he was arrested by the San Francisco police on disorderly charges 39 times. In 1960 he was
nominated for the Guiness Poetry Award and was invited to read at Harvard University but
ended up in New York City for an extended period and became involved in heavy drug use
while briefly pursuing a song writing career. Ironically, on the day in 1963 that he was
to depart New York with his wife and infant son, he was summarily arrested for walking on
the grass of Washington Square park and incarcerated on Rikers Island, then sent as a
"behavioral problem" to Bellvue Psychiatric Hospital where he underwent
electro-shock treatments. Later that year, he returned to San Francisco; and after John
Kennedy’s assassination, Kaufman submitted himself to a lengthy vow of silence which he
finally broke at the end of the Vietnam War.
Stories of Kaufman’s eccentric career are legion,
and consequently at times apocryphal. By now, oral tradition itself (local word-on-the
street grown into literary oral histories, memoirs and commentary) has transformed Bob
Kaufman into a mythical legend in the folklore of Beatdom.
The most recent edition of Kaufman’s poetry, Cranial
Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman, edited by Gerald Nicosia (Coffee House Press,
1996), will probably serve as the major collection for some time to come since it contains
the complete text of the out of print Golden Sardine (City Lights, 1967) along
with Kaufman’s broadside Abomunist Manifesto, as well as some fine poems from
currently in-print collections, Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness (New
Directions, 1965) and The Ancient Rain (New Directions, 1981), and includes eight
previously uncollected poems/prose poems. The three previous editions of Kaufman’s poems
were culled, for the most part, by others from notebooks, scraps of paper and audio-taped
transcriptions. In this latest collection, one of the previously unpublished poems was
discovered in 1980 on the floor of a North Beach diner where Kaufman often ate breakfast.
More than other poets of his generation, Kaufman
embraced the orality of poetry as part of a living art form that went beyond the
boundaries of the printed page. Raymond Foye, who edited a collection of Kaufman’s
poetry, The Ancient Rain (New Directions, 1981), remarked in his editor’s note,
"Bob took no part in publishing his work; indeed, he had an aversion to even writing
his poems down. He wanted to live a simple life, a man amongst his friends. ‘I want to be
anonymous,’ he once told me, ‘my ambition is to be completely forgotten.’ And I think he
meant it." Yet Foye also relates the story of finding Kaufman’s handwritten
manuscripts (many of the poems that eventually went into The Ancient Rain) in the
smoldering ruins of a burnt out San Francisco hotel where Kaufman had just lived and
escaped the disaster. It is remarkable not only that these poems survived, but that no one
might have known of their existence had it not been for their near extinction. Foye’s
anecdote is likely indicative of how Kaufman regarded literary fame that seeks a measure
of traditional status and permanence.
One of the hallmarks of the oral poet is
anonymity, and Kaufman was a man of the streets whose oral compositions and public
performances were his particular mode of art and life. Kaufman’s wife, Eileen,
writing in the Beat series, the unspeakable visions of the individual, told of her
husband’s proclaiming poetry to customers in a diner, of his shouting poetry to passengers
in cars stuck in traffic, of his holding lyrical court evenings at the Coffee Gallery, a
famous Beat hangout in San Francisco where he would spontaneously speak his poetry. Her
descriptions of Kaufman’s style illustrate the oral dynamics of his verse: "…each
time Bob speaks it is a gem in the crown of oratory," and "Bob’s entire
monologue is like a long line of poetry which constantly erupts into flowers." She
also spoke of her regret at not having a tape recorder to capture Kaufman’s "speeding
thoughts" and admitted that many poem fragments existed on note paper, napkins, and
even toilet paper.
Foye has written of Kaufman’s sources of poetry
as "oral and automatic." Kaufman’s intuitive sense of jazz musicality, reflected
in the rhythm and sound patterns of his prosody, as well as a heightened visual sense of
his imagery and word juxtapositions, link him to the surrealist painters of the twentieth
century. He aligns jazz with the surrealist traditions of the Parisian jazz age, as well
as celebrating an ecstatic symbolism and sensualism (of word music), and is hailed as the
"black American Rimbaud" by the French.
If one considers Kaufman as essentially an oral
poet, one ought to consider comparing his creations to the compositions of jazz musicians
who we think of as creators and improvisers in the moment of performance. Bob Kaufman’s
intimate acquaintance with and appreciation for jazz musicians such as Thelonius Monk,
Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane underscores his own
aesthetic. These musical influences on his poetry were evident in structure and style as
well as content and theme. Foye characterized Kaufman’s poetic thus, "Adapting the
harmonic complexities and spontaneous invention of be-bop to poetic euphony and meter, he
became the quintessential jazz poet." In this respect, Kaufman’s appellation as a
jazz poet reflects the joint association of modern jazz musicians with more ancient oral
traditions.
American as Bop, Kaufman’s poetry was capable of
ecstatic solo flights of word jazz. There exist a whole series of relatively short poems,
especially in Golden Sardine, that are expressed as lyrical wails. In one such
poem, "Cocoa Morning," the assonant sound patterns match the words in a very
jazz-like way, especially throughout the second stanza:
Drummer, hummer, on the floor,
Dreaming of wild beats, softer
still,
Yet free of violent city noise,
Please, sweet morning,
Stay here forever.
Kaufman’s sound-consciousness directly links his
poetic sense with jazz, explicitly so in the sound poem "Crootey Songo," where
the repetitive e’s and o’s combine in syllabic strings to resemble jazz riffs and runs of
a saxophone:
DEEREDITION, BOOMEDITION, SQUOM,
SQUOM, SQUOM.
