Frank O’Hara

New York School of Poetry

Political, socially apathetic, and avowedly amoral, an irreverent group of friends who met at Harvard in the 1950s became a distinctive movement in mid-century American poetry. The New York School — so-called because of their location and allusions to the city’s urban pleasures — shocked, delighted, and confounded their growing audience in 1950s and 1960s by their ebullient sense of the absurd. Electrified by John Cage’s experimental ‘music of chance’ and the process-focused paintings of Abstract Expressionists, the sophisticated, spontaneous, even silly surface of their poetry masked a more serious sensitivity to deeper currents of nihilism. Their voice was both campy and abstract, fusing disorienting frivolity with surreal imagery in free-form assemblages. Unduly fond of playful, irrational poetic devices — strings of puns, homophones, a residue of incoherent randomness — the New York School’s playful verbal puzzles seemed to lack depth or meaning. Yet this affectless, meaningless void was all a part of their collage-style impenetrability, a comment upon the sense of aimless absurdity that defines the modern sensibility. Urbane and street-smart, they parodied the navel-gazing, philosophic reveries indulged in by Beat and Black Mountain poets, earning a reputation for shallow, inconsequential humor at the service of their own skewed vision of the world. Besides a scathing wit, Surrealist tendencies, and an absurdist view of life, the New York School’s trademark became their use of vivid, hallucinatory images and cryptic prose played out in amusingly experimental forms. Associated poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, as well as compatriots Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, plied their unique trade until the late 1960s, when O’Hara’s untimely death and Ashbery’s defection to a poetics of his own diluted the School’s wry, comedic forum.

Barbara Guest, O’Hara, Schuyler and Ashbery all wrote reviews for ARTnews, one of the most influential art magazines of the 1960s. Ashbery was executive editor for nine years. Schuyler and O’Hara both worked at the Museum of Modern Art. Ashbery described O’Hara as the poet who was able to “cobble everything together” and strengthen and describe the relationships between the worlds of poetry and art. O’Hara’s poetry, because of its familiarity of language and reference and autobiographical nature, contains references to Hartigan, Freilicher, Ashbery, Koch, Rivers, Goldberg, and Guest. O’Hara describes the New York School in “Larry Rivers: A Memoir”:

There was a great respect for anyone who did anything marvelous: when Larry introduced me to de Kooning, I nearly got sick, as I almost did when I met Auden; if Jackson Pollock tore the door off the men’s room at the Cedar it was something he just did and was interesting, not an annoyance. You couldn’t see into it anyway, and besides there was then a sense of genius.

,,,

Frank O’Hara

Frank (Francis Russell) O’Hara was born on June 27, 1926, in Baltimore, Maryland. He grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O’Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.

Following the war, O’Hara studied at Harvard College, where he majored in music and worked on compositions and was deeply influenced by contemporary music, his first love, as well as visual art. He also wrote poetry at that time and read the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

While at Harvard, O’Hara met John Ashbery and soon began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O’Hara changed his major and left Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English. He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received his M.A. in 1951. That autumn, O’Hara moved into an apartment in New York. He was soon employed at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and began to write seriously.

O’Hara’s early work was considered both provocative and provoking. In 1952, his first volume of poetry, A City in Winter, attracted favorable attention; his essays on painting and sculpture and his reviews for ArtNews were considered brilliant. O’Hara became one of the most distinguished members of the New York School of poets, which also included Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch.

O’Hara’s association with the painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, also leaders of the New York School, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry. He attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he collaborated with the painters to make “poem-paintings,” paintings with word texts.

O’Hara’s most original volumes of verse, Meditations in an Emergency (1956) and Lunch Poems (1964), are impromptu lyrics, a jumble of witty talk, journalistic parodies, and surrealist imagery.

O’Hara continued working at the Museum of Modern Art throughout his life, curating exhibitions and writing introductions and catalogs for exhibits and tours. In 1966, while vacationing on Fire Island, Frank O’Hara was killed in a sand buggy accident. He was forty years old.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

A City Winter, and Other Poems (1952)
Meditations in an Emergency (1956)
Odes (1960)
Second Avenue (1960)
Lunch Poems (1964)
Love Poems (1965)
In Memory of My Feelings (1967)
The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1971)
Selected Poems (Knopf, 2008)

Prose

Jackson Pollack (1959)
The New Spanish Painting and Sculpture (1960)

Drama

Collected Plays (1978)

…

Personal Poem
by Frank O’Hara

Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now I’m happy for a time and interested

I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I’d like to have a silver hat please
and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five years my batting average
is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it’s
cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich
and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so

“Okay I’ll Call You/ Yes Call Me”:

