Soul!: S1 E15 - Ruby Dee/Ossie Davis Soul!
Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, aided by the music of composer-saxophonist Lucky Thompson, give dramatic readings of the poetry of a writer named Robert Garnell Kaufman (1925-1986)
Program aired on WNET-NY on March 28, 1972
Bob Kaufman: A Great American Poet
1925-1986
by Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Spring, 1987
PHOTO: Bob Kaufman (1925-1986)
On January 13, 1986 one of the finest American poets since 1945 died in San Francisco after a long illness. His name was Robert Garnell Kaufman and he was 60 years of age. He was also an internationally acclaimed writer who was virtually unknown in the country of his birth. The story of how this happened is yet another blatant example of the tremendous ideological and social power of racial oppression, and its poisonous impact on American cultural life. In fact, it is a great testament to the artistic integrity and independence of Kaufman’s work that he was able to make such a significant contribution to American literature under such hostile conditions.
To fully appreciate the comprehensive scope of Kaufman’s oeuvre it is necessary to talk a bit about his personal biography. Born April 18, 1925, in New Orleans, Louisiana, Kaufman was one of 14 children born to a white Jewish father and Black (and Native American) mother. At the age of 13 Kaufman, a brilliant student yearning for adventure, left home to join the Merchant Marines. It was during his twenty year career as a seaman that Bob developed his lifelong love and fascination for books and writing. It was also where Kaufman first met an older seaman who introduced young Bob to the classic and modernist tradition in European and American literature: Shakespeare, Eliot, Pound, Whitman, Joyce, Williams, etc.
During this period Kaufman also became a widely respected shipmate who was well known for tackling the most dangerous jobs aboard ship. Later during the 1940s Kaufman became a Communist labor organizer for the Seaman’s Union. This political activity leads him to being barred from leaving port at the height of the repressive and reactionary McCarthy era in the early 1950s. However, this did not deter Kaufman from continuing his organizing forays into the south were he was often beaten and arrested by vicious racist mobs and local police authorities. At the time that Bob first met his future wife Eileen in Texas in 1958, she recounts that “Bob was so badly beaten in the chest and stomach that he literally could not eat any solid food for six months.”
After traveling all over the globe nine times with the Merchant Marines Kaufman finally settled down to live in San Francisco in the late 1950s after frequent stops there while on leave during the ’40s and early ’50s. Sandwiched in between all this activity Bob managed to take academic courses for two years in literature and sociology as well as labor history and politics at the famed New School for Social Research in New York City in the late 1940s, early ’5Os. It was during this time that Bob first met and established a long-term personal and artistic friendship with Jack Kerouac, the acknowledged “leader” of the still underground Beat literary movement. During the next 15 years Kaufman would go on to have a singularly powerful and seminal impact on the movement through his excoriating and lyrically captivating poetic style. His personal relationship with Kerouac is documented in the exhaustive 600-page biography on Kerouac by Gerald Nicosia entitled Memory Babe (Grove Press, 1984). Bob would go on in 1959 to start a legendary literary magazine with Allen Ginsberg and Bob Margolis called Beatitude, which just recently published its 33rd edition, and is the only non-academic journal from the Beat school still being published today.
So given all this information (which understandably only touches the bare surface of the complexity of Kaufman’s contributions) it would be more than a “fair” question to ask: “How is it that only two short articles have ever been published in the United States on this major literary figure?”
Furthermore, despite appearing in over 75 anthologies and having his poetry critically acclaimed and honored in Europe and Asia, and particularly in France where he was enthusiastically reviewed in all the major French literary journals and newspapers (and was so loved that he was known as the ‘Black American Rimbaud’), Kaufman was openly ignored (some say snubbed) by the tight coterie known as the Beats.