DEE BEETSTRAWISIT, WAPAGO, LOCORO,
LO.
VOOMETEYEREEPETIOP, BOP, BOP, BOP,
WHIPOLAT.
Kaufman’s poetic devices combine in series of
short playful outbursts or epiphanies in phrases and lines. In "Secondless,"
Kaufman demonstrates a long line of melodic assonance:
Secondless, minute scarred,
hourless, owless, sourness,
flowerless, for a statement, FOR
GOD the pygmies are ECSTATIC.
FICKLE
TIME GONE FROM TIME INTO
TIMELESSNESS,
Sometimes are tickless times.
And in "Darkwalking Endlessly," it is
the assonance of the connecting words that drives the lines themselves:
I WEAVE THE WINDS AND KISS THE
RAINS, ALL FOR
LOVE.
I DREAMED I DREAMED AN AFRICAN
DREAM.
. . . .
DRUMMING HUMAN BEATS FROM THE HEART OF AN
EBONY GODDESS,
HUMMING THE MELODIES OF BEING
FROM STONE TO BONE AND
FROM SAND
ETERNAL.
Kaufman is capable of long poems and prose poems
that consist of the long bardic breath-line in which all his sonic and rhythmic energies
come into play. In "Jazz Te Deum for Inhaling at Mexican Bonfires," each long
line is prefaced with the words "Let us . . ." followed by an almost breathless
array of surrealistic images. One can detect a litany of cries and responses and the
repetition of stated themes that are typical of oral poems and that resemble jazz
composition containing chorus lines and individual solo improvisations.
The importance of sound as an key element in
Kaufman’s poetry is most evident in "Unanimity Has Been Achieved Not a Dot Less for
its Accidentalness," a poem in which rhythm is both the subject and driving force:
Raga of the drum, the drum, the
drum, the drum, the drum, the
heartbeat
Raga of lip, raga of brass, raga of
ultimate come with yesterday,
raga
of parched tongue-walked lip, raga of yellow, raga of
mellow, raga of new, raga of old,
raga of blue, raga of gold,
raga of air spinning into itself. .
. .
The oral dimension of
Kaufman’s poetry is particularly characteristic of the poetry of the Beat generation that
Kaufman helped to shape. Lee Hudson, in "Poetics in Performance: The Beat
Generation" (Studies in Interpretation, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1977), has
examined the oral aspect as it relates to the poetics and performance of members of
Kaufman’s generation. According to Hudson, the Beat poets related to ancient bardic
traditions and sought to bring their poetry directly to the people. Thus, the Beat scene
was a resurgence of an oral tradition, a tradition of performance. In short, the poem’s
existence depended, in large part, on more than print; performance was basic. A
significant dimension in the entire Beat movement, performance was a part of the
compositional process, a consideration in the form and content of poems, a social literary
event. (pp. 67-68)
Hudson has further described the sources of this
type of poetry which consisted of a particular American idiom, as a form of talking that
reflected common speech. This language was transformed in terms of a "physiological
metrics" with a "rhythmic unit born of lyrical outburst," which quite
naturally emphasized spontaneity and oral composition and came to be known as "street
poetry." Hudson linked this type of poetry to the self-identity of the poet in so far
as "the physiology of the poet himself will determine the from of his
expression."
As part of a master’s thesis/project in 1989, I
conceived and directed a readers theatre production of Kaufman’s poetry, entitled The
Poet Alive. Kaufman’s poetry lent itself to performance by a spoken word choral
quartet, with a saxophonist who interweaved sounds with the texts. Modeling the
performance of poetry on jazz suggested one contemporary mode of oral poetics, especially
in the case of Kaufman who self-consciously created jazz poems, is the reappearance and/or
variations from one poem to another of the same phrases and lines (anathema to the
authorial poet/writer), the explorations of words as sound as well as the concoction of
sounds into word-like vocalic forms (scats and sound-poems), the prosody of air and
percussive instrumentation through intonations and verse rhythms. Most importantly, the
orality of living poetry comes through as Kaufman’s poetry was the rich score for the body
to perform as an instrument of language art, vocally and kinetically, providing the
performers with interpetive material for multiple voices and choreographed movements.
Poetry, for Kaufman, was always a part of the
occasion for his utterances and inseparable from the activities of his daily life. Poetry
lived and breathed through Kaufman body and consciousness as a matter of his routine. He
was known to recite other poets he knew "by heart" and interlaced his own verses
with theirs. Kaufman played the situation and the crowd for its own
"consciousness," and naturally sensed the need for poems as evocations for
occasions. The special impact of such poetry as it relates to performance also brings into
play a direct interplay between the poet and audience, the hallmark of the lyric poet.
Rather than a distanced, abstract poetry of the formal, printed "literary" type,
this Beat poet was aware of and engaged his audience’s immediate senses in a poetry of the
body.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbott, Steve. "Hidden Master of the
Beats." Poetry Flash, February 1986.
Cherkovski, Neeli. Whitman’s Wild
Children. (Venice, CA: Lapis) 1988.
Foye, Raymond. "Bob Kaufman, A Proven
Glory." The Poetry Project Newsletter, March 1986.
Kaufman, Eileen. "Laughter Sounds Orange at
Night." The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook. Eds. Arthur Knight
and Kit Knight. (New York: Paragon) 1967.
Seymore, Tony. "Crimes of a Warrior
Poet." Players Magazine, December 1983.
Online Source