Frank O’Hara’s “Personism”   by Stephen Burt
Academic poets from the 1940s avoided manifestos like the proverbial plague; avowedly anti-academic poets from the 1950s therefore embraced them. The New American Poetry 1945-60 concludes with forty pages of statements on poetics, most of which now seem useful in inverse proportion to their length. Frank O’Hara in that volume called his contemporaries “a useful thorn to have in one’s side” and said something that might strike his casual readers as surprisingly serious: “at times when I would rather be dead the thought that I could never write another poem has so far stopped me.” O’Hara, in other words, took his poetry as seriously as anyone else whose poetry you’d want to spend a lot of time reading.
And yet, and yet: it’s hard to imagine O’Hara saying, as Wallace Stevens famously said, “a book of poems is a damned serious thing.” It’s hard to imagine O’Hara saying, even, as William Carlos Williams said, that a mere poem felt like a bomb dropped on him. Part of the seriousness in O’Hara’s approach (as with Lord Byron or W. H. Auden) involved making much of his poetry seem tossed-off, personable, the evidence of a personality you’d go out of your way to encounter. (That he did have such a personality seems almost too good to be true.
O’Hara’s best-known and most tongue-in-cheek manifesto “Personism” came not in the New American pile-up but in the magazine Yugen, in September 1959. The magazine, like the manifesto, owes part of its existence to LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), a debt O’Hara acknowledged readily in the essay: Personism “was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones.” In actuality, it grew out of a love affair (not with Jones; probably with Vincent Warren) and consisted of the smitten O’Hara’s realization that love poems might not differ in intention, nor in effect, from phone calls: “I realized that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born.” Poems, in other words, are only one kind of intimate communication, and ought to be at least as impressive, at least as personal perhaps, as the others (even if their forms differ). Every poem is or could be a “Personal Poem” (an O’Hara title), with an “I” and a “you,” and a hope, not that Heaven will favor the poet, but that “one person out of the 8,000,000 is / thinking of me.”

What I value most in “Personism” might just be its tone: “look,” it says, “reading these things may not actually help you read poems, and it probably won’t help me write them, but isn’t it fun?” No thousand-word (no thirty-thousand-word) document can offer a set of rules as fruitful for readers as the countless, nameless unremembered acts, reflexes, habits and associations you can encounter by reading a lot of poems. You can start up more arguments, more discussions, through manifestos and claims about movements (I should know: I wrote one), but you can usually do more good in the long run by listening closely to individual poems.

What I value second-most in “Personism” is the way it serves as a backhanded guide to O’Hara’s own practice, and to one of the virtues in his poems, a slippery virtue which makes an aesthetic asset out of a psychological fact which usually interferes with fair reading and hearing. Like it or not, when you’ve met someone, and especially if you like them, you almost automatically bring more to, find yourself better-disposed towards, and hence take more from, think more of, that someone’s writings. But no poet’s work survives for long if it depends just on the judgment of personal friends, or even on our knowledge of the author’s life (otherwise Oscar Wilde’s sonnets would have as much currency as his plays). Most major poets, dead or alive (even those who refer frequently to their own lives: Wordsworth, Yeats, Rich, Lowell) stand up perfectly well if you don’t think much about what it would be like to meet them.

With O’Hara, though, you have to think about what it would be like to meet him: the poems almost cajole you into doing so, and you’ll be glad you did. O’Hara figured out how to get you to read his poems (even or especially if you’d never met him) not as you’d read other poems by other dead strangers, but more or less as you’d read poems by your close friends. The style O’Hara gradually invented (you can see it as early as “Autobiographia Literaria,” though it doesn’t take charge until maybe 1956) reverses the process by which you think more, get more from a poet’s work, judge the work more sympathetically, give it more play, if you already and like the poet personally. Instead, O’Hara’s poems give strangers the feeling that we know and like him.

That’s how a Personist poem works, and it’s why Personism isn’t (as I once believed) just a parody of manifestos, but a good way to describe what O’Hara invented, though not an explanation of why it works. O’Hara’s best poems come off informal, almost inordinately sympathetic, charmed, especially alert to comedy, intimately privileged. They leave me, at least, almost defensive (I want to explain away flaws in the work) but finally admiring (I look up to him, I want his approval, rather than wanting to help the poor guy, as when I read John Clare). Some of those feelings are just my reaction to talent, to what Walt Whitman called “personal force,” and some are the feelings I ordinarily get about poetry (good or at least promising) by people I know.

That second set of feelings comprises the effect “Personism” really names. Confessional poetry (Life Studies, Heart’s Needle) also put the poem “between two persons instead of two pages,” but in those books, attentive readers become not the poet’s friend but his or her therapist, hearing exactly the facts and reactions people do not ordinarily tell their friends. The Personist poem instead makes the reader a nearly intimate equal. (It’s tempting to see Personism, the style, as a reaction to Confessionalism, except that O’Hara invented his own style first.) “Personism” becomes both a manifesto and a parody of a manifesto, and if it seems to name a point of view which makes poems obsolete, it also names an aesthetic effect which only a few poets achieve.

