Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman is a triumph over unjust neglect. Its publication ensures a renewal of interest in one of the more marginalized associates in the literary phenomenon known as the Beat Generation. The collection is edited by Kaufman’s close friends and admirers, Neeli Cherkovski and Raymond Foye, both of whom contribute short personal essays, along with Tate Swindell, a younger aficionado of San Francisco poets from Kaufman’s generation. This gathering of material brings all of the poet’s diffusely published writings together for the first time. Swindell compiled the thoroughly researched chronology of Kaufman’s life, which dispels some of the mythic fog enveloping some aspects of his biography. The editors were relentless in their search for Kaufman poems, resulting in some thirty pages of uncollected works presented here along with the complete contents of all Kaufman’s published volumes: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965), Golden Sardine (1967), The Ancient Rain (1981), and Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems (1995).
Born in New Orleans in 1925, Kaufman grew up in a city that itself reflects and celebrates his own racially mixed African American background (he often claimed his father was Jewish). He joined the National Maritime Union (NMU) in 1943 and for several years pursued an itinerant career as a seaman. As he crisscrossed international shipping channels, he frequently hopped ship assignments, traveling from port to port. He spent significant amounts of time in New York City and became quite active in NMU, climbing up the political ranks of an organization the FBI considered to be infiltrated by the Communist Party. Soon the Bureau’s agents were looking into his private affairs and attempting to keep track of him amid his erratic meandering. However, by 1950, he was no longer in good standing with NMU and had stopped sailing. The next year he was “[expelled] from NMU for ‘degeneracy’ or admitting to drug use.”
After being forced out of NMU, Kaufman continued his itinerant wandering about the country. His brother Donald recalls him hopping atop a table at Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach in 1953 and reciting poetry to an enthusiastic crowd. For the rest of his life Kaufman would use San Francisco as his home base, save a stint in New York City (ca. 1960–63). He was a habitual peripatetic wanderer; he travelled a fair deal, with poetry and San Francisco’s North Beach serving as his center points. In 1963, shortly after the assassination of JFK, Kaufman entered a lengthy period of silence. Although friends report hearing him mumble something on occasion, he did not speak publicly until a poetry reading in 1974. By that time he was a more or less living myth, casting a significant veil of influence over the North Beach poetry community. Foye recalls gatherings in his kitchen at 28 Harwood Alley: “Bob was also a regular. I had tacked photographs of him on the kitchen door along with broadsides and fliers for bygone readings. ‘What am I, the local hero?’ he said with a smile one day looking at the photos.” Kaufman’s ashes were scattered into San Francisco Bay after his death in 1986.
In his blurb for Collected Poems, poet Will Alexander advances an argument for acknowledging Kaufman as the unrecognized life force of the Beat Generation: “To set the story straight it was his spirit that helped sire the Ginsberg that we know and not vice versa. It was he who magically hoisted the invisible umbrella under which Kerouac and others such as Corso were enabled to protractedly flourish.” For many readers, this will sound like a rather outlandish claim. Kaufman’s work has generally been seen as ancillary to the more prominent Beats noted by Alexander. Yet Alexander doesn’t read Kaufman’s poetry only as literature per se. His reading revels in the poems as proto-shamanic visions wherein he witnesses how Kaufman “volcanically en-veined the Beats as a mirage enveloped Surrealist; not as a formal poet, but one, like Rimbaud, who embodied butane.” Full recognition of Kaufman’s work has for too long lagged from the absence of just such a reading. Rather than being taken as embodying the fiery force of poetry’s power to enchant and consume the poet’s own sense of self, critical regard for Kaufman has often aligned his work simply with his social ties to the Beats. The work deserves to be taken in a broader context and on its own terms.
Alexander’s positioning of Kaufman presents a fitting challenge to the status quo reception his work has received. His remarks significantly hem in tendencies of Ginsberg’s lopsided marketing effort to define the Beat Generation almost solely on behalf of the works of his closest pals: William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac. After all, four white men do not a “generation” make and, as a Black man, Kaufman’s outsider status is surely due to latent racism. As poet Ted Joans, also African American, claims: “The white poets of the Beat Generation have borrowed the hipster attitude from black Americans.” † [†/ Ted Joans, “Ted Joans Speaks ” in Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 230.] Alexander, of course, addresses this same concern that extends much further than mere borrowing or adapting from the work of one’s peers. As Kaufman himself puts it, “Allen passed through the Black Hole of Calcutta / behind my eyes.” The claim extends further than just a necessary broadening of the tent, as it were. Kaufman, both in person and upon the page, presented a version of The Poet, which Ginsberg himself was desirous of representing. After Howl, Ginsberg rarely attained the oracular fury grounded by lived experience that is abundant throughout Kaufman’s work.
