No Longer an Abstraction

The beat poets were a growing group of intellectuals that experimented with drugs, made art, wrote, and were great conversationalists that wanted to spark change. They were firm believers that school is not required for thinking, and that words are one’s best weapon. Beat poets urged their readers to do the same, along with also breaking traditional writing by changing syntax and the format of their poems. The beats rejected what the standards of their time were, and were determined to show what living conditions were really like. They explored different religions and spiritualities, rejected materialism and welcomed in conversations of stimulation and change.

Ferlinghetti, a poet, painter and activist who co-founded the City Lights Bookstore, urges his reader to use words as their weapon of choice in his poem, Poetry as Insurgent Art. “You can conquer the conquerors with words....” Words are how they stayed stimulated- they thought that boredom was a choice, as they broke tradition and fought social climates with their pen. Poetry for them was not an abstraction- they were writing their ideas about events. Ferlinghetti says, “If you call yourself a poet, don’t just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a ‘take your seat’ practice. Stand up and let them have it.” Ferlinghetti uses this as an example of how poetry and art should be used to take a stand against social, economic and political adversaries, and shows how just words are able to spark change and ideas into the heads of the readers of the poems that they wrote. Each of the poets were determined to give notice through issues through art- whether it was painting, writing, music, etc., the desire to spark change and be intellectuals without institutionalized education was a want they shared. Ferlinghetti thought, for the most part, that poetry could spark conversation and change the world. He asks his readers to use it, and to not let their words be “Write living newspapers...Your poems must be more than want ads for broken hearts”. This would stray away from the Poe’s of the world and lean more towards the Thoreau’s and Whitman’s, using their pens and words and thoughts to speak about what other’s may not want to hear. Ferlinghetti says, “don’t let them tell you your poetry is bull-...Don’t ever believe poetry is irrelevant during dark times.” Ferlinghetti and the poets of Greenwich village and City Lights indeed changed the world and lit a match that changed American literature and the country itself.