Plenty of poets have learned from O’Hara, and they’re not shy about saying so: how to emulate the exhilarating life of happy crowds, how to make poems that sound like New York, how to make words acknowledge the accomplishments of abstract visual art, how to “let our guard down” (yes, those are scare quotes), and how to emulate the energetic representational practice of post-abstract painters such as Larry Rivers. Plenty of devices all too common in today’s young poets have exempla in O’Hara: “I am a mural / you are two big cows hanging your head / I am / a liver an orator,” he declares in “Seven Nine Seven”. And yet I can think of just one living poet whose poems not only treat readers as near-but-not-quite-intimate-equals, but consistently, through tone and pace internal to the verse, encourage me to hear and judge his work by the inevitably-more-generous standards I normally give (however much I try to resist doing so) only to poems by my friends: that poet is Albert Goldbarth. What does he know that I don’t?

Malay Roychoudury

This trail of following the Future Poetry has mostly been a study of English language poetry. But certainly Bengali poetry would have been of interest to Sri Aurobindo and perhaps the most noteworthy Bengali Poetry for our purposes in exploring the Beats, was by disaffected, alienated young poets who were members of a literary movement called themselves the Hungry Generation.  Several poets in this movement had a big impact on Allan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder who visited them in India. What follows is a brief summary of what these Bengali poets were up to as well as a letter from perhaps the most central figure of the movement Malay Roychoudury on his influence on Allan Ginsberg -who proves himself completely inept in assimilating the cultural nuances of India- One of the most well known poems of Roychoudury entitled Stark Electric Jesus is also included. One noteworthy trait of some members of the Hungry Generation is that although they eschewed the traditional cultural/religious values of India and many of their poems were considered at the time to be obscene, that they apparently did not entirely loose faith in some aspects of their indigenous spiritual heritage and some of these sensibilities were in turn transmitted to Ginsberg. rc

Hungry Generation

Prof Howard McCord

Poetry of Chaos and Death

Every attitude has its poetry, and a small, neat nation may, in one age, present a singularly unified attitude and its poetry to the world, as did England in the last sixteenth century. But such a tidy clarity is impossible for India. No country in the world offer greater extremes or variety in the total experiences which shape poets. Every social ordering from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, may be found; every major religion and most of the minor ones are practiced: the world views and value structures of India are nearly endless and expressed in 723 languages. The only area in the world that offers even remotely an equivalent complexity and confusion is the whole of Africa. Two things give the country what unity it has: the first is false generalization—that there is an Indian temperament, discernable both in the North and the South, composed of egoism, agility of mind, quickness to violence, a penchant for vaporous theories and an honest material avarice; the second is a terrible truth—that nowhere else is there such an omnipresent doom, of the implacable approach of absolute disaster and collapse.

India produces many kinds of poetry; I am familiar only with that in English, and it falls roughly into three categories. The first is simply bad: the sentimental outpourings of the young or heartsick; formal and bombastic occasional verse; a gauche and florid romanticism: grotesque prayers and pious exhortations, and such like, all of which suffer from banality, false emotion, and technical incompetence. The second is compromised and serious, often well-written poems which sometimes move me but most often seem too dependent on the poetic traditions of England a generation or more ago, and the bland and inoffensive taste of the upper middle class. These works exist in the limbo of the lukewarm, and represent a timid art that dares neither to hate nor love too much. Like our own academic verse, these poems reflect calm intelligence, tamed passion and the polite despairs of gentlemen born into a world they never made. The poems are cultured, introspective, sensitive, and are most true to the plight of the Indian estranged from his own culture by his mastery of English, but whose situation is tolerable, and who would not admit that poetry is a criminal occupation. These are sincere and harmless poems, and aside from a little local colour, could have been written in Leeds or Philadelphia. The denatured cosmopolitanism that infects the poetry of the West prevails in India as well, and few of the poems carry any sense of place, or the sound of a man speaking, or the rasping smell of cow-dung fires. The academic poets of India have yet to grasp the vernacular and all that implies.

The poetic vision of the Hungry Generation erupted in Bengal five years ago, and has rapidly spread to such cities like New Delhi, Bombay and Allahabad. This kind of poetry is dangerous and revolutionary, cleanses by violence and destruction, unsettles and confounds the reader. This is the poetry of the disaffected, the alienated, the outraged, the dying. It is a poetry which alarms and disgusts the bourgeois, for it describes their own sickened state more clearly than they wish to hear, and exposes the hypocrisy of their decency. One reaction of good citizens has been to accuse the poets of hysteria and obscenity. The long and painful persecution of Malay Roychoudhury, ending in his conviction on 28^th December 1965 on charges of obscenity, indicates the virulence and depth of the fear which these poets have uncovered.

