BOLLEN: And have you stuck to all of those principles?

FERLINGHETTI: Of course. [laughs] But it wasn’t just going to Nagasaki; it was coming to San Francisco at a time when a new San Francisco was being born. I got here after coming back from the Sorbonne. I was a GI there. I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.

BOLLEN: I always wondered why the West became the cauldron of youth and not New York.

FERLINGHETTI: I was from New York and I tried to settle down there at the end of the war. I tried to get a job at publishers and newspapers, but everything was sewed up. Whereas in San Francisco, it was still wide open. It was still the last frontier in the ’40s. It seemed like it was possible to do anything you wanted to out here. And when you think of what did happen, what started out here and went east—just like the electronic revolution that started in Silicon Valley.BOLLEN: Time of Useful Consciousness is very much about the West-about the last frontier and the travelers along that road.

FERLINGHETTI: It’s one of a two-book series. The first one started in Europe, moved to New York, and ended with the assassination of Kennedy. This book takes off from that point and moves west.

BOLLEN: And there are Beat figures scattered in these poems. I wonder now how you align yourself with the legacy of the Beat poets.

FERLINGHETTI: I don’t mean to give them more weight than other poets. The bohemian generation is what they called people who didn’t lead conventional lives before the Second World War. When I arrived in San Francisco, I was still wearing my French beret! And then the Beats like Ginsberg and Kerouac, they were a few years younger than me. They weren’t old enough to be in the war. So there’s a difference. My poetics were totally different than Allen Ginsberg’s. We had the same political positions. Ginsberg’s background was immigrant Russian, Jewish, radical, communist. Typical New York radical. Threw potato salad at etiquette picnics. Whereas I grew up in very staid Westchester County. Totally different background. It was only when I got to San Francisco that I started listening to the first free radio, KPFA [a community-supported radio station in Berkeley, California]. KPFA had just been founded in 1949, and it was a totally different station than it is today. It started out as a station that really had a wide cultural program for that time. Alan Watts was on there. And so was Kenneth Rexroth, the most important poet and critic in San Francisco. He was published by New Directions in New York, published in The Nation, things like that. And he had a program. He didn’t just review books, he knew every possible field-geology, astronomy, philosophy, logic, classics. It was a total education listening to him. It was a radical position. I used to go to his soirees on Friday night. There were a lot of poets that would show up. He lived in the Fillmore District, which was black at that time. He lived at 250 Scott Street, above Jack’s Record Cellar. Anyway, Friday night soirees at his house were old and young, but just poets. That’s where I met Kerouac and [Neal] Cassady and Gregory Corso . . .