Allen Ginsberg
A friend of Bangladesh
by Bipul K Debnath
During our Liberation War in 1971, the US government was allies of Pakistan and even sent its 7th fleet to intimidate India for not interfering with the events in then East Pakistan. But it was the peace-loving people of the United States who created the forum Americans for Bangladesh and arranged a poetry recital event on November 20, 1971 at Saint George Church, New York. Among the poets who performed that day were Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovski and Ed Sanders.
Ginsberg, 45, recited his legendary 152-line poem September on Jessore Road, which he had written to draw the worlds attention to the sufferings of Bangladeshi refugees after visiting refugee camps in India, and witnessing the plight of millions fleeing wartime violence:
Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A million girls vomit groan
Millions of families hopeless alone
Out of the poem, he made a song that was performed by Bob Dylan, other musicians and Ginsberg himself. The last few lines of the poem read:
Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children nowhere to go
Allen Ginsberg, an acclaimed poet of his generation, was one of the most respected and leading figures of the Beat writers. He was born into a Jewish family on June 3, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, USA, and raised in nearby Paterson. His father Louis Ginsberg was a high school English teacher and poet. His early life was marked by the psychological problems of his mother Naomi Levy.
The Beat Generation was a group of authors during the 1950s whose literature explored and influenced American culture, with features like rejection of standard narrative values, the spiritual quest, exploration of American and Eastern religions and rejection of materialism in the post-World War II era. Allen Ginsbergs Howl (1956), William S Burroughss Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouacs On the Road (1957) are among the best-known examples of Beat literature.
As a young teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to The New York Times about political issues, such as World War II and workers rights. While in high school, inspired by his teacher, Ginsberg began reading Walt Whitman. In 1943, Ginsberg graduated from Eastside High School and briefly attended Montclair State College before entering Columbia University on a scholarship. While at Columbia, Ginsberg contributed to the Columbia Review literary journal, the Jester humor magazine, won the Woodberry Poetry Prize and served as president of the Philolexian Society, the campus literary and debate group.
Hence, Ginsbergs early poems were greatly influenced by fellow northern New Jersey resident William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg recalled being taught at school that Williams was some kind of awkward crude provincial from New Jersey, but upon talking to Williams about his poetry, Ginsberg suddenly realized [that Williams] was hearing with raw ears.
Ginsbergs works also became an integral element of early 1960s hippie culture. However, he was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He was also involved with Krishnaism. He had started incorporating chanting the Hare Krishna mantra into his religious practice in the mid-sixties.
Undoubtedly, Ginsberg was known around the world as a master of the outrageous. He read his poetry and played finger cymbals at the Albert Hall in London, he was expelled from Cuba after saying he found Che Guevara cute, he sang duets with Bob Dylan, and he chanted Hare Krishna on William F Buckleys television show. As the critic John Leonard observed in a 1988 appreciation: He is of course a social bandit. But he is a nonviolent social bandit.
In other words, Ginsbergs poetry was strongly influenced by Modernism (most importantly the American style pioneered by William Carlos Williams), Romanticism (specifically William Blake and John Keats), the beat and cadence of jazz (particularly that of bop musicians like Charlie Parker), and his Kagyu Buddhist practice and Jewish background. He considered himself to have inherited the visionary poetic mantle handed down from the English poet and artist William Blake, the American poet Walt Whitman and the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The power of Ginsbergs verse, its searching, probing focus, its long and lilting lines, as well as its New World exuberance, all echo the continuity of inspiration that he claimed.
Needless to say, he is best known for his first major work, the epic poem Howl. The long-running poem expressed the anxieties and ideals of a generation alienated from mainstream society. Howl, which was to become Ginsbergs most famous poem, begins:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.
His collection of poems, The Fall of America, shared the annual US National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. He received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1979. In 1986, he was awarded the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings in Struga, Macedonia. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book, Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 19861992.
In 1960, he was treated for a tropical disease but he continued to write through his final illness, with his last poem, Things Ill Not Do (Nostalgias). At the age of 70, he died of liver cancer on April 5, 1997 surrounded by family and friends in his East Village loft in New York City. He is buried in his family plot in Gomel Chesed Cemetery. Burroughs, one of Ginsbergs lifelong friends and a fellow Beat, remarked that his death was a great loss to me and to everybody. The great American poet will be fondly remembered by many a Bangladeshi for whose just cause he once stood by _ and gave a very loud voice.
The writer is a Masters (English) student of Dhaka College.
