Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 392
Don’t Hide The Madness – read David S Wills’ “Angry Young Men Become Nice Old Men’, his review of the Ginsberg-Burroughs book on Beatdom – here
Allen Ginsberg photographer, the UK-based Far Out magazine. features a deftly-chosen annotated photography portfolio
Stuart Walton in the LA Review of Books on Jack Kerouac’s painting
Baudelaire’s suicide note – Baudelaire
Lorca as a graphic novel – Lorca
Francesco Clemente in his recent Vulture interview “I still believe in the America I loved as a teenager. I still believe in Emerson, Thoreau, Ginsberg, and all the rebels and mystics”.
“Why Do The Powerful Fear Poets?” – Ai Weiwei‘s PEN Artistic Expression Award speech – can be read (and/or listened to) – here. (and more from Ai Weiwei – here)
“..Can we, for example, pinpoint when Allen Ginsberg stopped being a beatnik and became a hippie? It is impossible?” – Juliane Fürst, guest curator of the recent exhibition at the Wende Museum,“Socialist Flower Power: Soviet Hippie Culture“ in a recent interview in the LA Review of Books) More about that intriguing (sadly-no-longer-on show) exhibit (Russian hippies) and Fürst’s pioneering scholarship – here and here
Today (November 16) is the anniversary of the birth of the great “New York School” poet, Ted Berrigan. For our fond (2013) appreciation – Happy Birthday, Ted! – see here
and tomorrow at City Lights, a tribute to another New York School luminary – Bill Berkson
When Allen Ginsberg became a hippy? 1962 in India?
the Calcutta café
I read* about a café
in Calcutta
in the sixties
it fixes
in my romantic mind
and I call it
The Calcutta Café**
though that wasn’t
or isn’t
its name
all the same
it speaks to me
of a café society
that was special
you see
each group there
sat at its own table:
the novelists here
the playwrights the screenwriters
there
the journos the hacks the others
elsewhere
and the poets?
ah the poets
they had their own table too
they even had
their own name
which resonates
down the years
of their literary fame
The Hangry Poets
they called themselves
and here’s to explain:
claiming poverty
they professed to be
hungry
claiming alienation
they professed to be
angry
and being poets
they claimed –
of course –
to be talented
collectively they were
loud
opinionated
wild-looking
and –
as poets everywhere are –
curiously attractive
theirs was
the most sought-after table
it seems
some habitués
of The Calcutta Café
were prepared
to give up writing
novels films plays
in order to be
or pretend to be poets
and thus gain a place
at The Hangry Poets’ table
and become presumably:
hungry
angry
loud
opinionated
wild-looking
and curiously attractive
too –
the quality
of their verse
is not known
now here’s a thing:
in 1962
the American Beat poet
Allen Ginsberg
while stumbling around India
in search
of enlightenment
stumbled one day
into The Calcutta Café
and saw
in a flash of enlightenment
that The Hangry Poets were
in some way or another
an howling outpost
of the Beat Generation
of which he was
a founding father
in turn
The Hangries
recognised a fellow Hangry
and fell upon him
with glad cries
of warmth and solidarity
all this
a romantic dream
but real
though such a thing
has never happened
to me or ever will
I feel
to think:
the company of poets
actively sought
by literary pretenders
their table blessed
by Allen Ginsberg’s presence
no women sat there
of course
or were invited for sure
if the Hangries had muses
they kept quiet
about them
AG
became their muse maybe
for a bond was formed
two of the Hangries
even got jobs
eventually
in American universities
and ceased to be
hungry
or even angry possibly
and wore tweed jackets
no doubt
with leather patches
at the elbow
the better able
to live out their fable
and did ever again
I wonder
writers deceive and scheme
to sit at their table…..
* A Blue Hand: the Beats in India
Deborah Baker Penguin Press NY
** ‘The College Street Coffee House
Comment by jeff cloves on 27 November, 2018 at 6:13 pmadjacent to Calcutta University…
College Street packed to the gutters
with book stalls…derelict old houses
are filled with so many books and
publishing concerns that one has to
stand in a sweaty line on the pavement
and wait to be served.’