Kaufman’s poetry deserves to be read in full recognition of the astonishing power behind his avowed commitment against the odds to a poetic vocation first and foremost. Kaufman was a walking and talking poem. He enters directly into his poems not in any confessional sense but rather in the raw tumultuous assault language wages upon his consciousness. And it needs to be noted that he is not bewailing his personal state or looking for sympathy. His is an expression of direct poetic transmission. “In one ear a spider spins its web of eyes, / In the other a cricket chirps all night. / This is the end, / Which art, that proves my glory has brought me. / I would die for Poetry.”
The onslaught he suffers at the hands of his poems comes fueled by the rhythmic measures of remembered poetic lore swirling in his head. This is an image partially promulgated in Jack Spicer’s unfinished detective novel, The Tower of Babel, where Kaufman is the likely inspiration for the character Washington Jones, along with a fish out of whose mouth poems are granted to Spicer’s protagonist. The case of Spicer as yet another poet who benefited under Kaufman’s “umbrella” is further complicated by the fact that Spicer’s lover Russell Fitzgerald was hopelessly enthralled with Kaufman. Much to Spicer’s chagrin, Fitzgerald pursued sexual acts with Kaufman, whose sexuality appears to have been rather fluid. Spicer’s intense jealousy led to sexual sparring with Kaufman in which the lines between poetry and life were hopelessly blurred. The lives of both poets demonstrate the hazards of such poetic practice. Spicer died of alcoholism at forty. His dying words, according to Robin Blaser, were “My vocabulary did this to me.” Kaufman was ever aware of the overwhelming nature of poetry’s force at work upon him in his life. As he laments, “who wants to be a poet & work a twenty four hour shift, they never ask you first, who wants to listen to the radiator play string quartets all night.” Despite the grueling labor involved, Kaufman’s oracular anointment to living a life committed to poetry seemingly flowed as an inevitable life course.
Kaufman holds forth in his poems as visionary seer: “I see the death some cannot see, because I am a poet spread-eagled on this bone of the world.” Kaufman immerses readers in his own often-chaotic experience of being at odds with an American society where his identity as an African American conducting various personal affairs on city streets and in bars made him a regular target for routine abuse at the hands of various institutional forces. As Devorah Major’s foreword to Collected Poems describes, Kaufman was “[a] man who wrote poems on newspaper margins, the man flowing with piled, jazz-infused visions as wife or friend transcribed his surrealistic rants, the man yelling poems at strangers parking their cars on North Beach streetncorners, the man repeatedly and repeatedly arrested on San Francisco streets, at times after being harshly beaten by the arresting officers.” In what was then a predominately white working-class neighborhood of the city, the spectacle of Kaufman’s public rants was taken as a threat to law and order by North Beach’s notoriously racist Irish American cops, who saw Kaufman carousing predominantly with whites, including women. Kaufman moved through a racially tense, dangerous world with poetry, the noise of words providing him limited safeguards. As he put it: “His is a noisy loud one, the silent beat is beaten by who is not beating on the drum, his silent beat drowns out all the noise, it comes before and after every beat, you hear it in beatween, its sound is / Bob Kaufman, Poet.”
There are lighter moments visualizing his induction as artistic medium: “In the night he comes, my prechanteur, / Singing the silent songs, enchanting songs.” Yet Kaufman always returns with urgency to the near traumatic force by which poetry anoints him as its messenger, usurping his physical body. He often capitalized all the lines in his poems as if to add emotive weight:
I DREAMED I DREAMED AN AFRICAN DREAM. MY HEAD WAS
A BONY GUITAR, STRUNG WITH TONGUES, AND PLUCKED BY
GOLD FEATHERED WINGLESS MOONDRIPPED RITUALS UNDER A
MIDNIGHT SUN, DRUMMING HUMAN BEATS FROM THE HEART
OF AN EBONY GODDESS, HUMMING THE MELODIES OF BEING
FROM STONE TO BONE AND FROM SAND ETERNAL.