The energy of the poets is hysterical: the imagery of the poem is obscene. It is meant to be. But I take obscenity to be a just and natural reaction to a vile existence.. Obscenity is the desperate music of poets who dare speak out against the rape of mind and soul that marks our demented and vicious civilization. Obscenity is the last attempt by honest men to speak their agony to those who torture them. Obscenity is a moral weapon with which to attack the degrading and filthy use of power that characterizes our age, and assert contempt for the managers of our lives.

These poets say what poets and prophets have said for a hundred years—that our civilization is desperately sick, that our consciousness is polluted, our values murderous. They are outraged at the cruel and deliberate waste of beauty and intelligence that world culture represents, and sickened by the perversions of life our societies demand. Their poems record the ugly, numbing truth that most men delight in these horrors, lust after their own destruction, and fear life insanely. The poets are nihilists. They are pessimists. And most will die before their time. But each of them has a vision of what man ought to be, and should be, and their poetry stems from the sad knowledge of what he is. I value their work most because it is an honest response to the reality of life in India. And India endures now what will come to us all before long. Pound said that poets were antennae of the race, and they are—but they are also gotten on Cassandra, and will not be believed until too late, when the vacuous mouthings that pass as earthly wisdom are known by all to be empty, dreadful lies and the hideous future we have let to be prepared for us arrives. We will not be saved. This is the obscenity their poetry must celebrate.

Malay Roychoudhury, a young Bengali poet, has been a central figure in the Hungry Generation’s attack on the Indian cultural establishment since the Movement began in the early sixties. The Indian press believes to this day that the group’s origins can be traced to the 1962 Indian visit of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gary & Jeanne Snyder. But however stimulating the visit of these American poets, however inspired by such writers as Artaud, Genet, Michaux, Burroughs, Miller, and Celine, I believe the Movement is autochthonous and stems from the profound dislocations of Indian life.

There was little notice of the Movement in the United States until 1963 when City Lights Journal carried news of the group; In 1964 the Hungrealist Manifestoes appeared in KULCHUR#15, and EL CORNO EMPLUMADO and EVERGREEN REVIEW printed letters telling of the Movement’s legal difficulties. For in the autumn of 1964, as many learned from a November issue of TIME, six poets of the Hungry Generation, Malay Roychoudhury, Saileswar Ghosh, Subhas Ghose and Pradip Choudhuri, had been arrested and charged with conspiring to produce and distribute an obscene book in violation of Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code. The book was an anthology of their writings, and STARK ELECTRIC JESUS was Malay Roychoudhury’s contribution. At their arrest, all were suspended from their jobs, and when I saw them in June 1965, they had been out of work nearly ten months. Later that summer charges were dropped against five, but the prosecution of Malay Roychoudhury continued. On 28 December 1965 he was found guilty by a Calcutta court and sentenced to a fine of 200 rupees or one month’s imprisonment. The poem was banned. He has not been reinstated in his job, and life, as he writes, “has become hard and difficult…I am more or less living on alms”.

In spite of prosecution and harassment, the Hungry Generation has continued to produce and publish poetry and prose. Acid, destructive, morbid, hallucinatory, nihilistic, outrageous, obscene, mad, shrill—these characterize the terrifying and cleansing visions that the Hungrealists insist Indian literature must endure. With few exceptions, contemporary Indian literature is school master’s stuff: pallid, otiose, and dull. It is timid and moralistic, and when it is not politely realistic, it is romantic and aimlessly and endlessly philosophical. Bhabani Bhattacharya and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are among the exceptions, the one possessing a dank tartness like that of Albert Cossery, the other the lucid wit of Jane Austin. But only the Hungry Generation, excluded from the academies and the literary aristocracy, can the fullness of urgency and despair be seen, for they more than any other group have realized that there is very possibly no hope for India, that what lies ahead is chaos and collapse. They are not revolutionaries, only mourners. Revolution is pointless when betrayal has been so deep. All that remain is to protest, scream, love everything to foolishness—especially India—then nod wisely and callously at death.

…….

Impact of the Hungry Generation (Hungryalist)

Impact of the Hungry Generation (Hungryalist)
Literary Movement on Allen Ginsberg

Malay Roychoudhury

Allen Ginsberg, the American Beat poet, was influenced by the Indian worldview in general and the Hungryalist movement in Bangla literature in particular in more ways than one. This was the main refrain of my discourse which I presented to Bill Morgan, the Beat researcher and Bob Rosenthal, Secretary, Allen Ginsberg Trust who along with Sharmy Pandey and Subhankar Das, poets and Ginsberg’s Bengali translators, visited me at my Kolkata residence during the last week of January 2004.

The Hungry Generation literary movement was launched by me in November 1961 with the publication of a manifesto on poetry in English. I had to resort to English as I was residing at Patna at that time. Several manifestoes had been published before Ginsberg reached Kolkata in July 1962. Since they were in English, the Hungryalist bulletins were distributed for free throughout the country and Ginsberg had started collecting them right from the first one when he visited New Delhi on arrival to meet Pupul Jayakar who had requested Beat poets and writers to visit India and popularize use of Khadi wear among hippies. He mailed these bulletins regularly to his friends at California and New York, as well as to his personal archive at New Jersey, later sold to Stanford University.