As a result, Kaufman was left out of many of the most well-known anthologies featuring the work of leading American ‘avant-garde’ writers, including Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (Grove Press, 1960), Seymour Krim’s The Beats (1961), and two books edited by LeroiJones/Amiri Baraka: The Moderns (1963) and the seminal anthology of African American writers Black Fire (William Morrow, 1968). Kaufman was also noticeably absent from the ground-breaking edition of Evergreen Review # 2 (Grove Press, 1957) which featured the work of Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Henry Miller, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti et al, and no Blacks, Native Americans, or Latinos at all! So much for truly progressive attitudes and values among the “radical wing” of American letters…
II. Kaufman The Poet
But what of the writer who so outraged local police authorities and staid newspaper columnists and academicians that he was often openly attached and/or ridiculed by them in the 1950s; and who so delighted and entranced brilliant Jazz musicians, poets and painters that he was just as openly revered as a heroic cultural figure setting the pace for a true revolution in American literary circles?
For insights into just how Kaufman was able to crack through the cultural somnolence of this country it is necessary to examine the broad range of his work. For Kaufman’s poetry is in many ways the very embodiment of 20th century modernism with one distinct and very significant difference: his work is at the same time a brilliant synthesis and extension of the many streams of African American poetics over the past sixty years. Which is to say that Kaufman is a master of Western and African American literary and oral traditions. Kaufman’s highly original use of the vernacular modes in American art (e.g. Blues, Jazz, urban argot-slang, and the ‘pop’ inno¬vations in painting, film, and cultural speech) had a considerable impact on his poetic stance, and is largely responsible for one of the most lyrically intense and highly imaginative poetic expressions in the post World War II period. What is of paramount importance to Kaufman’s vision and poetic practice is a flexible language form that will simultaneously allow for and reveal imagery, syntax, and rhythms that critically question or celebrate the vagaries of human existence as lived in social culture:
The whole of me
Is an unfurnished room
Filled with dank breath
Escaping in gasps to nowhere.
Before completely objective mirrors
I have shot myself with my eyes
But death refused my advances.
I have walked on my walls each night
Through strange landscapes in my head.
I have brushed my teeth with orange peel,
Iced with cold blood from the dripping faucets.
My face is covered with maps of dead nations...
“Would You Wear My Eyes”
(from: Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness)
Ray Charles is the black wind of Kilimanjaro
Screaming up-and-down blues,
Moaning happy on all the elevators of my time.
He burst from Bessie’s crushed black skull
One cold night outside of Nashville, shouting
And grows bluer from memory, glowing bluer, still...
“Blues Note”
(from Solitudes…)
Love tinted, beat angels,
Doomed to see their coffee dreams
Crushed on the floors of time, -
As they fling their arrow legs
To the heavens,
Losing their doubts in the beat.
Turtle-neck and angel guys, black-haired
dungaree guys,
Caesar-jawed, with synagogue eyes,
World travelers on the forty-one bus,
Mixing jazz with paint talk,
High rent, Bartok, classical murders,
The pot shortage and last night’s bust
Lost in a dream world
Where time is told with a beat…
“Bagel Shop Jazz”
(from: Solitudes…)
Five square miles of ultra-contemporary nymphomania,
Two dozen homos, to every sapiens, at last countdown,
Ugly Plymouths, swapping exhaust with red convertible buicks.
Twelve-year old mothers suing for child support,
Secondhand radios making it with widescreened TV sets,
Unhustling junkies shooting mothball fixes, insect junk,
Unemployed pimps living on neon backs of
Unemployed whores…
“Hollywood”
(From: Solitudes…)
Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind
Kansas Black Morning/First Horn Eyes/
Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings
People shouts/boy alto dreams/Tomorrow’s
Gold belied pipe stops and future Blues Times
Lurking Hawkins/shadows of Lester/realization
Bronze fingers-grain extensions seeking trapped sounds
Ghetto thoughts/bandstand courage/solo flight…
“Walking Parker Home”
(from: Solitudes…)
The Poet Nailed On
The Hard Bone of the World
His Soul Dedicated to Silence
Is a Fish With Frog’s Eyes,
The Blood of a Poet Flows
Out With His Poems, Back
To the Pyramid of Bones
From Which He is Thrust
His Death is a Saving Grace
Creation is Perfect…
“I Am A Camera”
(from: The Ancient Rain)
Piano buttons, stitched on morning lights
Jazz wakes with the day,
As I awaken with jan, love lit the night:
eyes appear and disappear,
To lead me once more, to a green moon.
