Lawrence Ferlinghetti says:

I have the same perception of the world, or the perception of reality, as a painter. If you’ll notice, practically any poem of mine that you may have at hand, you’ll see it’s very visual. A poem is usually a visual turn-on to begin with, and the idea is to make it into something more than a visual perception…. My poetry is definitely figurative. In other words, it’s a description of what’s actually before you in the visual world. Or that’s the way the poem begins…. The poem should have a public surface, by which I mean anybody who hasn’t had any education could still understand the poem. Then below that it should have a subjective or subversive level, which would make the poem more important than just a surface lyric that’s just giving you a nice picture…. Great writing is anything that gives you a view of reality that you never had before. For instance, when I first read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, I said, “Gosh, I’ve never seen the world like this before.” And that’s what great writers do. You could say that with Don Quixote, or you could say it with Shakespeare, or Whitman…. Either saying it in a new way or what they were saying was new. Sometimes both…. I stole many techniques, especially from people like E.E. Cummings, and the whole avant-garde tradition; James Joyce. In poetry and in painting both, you’re constantly stealing from the past. I mean, Picasso stole from everyone. You could say that we’re summarizing the past by theft and allusion.

It seems to me the poetry world is in a sad state these days. It seems to me it’s gotten back to somewhat the way it was before Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was published, which really was a watershed moment in the 1950s. After Howl was published, poetry was different. It was a whole new world in poetry. … Now today it seems like the Beat revolution never happened. We’ve got more poetry published, more poetry written and more poetry workshops today than ever in the history of the world. But it seems to me it’s pretty tame; not only politically, but generally in experimental avant-garde directions, I don’t see any great new vision…. They say that great art is made by hunger and passion. I think the population may get very hungry in the next 50 years.

I often get invited to universities, and the English professor or the writing professor or the writing workshop professor always wants to know my routine and do I start at a certain time every day, etc., do I brush my teeth first, etc., and do you write on the computer or pencil or what, and I always say, “It’s a trade secret.” So I’m really not interested in “craft”—I think it’s a miserable word to be applied to poetry. Do you think Keats and Shelley thought about “craft”? In fact, can you imagine Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth or any of the other great poets, let’s say Dante, can you imagine them going to a poetry workshop? 

If you’re going to be a writer you should sit down and write in the morning, and keep it up all day, every day. Charles Bukowski, no matter how drunk he got the night before or no matter how hungover he was, the next morning he was at his typewriter. Every morning. Holidays, too. He’d have a bottle of whiskey with him to wake up with, and that’s what he believed. That’s the way you became a writer: by writing. When you weren’t writing, you weren’t a writer.

I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away…. Time wears down the pencil.