Allen Ginsberg, the poet of Howl and Kaddish, after his interaction with the painters and poets of the Hungryalist movement, could never remain the same person who had departed for the orient to get rid of negative image he had himself cultivated in the USA after the success of Howl. Ginsberg’s biographers and critics, most of whom are American, are almost ignorant of Indian complexities, have never taken into account the contributory factors that impacted the poet to such an extent that his post India poems changed structurally, semantically and semiotically, though his Indian Journals reveal that he had been making vain efforts to regain rhymes, meters and breath-spans in Howl-Kaddish refrain. Poems written by Ginsberg after his India visit are composed in the breath-span of mantras, pranayamas as well as Bangla poetry of 1960s, all of which remained beyond Euro-American academic comprehension. Unlike T.S.Eliot, whose usage of mantra was a modernist technical intervention outside the Indian world view. Ginsberg’s chanting and singing of mantras were pregnant with values inculcated in a historical faith-penumbra of the people he lived with in India.

Whether be it Benaras, Kolkata, Tarapith, Chaibasa or Patna, Ginsberg invariably visited the burning ghats (where the dead are consigned to flames), accompanied by one or several members of the Hungryalist movement. The experience was so earthshaking for him (quite a normal one for any Hindu) that he could, for the first time in his life, understand the difference between the occidental quest for immortality and the oriental quest for eternity. From the collection of letters of another Beat poet Gregory Corso, An Accidental Autobiography, edited by Bill Morgan, it is evident that Ginsberg had been conveying his state of mind on the subject to his friends in America. His biographers and critics, who are either Jew or Christian, have never taken into epistemic consideration the dedication page of Ginsberg’s Indian Journals. Why were the Hindu sadhus and sannyasies been crelentlessly sought after by Ginsberg consequent upon his association with the poets and painters of the Hungry Generation movement needs to be examined by researchers.

Prior to Allen Ginsberg, another Beat poet Gary Snyder had visited India but instead of directly trying to contact the Hungryalists he sought the help of US consulate. Unfortunately the consulate receives feedback from their Bengali agents who are driven by their personal interests. Snyder was sent by the consulate to the Krittibas group of poets, a pro Establishment commercial renegade coterie whose machinations had led to the arrest and trial of the Hungryalists between September 1964 and July 1967. When Dick Bakken, editor of Salted Feathers wanted to bring out a special issue on the Hungryalist movement, this is what a vocal member of Krittibas group wrote to him on December 12, 1966:

My Dear Mr. Bakken,

I am still bewildered why any one in Portland, Oregon, should be interested in publishing a special issue on the Hungry Generation. Is there not enough local talent in Oregon to fill up the pages of ‘Salted Feathers’, which you describe as a small magazine? Or is it due to an interest in the out of the way, the quaint, and the fantastic? It is like someone in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, bringing out a special number on the Trotskyite poets, revolutionary American poetry by bringing out the ‘Penny Paper of Iowa City’. Hurrah for the public relations work and promotion by Allen Ginsberg, Time magazine and the silly magistrate who convicted Malay.

Very sincerely yours
Jyotirmoy Datta

What Jyotirmoy and critics like him failed to comprehend was that it was we Hungryalists who had created a great impact on Allen Ginsberg and that special issues or supplements US, Latin American and European periodicals such as City Lights Journal(Lawrence Ferlinghetti), El Corno Emplumado(Margaret Randall), Kulchur(Lita Hornick), Evergreen Review(Barney Rosset), Tribal Press(Howard McCord) and Burning Water, San Francisco Earthquake, Intergalactic, Ezra, Damn You, My Own Mag, Vincent, Panic, Ramparts, The Los Angeles Free Press, Eco, Iconolatre, Imago, Where, Work etc on the Hungryalist movement were not for nothing.

Another Krittibas writer Sandipan Chattopadhyay had volunteered to become police witness against the Hungryalists after he dissociated from the movement and submitted the under noted statement to the Police Station on March 15, 1965:

I am a graduate of Calcutta University and employed as an Assistant Inspector, Calcutta Corporation. I am also a writer and used to visit the College Coffee House where young writers of Calcutta generally assembled in the evening. Samir Roychowdhury is a personal friend of mine. I came to know the sponsors of Hungry Generation, Namely Shakti Chatterjee, Malay Roychoudhury and others. Although I am not directly connected with the Hungry Generation but I was interested in the literary movement. Some of the manifesto of the Hungry Generation contains advertisements of my literary works. In one of the publications my name was cited as publisher. This was probably done with a motive to exploit my reputation as writer but since my prior consent was not taken I took exception. The publication in question also came to my notice. As a poet myself I do not approve either the theme or the language of the poem of Malay Roychoudhury captioned Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar(Stark Electric Jesus). I have severed all connection with Hungry Generation. I had correspondence with Malay Roychoudhury who often sought my advice on literary matters.

