Some books newly acquired by the Thammasat University Library draw attention to an American poet who has influenced writers around the world, including in the Kingdom. Dharma Lion: a Biography of Allen Ginsberg is about the life of an American poet who lived from 1926 to 1997 and was especially famous in the 1950s and 1960s. Among the different viewpoints in Ginsberg’s work may be seen an interest in Eastern religions and rejection of economic materialism. Another new acquisition at the TU Library is The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats written by Ginsberg. The title refers to the name given to the Beat Generation, a group of writers who were friends and colleagues of Ginsberg. Often critics of literature and the fine artists like to group creative people into schools and movements, in an attempt to better study them. Almost all creative people in modern Western society are individuals, so they do not really belong to such groups. The so-called Beat Generation was a circle of writers who became well-known after the Second World War. All of them were interested in searching for spirituality and were opposed to materialism, the tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. The title also quotes from one of the most famous poems by Ginsberg, Howl, dedicated to Carl Solomon, a patient whom Ginsberg met in a hospital. The poem’s first line is

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.

In America at the time, many people were concerned about the Cold War, the Korean War, and many other conflicts. While Ginsberg was exaggerating when he wrote that the best minds of his generation in America were destroyed by madness, the line follows in the tradition of poetic license. When literary historians refer to poetic license, they mean freedom from facts about anything and the right to express things in an unusual way in poetry. When we read a poem, we do not expect it to give us accurate facts in the same way that a doctoral thesis or history book should. There many be other ways that a poem is true, but it is not true the way other forms of expression are. One film blogger used the term this way:

It’s quite impressive how Mr. Pisanthanakun beautifully fused a tragic love story with the tinge of comedy and engulfing it in the poetic license of unfettered love and loyalty. Pee Mak Phra Khanong is making its mark as a must-watch for couples and non-couples alike.

Still another new book involving Ginsberg at the TU Libraries is First Thought: Conversations with Allen Ginsberg. The title of this book refers to another idea of Ginsberg’s:

First thought, best thought.

This meant that Ginsberg felt that writing should be spontaneous and not planned. Again, we see a form of poetic license here, since it depends who is writing what. If we are writing an academic research paper or graduate thesis, then planning and revision are helpful. In many or most of the finest poems, authors have rewritten their work, trying to get the words just right. Ginsberg felt that the expression would be more direct and true if he just wrote down immediately whatever he wanted, and did not edit the results. He taught students with this approach at the Naropa University, a private liberal arts college in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1974 by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, it is named for the 11th-century Indian Buddhist wise man Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda. Naropa University describes itself as Buddhist-inspired, ecumenical, and nonsectarian rather than strictly Buddhist in a traditional sense. At Naropa, students meditate to further their learning, in addition to traditional classroom education. Naropa University was the first Buddhist-inspired academic institution to receive United States accreditation. Ginsberg remains a controversial poet in America, since not everyone believes some of his theories, such as that poems are better when they are not rewritten. Still, his influence was worldwide, partly because he traveled to many countries, including to Thailand.

Thailand and Allen Ginsberg

As CNN reported in 2010, the Thai poet Zakariya Amataya, winner of Thailand’s 2010 Southeast Asian Writers Award (S.E.A. Write Award), declared that he was influenced by Ginsberg, as well as by Sufi mysticism and French surrealist authors. Khun Zakariya, who lives in Nonthaburi near the Chao Phya River, was the first Thai Muslim author to win the prestigious honor. Apart from Ginsberg, poets whom he reads in English translation are two Frenchmen from the 1800s, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Khun Zakariya stated that he considered Ginsberg and his fellow Beat poets to be the new imagination of world poetry… [Ginsberg] mentioned the story of his generation, and he was like a thunderstorm to American culture. Maybe we call Walt Whitman the father of new American poets, but I think the second [father] is Allen Ginsberg.

Among more recent writers, Khun Zakariya admires the American rock and roll lyricist Bob Dylan and the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen. It may be noteworthy that Ginsberg, Dylan, and Cohen are all Jewish authors. Khun Zakariya told CNN:

I am not truly Sufi, but I am interested, involved and I love them. Many of the great poets in the Muslim world — like Saadi, Rumi, and Omar Khayyam — are all Sufi, because the Sufi world, I think, is the same as the poet’s world.

The TU Library also own books by Saadi, Rumi, and Omar Khayyam. Khun Zakariya was born in Narathiwat Province and studied in a high school in Bangkok. The first lines of his prize-winning S.E.A. Write Award poem follow:

There must be something in this universe

That has strayed from the dimension of time

Something Columbus and Ulysses missed in their explorations

Something the world’s prophets forgot to preach

Something that vanished between the black holes of space.

His poetry collection, No Women in Poetry, is available through interlibrary loan, as is an academic research paper, Attitudes of Undergraduate Students Majoring in Thai and Foreign Languages about the Poeticity of Thai Free Verse Titled “No Women in Poetry” by Zakariya Amataya. This research in psychological attitudes about forms of poetry asked readers whether they require traditional rhyme and meter to consider something a poem. Like Ginsberg, Zakariya’s poems are written in freer forms. Some people feel that the idea of free verse is modern, but it is an old tradition in English literature, dating back to the first translations of the Bible centuries ago. During the 1800s in England, some of the most appreciated poets wrote in free verse. As always, the important thing is not the form, but the quality of poetic writing. One of Khun Zakariya’s projects was to translate the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa from English to Thai. The TU Library also owns some books by Pessoa and Lorca.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)