Bob Kaufman

Robert Garnell Kaufman(April 18, 1925 – January 12, 1986) was an AmericanBeat poetandsurrealistas well as ajazzperformance artist and satirist.In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the Black AmericanRimbaud.

Bob Kaufman
Born	Robert Garnell Kaufman (1925-04-18)April 18, 1925 New Orleans,Louisiana US
Died	January 12, 1986(1986-01-12)(aged 60) San Francisco, California US
Occupation	Poet
Years active	1958–1986
Spouses	Eileen Singe

For the basketball player, seeBob Kauffman.

In 1959, along with poetsAllen Ginsberg,John Kelly,A. D. Winans,and William Margolis, he was one of the founders ofBeatitudepoetry magazine, where he also worked as an editor.

Early life and education

Born inNew Orleans,Louisiana, Kaufman was the 10th of 13 children. His paternal grandfather was a German Jew, and his mother was from an established BlackRoman CatholicNew Orleans family. At the age of 18, Kaufman joined theUnited States Merchant Marine,his final voyage was in 1949.He studied at New York City'sThe New School for Social Research.In New York City he metWilliam S. BurroughsandAllen Ginsberg,however, Ginsberg has said he did not meet Kaufman until 1959.He also knew the photographerRobert Frankin New York in the late 1940s.

Career

During Kaufman's time at The New School and in New York, he found inspiration in the writings ofHerman Melville,Walt Whitman,Arthur Rimbaud,Guillaume Apollinaire,Federico García Lorca,Hart Crane,Gertrude Stein,Langston Hughes,Frantz Fanon,Aimé Césaire,andNicolás Guillén.He also identified with the works of jazz musicians and improvisational artists such asCharlie Parker,whom he named his son after.

Kaufman moved toSan Francisco's North Beachin 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life.

Kaufman frequently expressed his desire to be forgotten as both a writer and a person. Kaufman, a poet in the oral tradition, usually didn't write down his poems, and much of his published work survives by way of his wife Eileen, who wrote his poems down as he conceived them.City Lightspublished several books of Kaufman's poems during his lifetime, however, includingAbomunist Manifesto,Second Aprilin 1959, andDoes the Secret Mind Whisperin 1960. In 1981 Kaufman publishedThe Ancient Rain: Poems 1956 to 1978withNew Directions Publishing.He apparently did write his poems down on empty sacks and odd sheets of paper.

"Sitting here writing things on paper Instead of sticking the pencil into the air" From "Jail Poems"

Although he was baptized at age 35 while in the Merchant Marines (Cherkovski, xxxiii), like many beat writers, Kaufman became aBuddhist.

According to the writer Raymond Foye,Kaufman is the person who coined the term "beatnik",and his life was filled with a great deal of suffering. In San Francisco, he was the target of beatings and harassment by the city police, and his years living in New York were filled with poverty, addiction, and imprisonment. Kaufman often incurred the wrath of the local police simply for reciting his poetry aloud in public, and it is said that in 1959 alone, at the height of the" beatnik "fad, he was arrested by the San Francisco police on disorderly charges 39 times.

In 1959, Kaufman had a small role in a movie calledThe Flower Thief,which was shot in North Beach byRon Rice.In 1960 he was invited to read at Harvard and moved to New York City, giving readings at The Gaslight Café, The Paperback Book Gallery and The Living Theater. He was arrested in November of that year and taken to Bellevue Hospital. On his release, Kaufman lived in the same building as Allen Ginsberg, where he met Timothy Leary in January 1961, and took psilocybin along with Jack Kerouac, apparently for the first time.

In 1961, Kaufman was nominated for England's Guinness Poetry Award, but lost toT. S. Eliot.In 1962 he was in court for an alleged assault at the nightclub Fat Black Pussycat and imprisoned on Riker's Island. While he was on Riker's, Eileen and Parker, Kaufman's infant son, returned to San Francisco.In 1963 when he was to depart New York, he was summarily arrested for walking on the grass ofWashington Square Parkand incarcerated onRikers Island,then sent as a "behavioral problem" toBellevue Psychiatric Hospitalwhere he underwentelectro-shocktreatments, which greatly affected his already bleak outlook on society. He took a vow of silence after the assassination ofJohn F. Kennedy,which lasted 10 years. He was believed to return to this silence in the early 1980s, although he was filmed reading his poemThe Poetat theSan Francisco Art Institutein 1981. In September of that year, he was awarded a grant from theNational Endowment for the Arts.In 1982 he gave a benefit poetry reading forBeatitudemagazine at the Savoy Tivoli. In 1984 he appeared in a documentaryWest Coast: Beat and Beyondand in 1985 he gave a benefit poetry reading in North Beach, again forBeatitude.

He died in 1986 ofcirrhosisandemphysema.

Remembrance

In an interview,Ken Keseydescribed seeing Bob Kaufman on the streets of San Francisco's North Beach during a visit to that city with his family in the 1950s:

I can remember driving down to North Beach with my folks and seeing Bob Kaufman out there on the street. I didn't know he was Bob Kaufman at the time. He had little pieces of Band-Aid tape all over his face, about two inches wide, and little smaller ones like two inches long -- and all of them made into crosses. He came up to the cars, and he was babbling poetry into these cars. He came up to the car I was riding in, and my folks, and started jabbering this stuff into the car. I knew that this was exceptional use of the human voice and the human mind.