Though in court Sandipan had testified against the Hungryalist movement, in 1974 while writing his own introduction in Adil Jussawala edited New Writing in India published by Penguin Books he had claimed, ‘He was also responsible for starting the Hungryalist movement in Bengal, along with Shakti Chatterjee the poet and Utpal Basu, a writer now living in London’. The leader of Krittibas group, Sunil Gangopadhyay, in his letter to me dated June 10,1964 had threatened the Hungryalist movement in these words, ‘I had not destroyed your Hungry Generation in the very beginning quite affectionately as some of my friends are there in that team. Remember, I still have those powers’. Obviously, police swooped down on six of us in September 1964 on charges of conspiracy against the state and obscenity in literature.

As against the cultural politics such as above resorted to by Bengali intelligentia, the impact the Hungryalist movement had created on Allen Ginsberg is evident from the under noted letter dated September 28, 1964 he had written to me from New York.

Dear Malay

I saw clippings from Blitz, Sept 19, 1964 p.6 and also I think Calcutta Statesman 17.9.64 that you were arrested as well as Samir and two boys named Ghosh whom I don’t know, for your Hungry Generation Manifestoes. Are these the same as were printed in the issue of Kulchur 15? As soon as I read about it, I racked my brains what I could do to help and so today wrote a whole bunch of letters to the following; A.S.Raman, Editor Illustrated Weekly, Dr. Dadabhai Naoroji Road, Bombay. Sharad Deora, Editor, Gyanodaya, 18 Brabourne Road, Calcutta. Abu Sayeed Ayyub, Editor, Quest (sent message to him indirectly) and member of Indian congress for Cultural Freedom.Shyam Lall, editor, Times of India, New Delhi. Khushwant Singh, novelist and member of Congress for Cultural Freedom, 49 East Sujan Singh Road, New Delhi.

I also wrote to Jyoti Datta and phoned Lita Hornick of Kulchur. I asked, the Indians above all, what they could do to help you, suggested they activate the Congress for Cultural Freedom as this sort of thing is the proper activity of the Congress and Quest magazine and told them that the manifestoes were printed here in City Lights Journal and Kulchur and were not obscene. So the whole mess was scandalous bureaucratic illiteracy. Please, if you need literary help or advice do try to contact these people for support. And in addition perhaps ask for advice/help from Mrs. Pupul Jayakar, 130 Sundar Nagar, New Delhi – she was our protectress in India, we stayed with her, she’s friend of Indira Gandhi and others. I also notified Bonnie Crown here in New York, the Asia Society, 112 E 64 Street, NYC – she commissioned poetry to be translated by Sunil and others and that pack of poems plus your Rhythms etc will be printed together by City Lights. She can send you a letter on her official stationery saying your manifestoes are known, published and respected in US and not considered obscene. I will also enquire of Mr. S.K.Roy, the Indian Consul General here in New York who I do not know what he can do at this distance.

If there’s anything you want me to do, let me know. Write me and let me know the situation is and what the cause of the trouble is. Judging from Blitz I suspected jealous ideological Marxists or something. Are you ruined at the bank? I hope not. Regard to your family. Get the Congress for Cultural Freedom to supply you with a good lawyer who’ll take no fee. If the Indian Congress doesn’t cooperate, let me know, we’ll complain to the European Office. Who are the Ghose brothers? The manifestoes on prose and politics are pretty funny. I thought they were a little literary-flowery, but they must have hit some mental nail on the head. Good luck.

Jai Ram
Allen Ginsberg

The Congress for Cultural Freedom did nothing; rather Abu Sayeed Ayyub had written a dirty letter about the movement to Ginsberg himself. Bengali literati such as Shankha Ghosh, Pabitra Sarkar, Debesh Roy, Ashok Mitra, Amiya Deb, Amitabha Dasgupta, Arun Sen etc who get alarmed if a Latin American or African writer suffers from a sore in his arse, were conspicuous by their stony silence all though the ordeal of the Hungryalists. However non-Bengali intellectuals such as Nissim Ezekil, S.H.Vatsayana Ajneya, P.Lal, Dharmaveer Bharati, Phanishwar Nath Renu, Srikant Verma, Mudra Rakshas, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre etc supported us. It is these particular brands of Bengali authors who, in order to conceal their guilt, are found to denigrate the Hungryalist movement.

One thing which annoyed me at that time was that Ginsberg was unable to differentiate between the members of avant garde Hungryalist movement and the MNC-funded commercially inclined pro-Establishment Krittibas group.