Streets paved with opal sadness,
Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,
And jazz.
“Morning Joy”
(from: The Ancient Rain)
In summation, part of Kaufman’s greatness lies in his absolute refusal to allow any external forces (academic or popular) to determine the form or content of his art. Kaufman was decidedly not interested in being a mascot-member of any literary/artistic club, clique, or “school.” He was always the authentic rebel and iconoclast who was never controlled by any literary sect. As a master craftsman of language who fused grand passion, a mad subversive sense of humor, and a cutting satirical intelligence in his work, Kaufman found new and innovative uses for late modernist poetics, as well as the ancient oral tradition of the griot, street troubadour, and bard. As the quintessential Jazz poet he prophesized the creative unity of text and sound that characterizes contemporary postmodernist writing and performance art. And as a consummate poet of the bittersweet ballad that stings and haunts Kaufman, an accomplished songwriter who influ¬enced Bob Dylan and a number of other folk and blues artists, was one of those poets responsible for bringing back lyricism as an effective method of expression.
Finally, the incredible range of Kaufman’s obvious intellectual and emotional references, sources, and influences: Modern American poetry, Modern Spanish and Latin American poetry (particularly Frederico Garcia Lorca), Walt Whitman, the Greeks, ancient Egyptian literature and history, the entire corpus of European “avant-garde” poetics and art, the Bible, the Harlem Renaissance writers (especially Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown), Eastern and Western religious iconography and philosophy, Native American literature and oral history, Blues and Jazz, not to mention American comedy, journalism and politics, is the mark of a great literary intellect with an extraordinary command of tradition.
During Kaufman’s life, his artistic talent and visionary spirit was able to survive drugs, imprisonment, racism, and even an unjust public obscurity. In death it is our responsibility to see to it that Bob receives the proper recognition for his prodigious efforts. I can’t think of a writer who deserves it more.
Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Spring, 1987
Bibliography:
BOOKS:
The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978, (New Directions Books, 1981)
Golden Sardine, (City Lights Books, 1967)
Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness, (New Directions Books, 1965)
BROADSIDES:
Second April
Abomunist Manifesto
Does The Secret Mind Whisper?
(All published by City Lights Books, 1959, 1960)
MAGAZINES:
Beatitude, (founded 1959)
Articles about Kaufman:
“Bob Kaufman: Hidden Master of the Beats” (by Steve Abbott; Poetry Flash, February, 1986)
“Whatever Happened to Bob Kaufman?” (by Barbara Christian; The Beats In Criticism, 1981-Lee Bartlett, Editor)
“Private Sadness: Notes on the Poetry of Bob Kaufman” (by Raymond Foye; Beatitude #29, 1979)
REFERENCES:
Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters, City Lights Books and Harper & Row, 1981
Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, by Gerald Nicosia, Grove Press, 1984
Kerouac And Friends: A Photographic History of the Beat Generation, by Fred McDarrah, William Morrow, 1985
PHOTO: Bob Kaufman (1925-1986)
To fully appreciate the comprehensive scope of Kaufman’s oeuvre it is necessary to talk a bit about his personal biography. Born April 18, 1925, in New Orleans, Louisiana, Kaufman was one of 14 children born to a white Jewish father and Black (and Native American) mother. At the age of 13 Kaufman, a brilliant student yearning for adventure, left home to join the Merchant Marines. It was during his twenty year career as a seaman that Bob developed his lifelong love and fascination for books and writing. It was also where Kaufman first met an older seaman who introduced young Bob to the classic and modernist tradition in European and American literature: Shakespeare, Eliot, Pound, Whitman, Joyce, Williams, etc.