Poetry

His poetry made use of jazz syncopation and meter. The critic Raymond Foye wrote about him, "Adapting the harmonic complexities and spontaneous invention ofbebopto poetic euphony and meter, he became the quintessential jazz poet. "He frequently used jazz and bebop metaphors in his poems:

One thousand saxophones infiltrate the city

Each with a man inside,

Hidden in ordinary cases,

Labeled FRAGILE.'

From "Battle Report"

PoetJack Michelinesaid about Kaufman, "I found his work to be essentiallyimprovisational,and was at its best when accompanied by a jazz musician. His technique resembled that of the surreal school of poets, ranging from a powerful, visionary lyricism of satirical, near dadaistic leanings, to the more prophetic tone that can be found in his political poems. "

Kaufman said of his own work, "My head is a bony guitar, strung with tongues, plucked by fingers & nails."

After learning of the assassination ofJohn F. Kennedy,Kaufman took a Buddhist vow of silence that lasted until the end of theVietnam Warin 1973. He broke his silence by reciting his poem "All Those Ships that Never Sailed," the first lines of which are:

All those ships that never sailed

The ones with their seacocks open

That were scuttled in their stalls...

Today I bring them back

Huge and intransitory

And let them sail

Forever

According to George Fragopoulis, in his article "Singing the Silent Songs": "It is generative to consider Kaufman's silence as a kind of poetic project in and of itself, a gesture meant to interrogate the lyric's possibilities of reimagining our relationships with the world. The history of modern poetry cannot be told without including those poets (Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Robert Duncan, George Oppen) who renounced poetry." (p. 152).

Personal life

In 1944, Kaufman married Ida Berrocal. They had one daughter, Antoinette Victoria Marie (Nagle), born in New York City in 1945 (died 2008). He marriedEileen Singe(1922–2015) in 1958; they had one child, Parker.

Bibliography

• Abomunist Manifesto(broadside) (City Lights, 1958). In 2013 Temática Editores Generales in Lima publishedManifiesto Abomunista,a bilingual Spanish-English version.(All Libraries)ArchivedDecember 3, 2008, at theWayback Machine
• Second April(broadside) (City Lights, 1958)(All Libraries)
• Does the Secret Mind Whisper?(broadside) (City Lights, 1959)(All Libraries)
• Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness(New Directions, 1965)(All Libraries)
• Golden Sardine(City Lights, 1967)(All Libraries)
• The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978(New Directions, 1981)(All Libraries)
• Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman(Coffee House Press, 1996)(All Libraries)
• Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman(City Lights Publishers, 2019)

Further reading

• Abbott, Steve. "Hidden Master of the Beats."Poetry Flash(February 1986).
• Anderson, TJ III. "Body and Soul: Bob Kaufman's Golden Sardine."African American Review(Summer 2000).
• Charters, Ann (ed.).The Portable Beat Reader.Penguin Books. New York. 1992.ISBN0-670-83885-3(hc);ISBN0-14-015102-8(pbk)
• Cherkovski, Neeli.Elegy for Bob Kaufman.San Francisco, CA: Sun Dog Press (1996).
• Cherkovski, Neeli.Whitman's Wild Children.Venice, CA: Lapis (1988).
• Christian, Barbara. "Whatever Happened to Bob Kaufman?"Black World 21(September 1972).
• Clay, Mel.Jazz Jail and God: Impressionistic Biography of Bob Kaufman.San Francisco, CA: Androgyne Books (1987).
• Damon, Maria. "'Unmeaning Jargon'/Uncanonized Beatitude: Bob Kaufman, Poet",South Atlantic Quarterly87.4 (Fall 1988).
• Foye, Raymond. "Bob Kaufman, A Proven Glory",The Poetry Project Newsletter(March 1986).
• Hernandez, Rod. "Between Black, Brown & Beige: Latino Poets and the Legacy of Bob Kaufman",Callaloo21.5 (Winter 2002).
• Kaufman, Eileen. "Laughter Sounds Orange at Night." In Arthur Knight and Kit Knight (eds),The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook,New York: Paragon (1967).
• Kohli, Amor. "Saxophones and Smothered Rage: Bob Kaufman, Jazz and the Quest for Redemption",Callaloo21.5 (Winter 2002).
• Lindberg, Kathryne V. "Bob Kaufman, Sir Real",Talisman 11(Fall 1993).
• Seymore, Tony. "Crimes of a Warrior Poet",Players Magazine(December 1983).
• Winans, A.D."Bob Kaufman".The American Poetry Review(May/June 2000).

External links

• C. Natale Peditto,"Bob Kaufman: The Jazz Poet of the Streets"
• A.D. Winans Remembers Bob KaufmanArchivedApril 13, 2016, at theWayback Machine
• Bob Kaufman,Poetry Foundation
• Happy Belated Birthday Bob Kaufman!The New Times Holler
• FBI file on Bob Kaufmanat theInternet Archive