Ginsberg, however, could comprehend that the Hungryalists had dispensed with the colonial compartmentalization such as Good/Evil, God/Devil etc binary opposites. We had explained to him that each of the triumvirate Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwara embody traits which exist in nature itself and nature was never monocentric. This idea has been articulated by Ginsberg to several of his interviewers. The human body is consigned to flames, he was told by Hungryalist artists Anil Karanjai and Karuna Nidhan at Benaras, as it is part of nature, and erecting a graveyard stone on a dead corpse would be against the cosmic spirit. Bob Rosenthal informed us that on death Ginsberg was consigned to flames and his ashes handed over to two different Tibetan Buddhist sects, immersed as per Red Indian ritual and sowed in Jewish cemetery flanked by his parent’s graves.

Ginsberg was overwhelmed with ordinary Indian human being’s tolerance, tenderness, resilience, pluralism, hetero glossia, synereticity and eclectic capabilities. While talking about the moment on the Kyoto-Tokyo Express on his way back from India to USA he had expressed: ‘My energies of the last, oh, 1948 to 1964, all completely washed up’, and that ‘to attain the depth of consciousness that I was seeking, I had to cut myself off from the Blake vision and renounce it’, he was actually revealing the impact of the Hungry Generation on him, a newness beyond Howl and Kaddish which sought ‘cosmic consciousness’ not in visions but in ‘contact with what was going on around me’. It was the Hungryalists who weaned him away from Hollywood world of Judeo-Christian visionary flashes.

The three fishes with one head which became Ginsberg’s logo after his India visit was brought to the notice of Allen and Peter (Orlovsky) by the Hungryalists when they had gone to Emperor Akbar’s tomb. Akbar wanted to combine the basic tenets of Indian religions of Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism into one which the Emperor called Deen-E-Ilahi, Ginsberg’s biographers and critics have never bothered to unravel Allen’s Deen-E-Ilahi fascination and the correlation thereof to his post-Planet News poetry. Ginsberg came across a Persian book at Patna Khudabaksh Library, the leather-bound cover of which depicted the three-fish and one-head design in silver colours.

In April 1963 Ginsberg had stayed for sometime with my parents at Patna. My father was quite angry with him for Allen’s addiction of taking photographs of beggars, paupers, crippled men, lepers etc. We had two vacant rooms at our Patna house which used to be the halting station for hippies on their way from Benaras to Nepal. A tanned Ginsberg in Khadi pyjama-kurta, oiled long hair, a red ethnic towel on right shoulder and vermillion dot on his forehead looked completely Indian and treated as one by my parents. Ginsberg had narrated to me an incident which explains as to why, although his book Indian Journals is full of references to Hindu deities, pilgrim places, saints and sannyasies, he ultimately became a Buddhist.

Allen Ginsberg had come to Patna after a trip to Bodhgaya which had not been developed as a tourist centre at that time and he had no place to stay. There were no toilets. Allen had to sit on two bricks beside a bush for morning chores when he was stunned to find that one of the bricks was actually a broken stone from a temple wherein small replicas of Buddha were curved. He got up, collected the stone, washed and cleaned it with his tooth brush at the nearby pond. The incident had an indelible impact on him.

Ginsberg had carried the stone with him to Patna and used to meditate in front of it. Prior to this incident he used to meditate in front of a wooden Chaitanyadev collected by him at Nabadwip, the paints on which had flaked off due to overuse. The Bodhgaya incident was recorded in his April 1963 notebook which was stolen from Ginsberg’s sling bag at Patna. Allen thought that the theft was the handiwork of some fellow from the Detective Police Department who had been keeping a watch on him from Benaras. His premonition may be correct since his visa was not extended thereafter. Since it was illegal, Ginsberg did not carry the Buddha stone to USA. Bob Rosenthal informed us that Ginsberg had kept an ordinary brick-like stone on his windowsill at New York home.

Allen had accompanied me to my elder cousin sister’s house where my nieces were playing on the harmonium. My sister showed him how playing the instrument was easiest. He had seen ordinary people at Benaras and Patna play the instrument with ease while reciting the classical Hindi poet Tulsidasa. On his way back to USA he had purchased a harmonium at Benaras and used to play it at poetry recitals, of his own or of William Blake’s. Who can deny that Ginsberg’s poetry reading methods had not been indianised? With harmonium hung from his shoulders he started composing extempore poems on the lines of Bhola Moyra, Jaga Kaivarta, Nitai Boiragi etc, pre-modern poets of Bengal who were called Kaviyal. Having come in touch with the Hungryalist writers and painters, Ginsberg’s understanding of relation between language and reality encountered a sea-change due to Indianisation of his being. However, in case of other Beat poets, including Gary Snyder who visited India, they remained at the same metropolitan cultural level.

How and to what extent the Hungryalist movement had been able to invade micro level American poetry circle may be felt from the under noted two letters written to me at that time by poets Carol Berge and Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

My dear friend Malay New York, November 26, 1966.

