Not P but Beat: Lawrence Ferlinghetti Centennial Interview

[Jochen Stremmel]

Thank you very much, Allan: nice photograph.

I think the poem is about 12 years old, there's a clip on youtube from 2007
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKCblAJtzgE) where it is called a recent
effort.

Am Mi., 9. Jan. 2019 um 14:58 Uhr schrieb Allan Balliett <
allan.balliett at gmail.com>:

> Ferlinghetti has a new book coming out in March to commemorate his
> hundredth birthday. He talks about it, the state of American and the state
> of San Francisco, month other things here
> <
> http://www.documentjournal.com/2018/12/lawrence-ferlinghetti-on-the-old-san-francisco-his-new-novel-and-his-first-100-years/
> >
> .
>
> Here's an old poem of his, sorry, don't have the date, but it's probably
> from the Nixon-era, making it a deomonstrtion of Trump as a logical
> "evolution" of American politics, not a malignancy that appeared out of
> nowhere.
>
>
> “Pity the Nation” (After Khalil Gibran)
>
> ‘Pity the nation whose people are sheep
> And whose shepherds mislead them
> Pity the nation whose leaders are liars Whose sages are silenced
>
> And whose bigots haunt the airwaves Pity the nation that raises not its
> voice Except to praise conquerors
> And acclaim the bully as hero
>
> And aims to rule the world
> By force and by torture
> Pity the nation that knows
> No other language but its own
> And no other culture but its own
> Pity the nation whose breath is money And sleeps the sleep of the too well
> fed Pity the nation oh pity the people
>
> who allow their rights to erode
> and their freedoms to be washed away
> My country, tears of thee
> Sweet land of liberty!’
>
> -Allan in WV
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>