There is beauty to these lines, but the presence of an enduring jeopardy is undeniable. Defining key experiences in his life, Kaufman’s Blackness plays an unmistakable, central role in his poetics. It is the lens through which his annunciations of poetry’s perilous exuberance are pronounced.
At times a palpable wariness comes across his poetry. The racial tensions he faced on a daily basis took a toll that is reflected in such moments in the work, especially when graphed onto Kaufman’s use of metaphor, as with the sequence of koan-like images in “Heavy Water Blues”:
After riding across the desert in a taxicab,
he discovered himself locked in a pyramid
with the face of a dog on his breath.
The search for the end of the circle,
constant occupation of squares.
Why don’ t they stop throwing symbols,
the air is cluttered enough with echoes.
Poetry served as his vital connection to the world, enabling him to defiantly respond to the hazardous conditions in which he lived. His poems became literally the embers warming him, providing a means of existence and reasoning enough worth living for: “Remember not to forget the dying colors of yesterday / As you inhale tomorrow’s hot dream, blown from frozen lips.” Here he bears witness to the weariness of living on the edges of contemporary society where “tomorrow’s hot dream ” might be the latest marketing fad or the classic American Dream. Refusing such marketability, Kaufman’s work speaks out for those forgotten in the consumer-driven crush of that ever elusive but perpetual American dream.
The State of California’s execution of Caryl Chessman on May 2, 1960, after twelve years of appeals filed and despite his claims of innocence and intimidation at the time of his confession, riled the country. Kaufman responded with what is one of his best-known poems, “Carl Chessman (ReelnI, II, III, IV),” the opening poem of Golden Sardine. It is a protesting yowl against the corrosive institutional racism of the court system. Chessman had been found guilty of nonlethal kidnapping and, due to a subsequently repealed, faulty California law, was sentenced to death. The travesty of his case continues to provide an example for death penalty opponents. Visual artist Bruce Conner’s Child, dedicated to Chessman, hauntingly illuminates the horrors of state execution, and Kaufman added his voice to the tumultuous chorus of protest and lament. “Carl Chessman (Reel I, II, III, IV)” is an extended montage sequence of prose documentary of the execution and lyric bursts of elegiac grief. Kaufman holds Chessman up as a symbol of universal injustice while situating California as an eternally bleak landscape in which miserable figures suffer through their lives:
Here, Chessman, is the message to all garcias everywhere, longitude
people, beyond the margin,
I am glad now, sad now, home, in TIME FOR THE MURDER, guilty
California is quiet
Alien winds sweeping the highway
fling the dust of medicine men,
long dead,
in the california afternoon
Into the floating eyes
of spitting gadget salesman,
eating murdered hot dogs,
in the california afternoon
The ancient hindu guru
dreams of alabama,
gingerbread visions,
of angry policeman,
as he waves a sacred raga,
over the breast of
frigid sunworshippers,
in the california afternoon
A sad-eyed Mexican,
sacrifices an easter-faced virgin,
to a cynical god,
beneath an ancient sun,
in the california afternoon
It is of course Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, a continual touchstone for Kaufman, who is the referent of “to all garcias everywhere.” The refrain “in the california afternoon ” appropriately echoes Lorca’ s infamous line “A las cinco de la tarde, ” at five o’ clock in the afternoon, in his “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, ” a Spanish bullfighter felled in the ring.
As Cherkovski puts it, “there is an explicit meaning to the work, but it is clothed in a language that frees the perceptions from mere journalism.” Rather than utilizing poetry as a tool for reporting on particular details of the travesty of Chessman’s execution, Kaufman launches a poetic engagement decrying the injustice of state-mandated murder and breaking free of mere pedestrian perspectives.
Kaufman’s work is at times chaotic, for it is ever alive in the moment of its creation. He had little hand in collecting his poems for publication—most of his books were organized by others. His second wife, Eileen, long stood by his side through myriad domestic troubles and his own personal ups and downs. She always served as a faithful steward to his work at times when he was either unwilling or unable. Collected Poems is a fierce retrieval of a body of work that is not easily assimilated and nearly impossible to summarize. As with any of the greatest poets, reading Kaufman is a journey of its own parameters where anything, above all the unbelievable, is possible. Every page surprises and challenges. The collection is indeed all the more triumphant given the odds that so much of this work could easily have been forever lost. What a wonder to have it gathered all together and at hand at last.