The Poetry Reading Benefit (St. Mark’s Church) was one of the evenings of great beauty in our lives. As the evening approached, I found that many of the New York poets wished to be included, so that by Wednesday evening we had a fine group and a fine, eager audience. But the feeling of the evening, the emotion, the waves of wishes are what I can only try to describe to you.

The time began by my reading of a selection of excerpts from your letters to me; so that these people (poets and audience) could have an image of you as a man and poet and of your life as you live it. I introduced the poet Allen Hoffman, who then read aloud your poems.

I will tell you the names of the poets who read their work for you that night, with my comments, so that you may know the names of your friends here who have had a part in gesturing on your behalf. Paul Blackburn read and he made a tape recording of the entire night’s events, so that anyone who wishes may know of the evening’s occurrences. Others who read were: Armand Schwerner, Gary Youree, Carol Rubenstein, Allen Planz, Ted Berrigan, Jerome Rothenberg, Bob Nichols, Clayton Eshleman, David Antin, Jackson Maclow. It was unbelievable. When the day comes for you to be with us, we shall share further. Tell us, if you can, how you are faring. We care about you.

Your friend always
Carol Berge

Dear Malay City Lights, SF, California.
March 26, 1966.

I have received the legal decision on your case and thank you very much for sending it .I find it laughable. I want to publish it together with your poem ‘Stark Electric Jesus’ in the next City Lights Journal which will be out this coming summer and I enclose a small payment immediately, since I know you must need it desperately. I am sending a copy of this letter to Howard McCord .Perhaps he knows the answers to the following questions and will send them to me right away, time is of the essence and it may take some time to get a reply from you. I think it is a wonderful poem and I will certainly credit McCord for having first published it. Bravo.

Allen is in New York and his new address is 408 East, 10 street (Apt 4c), New York, NY.

I need to know the answers to the following questions:
1. Was the poem first written in Bengali and was it the Bengali or the English version which was seized and prosecuted?
2. Is this your own translation or whose is it?
3. Do you wish me to use the type written copy of the poem which you sent me last year or the version printed by McCord? (I find some differences).

Let me hear as soon as you can. Holding the press. And good luck. I hope you are still able to survive.
With love.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

American academicians and researches working on Allen Ginsberg will have to rethink the issue and examine the work of the poet in the light of his India visit.

…

Stark Electric Jesus

Oh I’ll die I’ll die I’ll die
My skin is in blazing furore
I do not know what I’ll do where I’ll go oh I am sick
I’ll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha
Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon
In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain
The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted
I can’t resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex
I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace
Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart
Brain’s contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness
other why didn’t you give me birth in the form of a skeleton
I’d have gone two billion light years and kissed God’s ass
But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well
I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss
I’ve forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse
In to the sun-coloured bladder
I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me
I’ll destroy and shatter everything
draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger
Shubha will have to be given
Oh Malay
Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today
But i do not know what I’ll do now with my own self
My power of recollection is withering away
Let me ascend alone toward death
I haven’t had to learn copulation and dying
I haven’t had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops
after urination
Haven’t had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness
Have not had to learn the usage of French leather
while lying on Nandita’s bosom
Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya’s
fresh China-rose matrix
Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain’s cataclysm
I am failing to understand why I still want to live
I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors
I’ll have to do something different and new
Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of
Shubha’s bosom
I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born
I want to see my own death before passing away
The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury
Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your
violent silvery uterus
Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace
Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream
Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm
Would I have been like this if I had different parents?
Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm?
Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father?
Would I have made a professional gentleman of me
like my dead brother without Shubha?
Oh, answer, let somebody answer these
Shubha, ah Shubha
Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen
Come back on the green mattress again
As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet’s brilliance
I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956
The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished
with coon at that time
Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom
Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
I do not know whether I am going to die
Squandering was roaring within heart’s exhaustive impatience
I’ll disrupt and destroy
I’ll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art
There isn’t any other way out for Poetry except suicide
Shubha
Let me enter in to the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora
In to the absurdity of woeless effort
In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart
Why wasn’t I lost in my mother’s urethra?
Why wasn’t I driven away in my father’s urine after his self-coition?
Why wasn’t I mixed in the ovum -flux or in the phlegm?
With her eyes shut supine beneath me
I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize Shubha
Women could be treacherous even after unfolding a helpless appearance
Today it seems there is nothing so treacherous as Woman & Aet
Now my ferocious heart is running towards an impossible death
Vertigoes of water are coming up to my neck from the pierced earth
I will die
Oh what are these happenings within me
I am failing to fetch out my hand and my palm
From the dried sperms on my trousers spreading wings
300000 children gliding toward the district of Shubha’s bosom
Millions of needles are now running from my blood in to Poetry
Now the smuggling of my obstinate legs are trying to plunge
Into the death-killer sex-wig entangled in the hypnotic kingdom of words
Fitting violent mirrors on each wall of the room I am observing
After letting loose a few naked Malay, his unestablished scramblings.

Malay Roychoudhury