together and facing each other maybe for the first time in a long time but their masks and public faces are all in place as they face outward behind the traveling corpse up ahead and oompa, oompa goes the band very slow with the trombones and the tuba and the trumpets and the big bass drum and the corpse hears nothing or everything and it's a glorious autumn day in Old North Beach if only he could have lived to see it only wouldn't we wouldn't have had the band who half an hour later can be seen struggling back silent along the sidewalks looking like a hungover broken down Irish bartenders dying for a drink or a last hurrah at the Golden Gate at the Golden Gate a single plover far at sea wings across the horizon a single rower almost out of sight roses cull into eternity and I take a Buddha crystal in my hand and begin becoming pure light I saw one of them I saw one of them sleeping huddled under cardboard by the church of St. Francis I saw one of them rousted by the priest I saw one of them squatting in bushes I saw another staggering against the plate glass window of a first-class restaurant I saw one of them in a phone booth shaking it I saw one with burlap feet I saw one in the grocery store come out with a pint I saw another come out with nothing I saw another putting a rope through the loops of his pants I saw one with a bird on his shoulder I saw one of them singing on the steps of City Hall in the so-cool city of love I saw one of them trying to give a lady cop a hug I saw another sleeping by the Brooklyn Bridge I saw another standing by the Golden Gate the view from there was great in Golden Gate Park that day a man and his wife were coming along through the enormous meadow which was the meadow of the world he was wearing green suspenders and carrying an old beat-up flute in one hand while his wife had a bunch of grapes which she kept handing out individually to various squirrels as if each were a little joke and then the two of them came on through the enormous meadow which was the meadow of the world and then at a very still spot where the trees dreamed and seemed to have been waiting through all time for them they sat down together on the grass without looking at each other and ate oranges without looking at each other and put the peels in a basket which they seemed to have brought for that purpose without looking at each other and then he took his shirt and undershirt off but kept his hat on sideways and without saying anything fell asleep under it and his wife just sat there looking at the birds which flew about calling to each other in the stilly air as if they were questioning existence or trying to recall something forgotten but then finally she too lay down flat and just lay there looking up at nothing yet fingering the old flute which nobody played and finally looking over at him without any particular expression except a certain awful look of terrible depression this is a point I wrote in Prague in May Prague is a great place these days Andre Kudrescu who is here tonight he was there this summer he didn't get the same impression I did I found it's like the sixties just happened there and the intellectuals and the artists who were all in jail under the dictatorship now running the cultural scene and the artists seem to be rushing around full of great ideas and excited and they haven't had it's like the sixties just happened they haven't had time to get cynical and disillusioned in the way the French are I mean I went to Paris from there and what a difference even the students around the Sorbonne looked totally bored this poem came to me in the middle of the night so I'll end with this Rivers of light my mind is racing in the middle of the night my mind races through the darkness around the world through the darkness of the world toward a tunnel of light it races through the night of Prague through Staramac Square with its Jan Hus sculpture reading love each other and the truth will triumph it races on through the night streets across the Charles Bridge across the river at the heart of Prague across the rivers of the world across the Rhine across the Rhône across the Sen across the Thames across Atlantic across Manhattan across Great Hudson into the heart of America my heart is racing now across America across Old Man River rolling along where is the light my heart is racing now across terrific Pacific across the river of yellow light of Sun Yat Sen across Gandhi's Ganges across Euphrates across the Nile across the Hellespunt across Tiber across Arno across Dante's River Sticks through the medieval darkness into the heart of the tunnel of light my heart and mind are racing now together on the same beat to the same music not the music of Carmina Burano it's the music of Don Giovanni it's Mozart's Horn Concerto it's the Yellow Submarine Yellow Submarine Yellow Submarine there is a sign in the light at the end of the tunnel I'm trying to read it we are all trying to read it dark figures dancing it in the half darkness light figures dancing it in the half light thank you all for coming thank you Mr. Furlingetti for a wonderful evening and let's all go home and write some poetry yeah let's do it thank you good evening