The Literarian Award - 2005
The Literarian Award is presented to an individual for outstanding service to the American literary community, whose life and work exemplify the goals of the National Book Foundation to expand the audience for literature and to enhance the cultural value of literature in America.
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI, Recipient of the 2005 LITERARIAN AWARD
Presented at the 2005 National Book Awards Ceremony and Dinner
November 16, 2005
New York Marriott Marquis, Times Square, New
York, New York
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI:
For a while, I thought we were on “Prairie
Home Companion”. I don’t have
half the wit that Garrison does, that makes
me a halfwit. Anyway, I am honored indeed
and I’m also glad to have published
a book by my introducer.
What is a “literarian” anyway? Sounds a bit old school, doesn’t it? A smart friend of mine said, “It’s for old guys.” Well, it’s for young guys of both sexes and many colors to carry forward the tradition of great literacy. I come from a New York generation which was before the Beat Generation, a generation that assumed that you would know the allusion when you referred to such things as Prufrock or Stephen Daedalus or Maud Gonne or Godot or Penelope’s unraveling her knitting at night or Dover Beach or Walden Pond or “lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d”. The absence of Third World writers, authors of color, from the list is shocking but, at that time, nobody even thought of such a thing back then, in the last white century.
Today it’s a cliché at this
point. But faced with the dumbing down of
America, the literarian is really an endangered
species. It is not true that President Bush
believes that anyone caught reading a book
should be banned from government but the
barbarians certainly are at the gates and
our commercial dominant culture welcomes
them. The dominant American mercantile culture
may globalize the world but it is not the
mainstream culture of our civilization.
The true mainstream is made, not of oil
but of literarians, publishers, bookstores,
editors, libraries, writers and readers,
universities and all the institutions that
support them. That is the real mainstream
of our civilization.
It will survive, if anything survives, after the electricity goes off and electronic civilization fades away, when Nature strikes back in retaliation for what the dominant culture is doing to it. Coming to your local theater soon, the day after tomorrow. See you at the show.
I’ll end with a poem I wrote just before 9/11:
Are there not still fireflies?
Are there not still fireflies?
Are there not still four leaf clovers?
Is not our land still beautiful, our cities
Never bombed by foreign invaders,
Never occupied by iron armies speaking iron
tongues?
Are not our warriors still valiant, ready
to defend
us?
Are not our Senators still wearing fine
togas?
Are we not still a great people in the greatest
country in all the world?
Is this not still a free country?
Are not our views still ours, our gardens
still
full of flowers, our ships with full cargoes?
Why then do some still fear the barbarians
coming,
coming, coming in their huddled masses?
What is that sound that fills the air, drumming,
drumming?
Is not Rome still Rome?
Is not Los Angeles still Los Angeles?
Are these really the last days of the Roman
Empire?
Is not beauty still beauty and truth still
truth?
Are there not still poets? Are there not
still
lovers?
Are there not still mothers, sisters and
brothers?
Is there not still a full moon once a month?
Are there not still fireflies?
Are there not still stars at night?
Can we not still see them in bold night
signaling
to us our so-called manifest destinies?
[Applause]
Thank you.
Photo Credit: Robin Platzer/Twin Images
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The
first recipient was poet and social activist Lawrence
Ferlinghetti in 2005. The Award recognized Ferlinghetti's
tireless work on behalf of poets and the entire literary
community for over fifty years.