Bob Kaufman: Afro; Creole, Jewish. Before ModPo, I confess I never paid much attention to the Beat poets. Except for Leroi Jones. From a distance they all appeared to me to be spoiled rich white kids, trying to find themselves, tripped out on drugs of various types. Luxuries that, frankly, I couldn’t afford coming of age without a safety net to catch me should I fall or fail.
Then ModPo revealed a different side of the Beats for me, connecting them to my new hero, Walt Whitman, and to new literary interests I developed over ModPo’s five prior weeks. So I said to myself, let me check out the Beats. I went online and found a good used copy of The Portable Beats Reader, marked “Worn, Soiled, Obsolete, Withdrawn.” Maybe I should have paid attention. A hardbound copy from Fresno County Free Library found its way into the hands of some enterprising used book seller. Ironic, perhaps. It was discovery time! Maybe there was a chance for a guy like me with the Beats Generation! Maybe I even had a bit of Beat in me!
Beats making poetry political. I confess I acquired a taste for Kerouac, his Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, his Belief & Technique for Modern Prose, and especially October in the Railroad Earth (ModPo classmate Helga hipped me to that) and all the Steve Allen collaborations. But then, along came my head-on meeting with Bob Kaufman. ModPo, while presenting only a few pieces, whetted my appetite, made me search for more. Why? I had detected a slight trace, a mere whiff of something deep, of something classical inside the lines of his verse. I found copies of The Ancient Rain and Cranial Guitar which I read, and read, and read. I dug what I heard about him taking a 12-year vow of silence after the Kennedy assassination.
Here’s a memorable quote on Bob Kaufman from Raymond Foye, friend of Kaufman, editor of The Ancient Rains, and Poe expert:
“Bob Kaufman had a tremendously wide knowledge of poetry,
and his approach to poetry was really in keeping with
poetry as an oral art. I mean, it doesn’t come out of writing, it comes
out of speech and recitation. There is an old saying that thought is
formed in the mouth. ‘Bob had this knowledge of American poetry he
could call on at will and endlessly recite from Eliot, Charles Olson,
Stephen Spender, Claude McKay, or Langston Hughes for hours on
end. And he would often times mix these poems in with his own
poems so you didn’t know where Eliot left off and where Bob
Kaufman began. And that was not an egotistical way of putting him-
self on that level, it simply had to do with the fact that for Bob all
poetry was one. There was a commonality to poetry in his mind and
it’s why later in life he wrote poems and never signed his name, often
times leaving them behind in cafes he’d write something on a nap-
kin and leave it behind. And things were often lost, thrown away.”
Kaufman opened Jail poems with a 14-liner (remember what I said earlier about the whiff of the classical?), a sonnet that I discovered and included in my sonnet anthology project. Probably too square to be included in ModPo but here it is:
Bob Kaufman – Jail Poems
I am sitting in a cell with a view of evil parallels,
Harper and Walton. 2000. A Vintage Book of African American Poetry.
Waiting thunder to splinter me into a thousand me’s.
It is not enough to be in one cage with one self;
I want to sit opposite every prisoner in every hole.
Doors roll and bang, every slam a finality, bang!
The junkie disappeared into a red noise, stoning out his hell.
The odored wino congratulates himself on not smoking,
Fingerprints left lying on black inky gravestones,
Noises of pain seeping through steel walls crashing
Reach my own hurt. I become part of someone forever.
Wild accents of criminals are sweeter to me than hum of cops,
Busy battening down hatches of human souls; cargo
Destined for ports of accusations, harbors of guilt.
What do policemen eat, Socrates, still prisoner, old one?
But I also discovered in my sonnet project that Kaufman, by virtue of his ethnicity and geography, may have been heir to a rich vein of New Orleans poetry-making among the French-Afro-Creoles reaching back to the mid 19th century, much of which appeared in newspapers during the Civil War era, recently having been translated from French to English. Check out Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of 19th Century Louisiana and Afro-Creole Poetry in French from Louisiana’s Radical Civil War Newpapers.
Cool video here on Tubi if you can take the commercials: When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead
A couple of Week 6 side notes.
Owen Dodson would turn in his grave to know that I am mentioning him here in Beat Week. Never mind the dramatics. His poem dedicated to Week 5 poet, Countee Cullen, reveals an encoded but interesting correspondence between the Beatitudes, the Psalms, Shakespeare’s sonnets that I find incredibly appealing (the nerd that I am). Dodson, Al told me, was a mentor to Hilton Als, a Berkley professor, New Yorker staff writer and theatre critic, and friend of Al’s.
COUNTEE CULLEN
(1903-1946)Now begins the sleep, my friend:
Where the cold dirt blanket is, you will be warm,
Where seeds begin to root, you will flower.
The dilapidation of our earth is left for us to order.
Your heart that was strong will help us carry
Whatever trouble springs to hunch our backs,
Whatever anger grows to sty our eyelids,
Whatever unexpected happiness comes like hope to smile our lips
— We would be ugly now except for hope.Now begins the sleep, my friend:
From Owen Dodson. Powerful Long Ladder. 1946.
You showed us that men could see
Deep into the cause of Lazarus,
Believe in resurrection.
You come back to us
Not unwinding a shroud and blinking at known light
But singing like all the famed birds,
Nightingale, lark and nightjar.
You come back to us with the truth
Of your indignation, protest and irony.
Also in your brave and tender singing
We hear all mankind yearning
For a new year without hemlock in our glasses.
Finally, and perhaps lastly (I can’t go on like this forever, can I?) Week 6 poet Allen Ginzberg’s fatehr, Louis Ginzberg, was a high school English teacher whose love for Edgar Allan Poe may well provide the link that connect the Beats to the Romantics (Shelley, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, De Quincy) of an earlier era. Beat poet Allen Ginzberg had an immeasurable influence on Baraka and all the Beats (and Baraka on Ginzberg), perhaps. Baraka, in turn, definitely had an outsized influence on playwright August Wilson.
A Louis Ginzberg poem to close.
ModPo 