Memories of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) aboard a Greenpeace ship

On Monday, 22 February 2021, American poet, publisher, and innovative book seller, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, died from lung disease, at the age of 101.

In the summer of 1977, Ferlinghetti joined the crew of the Greenpeace ship during the whale campaign and he wrote an historic poem in the ship’s dreambook.

Ferlinghetti was born in New York in 1919, earned a B.A. in journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, completed a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne in Paris, and published his first short stories in Carolina Magazine. He moved to San Francisco in 1951, and founded the first all-paperback bookstore in the US — the now-famous City Lights Books — to “democratize” modern literature by making new and innovative writers widely available.

City Lights began publishing their own books in 1955, featuring international writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Pablo Naruda, and became known for publishing renowned American beat-era writers such as Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman.

In 1957, US agents arrested Ferlinghetti on obscenity charges for publishing Ginsberg’s “Howl.” After an historic freedom of speech trial, the court acquitted Ferlinghetti, who became an international cultural hero. His City Lights bookstore became a hub for progressive politics and revolutionary writers.

Ferlinghetti’s own first collection of poems, A Coney Island Of The Mind, written in 1958 for jazz accompaniment, became his most iconic work. Nevertheless, “The greatest poem,” Ferlinghetti later wrote, “is lyric life itself.”

In September 1977, the Greenpeace ship James Bay, a Canadian mine-sweeper rechristened Greenpeace VII, had just confronted the Russian whaling fleet off the coast of California, when the crew arrived in San Francisco with photographs and film.

Greenpeace confronts Russian whalers, 1977: “I am what is left of Wild Nature.” © Greenpeace / Rex Weyler

Ferlinghetti visited the ship at Pier 32 in San Francisco harbor. After a tour of the ship, and a talk with several of the crew members, I invited the elder poet to join the crew, an invitation I knew I would have to clear with our skipper, George Korotva. Ferlinghetti eagerly accepted, and Korotva agreed. The poet and publisher had business to attend to so we departed, and he caught up with us in Seattle a week later, in early October.

Back at sea, we searched for the Russian whaling fleets, but they appeared to have retreated from the eastern Pacific. Over a coffee in the ship’s galley, Ferlinghetti told me the ship reminded him of his service in the US Navy during World War II. He recalled his experience as skipper of a submarine chaser — similar to the mine-sweeper James Bay — during the Normandy invasion. He told me that he had arrived in Nagasaki with the US Navy just weeks after the bomb had been dropped and that the experience had turned him into a lifelong pacifist. Ferlinghetti thumbed through a large black notebook that sat on the galley table, filled with entries from the crew.

He asked me about it, and I explained that two years earlier, during the first whale campaign, musician Mel Gregory had brought a notebook on board, labelled it “Greenpeace Dreambook,” and left it on the galley table for crew members to enter their dreams. This was Volume Two. The poet smiled and settled back to read the entries.

On the morning of 14 October, off Cape Flattery at the entrance to Juan de Fuca Strait outside Vancouver, Ferlinghetti sat down at the galley table, opened the Dreambook and wrote down his recollections from the night before:

Dreamt ofMoby Dick the Great White WhaleCruising aboutwith a flag flyingwith an inscription on it“I am what is left of Wild Nature”and Ahab pursuing in a jet boat with a ray gunand jet harpoons and super depth chargesand napalm flamethrowers and electricunderwater vibrators and the whole goryglorious efficient military-politicalindustrial-scientific technologyof the greatestcivilization theearth has everknowndevoted tothe absolute extinction anddeath of the natural world as we know itAnd Captain Ahab Captain Death Captain Anti-PoetryCaptain Dingbat No Face Captain Apocalypseat the helmof the Killer Ship of DeathAnd the blue-eyed whalesexhausted and runningbut stillsingingto each other . . .

Ferlinghetti published this poem the following year, in Northwest Ecolog (City Lights, 1978). Thereafter, whenever I visited San Francisco, I looked him up. He was always gracious with his time, and we typically had tea in his City Lights Bookstore office. He gave me signed copies of his books, and revised another poem from Northwest Ecolog, “Rough Song of Animals Dying,” to publish in our newspaper, Greenpeace Chronicles, which we did in November 1978. This poem had also emerged from a dream:

In a dream within a dream I dreamt a dreamof creatures everywhere dying outin shrinking rainforestsin piney woods & high sierrason shrinking prairies & tumbleweed mesas. . . a dreamof the earth heating up & drying outin the famous Greenhouse Effectunder its canopy of carbon dioxidebreathed out by a billioninfernal combustion engines . . .

These visions appear familiar now, but in 1979 they felt shocking. Almost no one had yet heard of the Greenhouse Effect. This was 10 years before Bill McKibben’s famous book on the subject of global warming, 35 years before Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.

Remembering Lawrence Ferlinghetti ignites in me a reminder that poets typically lead cultural change, serve as pioneering voices that might awaken an emerging zeitgeist, a new awareness arising in humanity. Ferlinghetti wrote his dark dreams not to lead us to despair, but rather to action.