During this period Kaufman also became a widely respected shipmate who was well known for tackling the most dangerous jobs aboard ship. Later during the 1940s Kaufman became a Communist labor organizer for the Seaman’s Union. This political activity leads him to being barred from leaving port at the height of the repressive and reactionary McCarthy era in the early 1950s. However, this did not deter Kaufman from continuing his organizing forays into the south were he was often beaten and arrested by vicious racist mobs and local police authorities. At the time that Bob first met his future wife Eileen in Texas in 1958, she recounts that “Bob was so badly beaten in the chest and stomach that he literally could not eat any solid food for six months.”
After traveling all over the globe nine times with the Merchant Marines Kaufman finally settled down to live in San Francisco in the late 1950s after frequent stops there while on leave during the ’40s and early ’50s. Sandwiched in between all this activity Bob managed to take academic courses for two years in literature and sociology as well as labor history and politics at the famed New School for Social Research in New York City in the late 1940s, early ’5Os. It was during this time that Bob first met and established a long-term personal and artistic friendship with Jack Kerouac, the acknowledged “leader” of the still underground Beat literary movement. During the next 15 years Kaufman would go on to have a singularly powerful and seminal impact on the movement through his excoriating and lyrically captivating poetic style. His personal relationship with Kerouac is documented in the exhaustive 600-page biography on Kerouac by Gerald Nicosia entitled Memory Babe (Grove Press, 1984). Bob would go on in 1959 to start a legendary literary magazine with Allen Ginsberg and Bob Margolis called Beatitude, which just recently published its 33rd edition, and is the only non-academic journal from the Beat school still being published today.
So given all this information (which understandably only touches the bare surface of the complexity of Kaufman’s contributions) it would be more than a “fair” question to ask: “How is it that only two short articles have ever been published in the United States on this major literary figure?”
Furthermore, despite appearing in over 75 anthologies and having his poetry critically acclaimed and honored in Europe and Asia, and particularly in France where he was enthusiastically reviewed in all the major French literary journals and newspapers (and was so loved that he was known as the ‘Black American Rimbaud’), Kaufman was openly ignored (some say snubbed) by the tight coterie known as the Beats.
As a result, Kaufman was left out of many of the most well-known anthologies featuring the work of leading American ‘avant-garde’ writers, including Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (Grove Press, 1960), Seymour Krim’s The Beats (1961), and two books edited by LeroiJones/Amiri Baraka: The Moderns (1963) and the seminal anthology of African American writers Black Fire (William Morrow, 1968). Kaufman was also noticeably absent from the ground-breaking edition of Evergreen Review # 2 (Grove Press, 1957) which featured the work of Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Henry Miller, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti et al, and no Blacks, Native Americans, or Latinos at all! So much for truly progressive attitudes and values among the “radical wing” of American letters…
II. Kaufman The Poet
But what of the writer who so outraged local police authorities and staid newspaper columnists and academicians that he was often openly attached and/or ridiculed by them in the 1950s; and who so delighted and entranced brilliant Jazz musicians, poets and painters that he was just as openly revered as a heroic cultural figure setting the pace for a true revolution in American literary circles?
For insights into just how Kaufman was able to crack through the cultural somnolence of this country it is necessary to examine the broad range of his work. For Kaufman’s poetry is in many ways the very embodiment of 20th century modernism with one distinct and very significant difference: his work is at the same time a brilliant synthesis and extension of the many streams of African American poetics over the past sixty years. Which is to say that Kaufman is a master of Western and African American literary and oral traditions. Kaufman’s highly original use of the vernacular modes in American art (e.g. Blues, Jazz, urban argot-slang, and the ‘pop’ inno¬vations in painting, film, and cultural speech) had a considerable impact on his poetic stance, and is largely responsible for one of the most lyrically intense and highly imaginative poetic expressions in the post World War II period. What is of paramount importance to Kaufman’s vision and poetic practice is a flexible language form that will simultaneously allow for and reveal imagery, syntax, and rhythms that critically question or celebrate the vagaries of human existence as lived in social culture:
The whole of me
Is an unfurnished room
Filled with dank breath
Escaping in gasps to nowhere.
Before completely objective mirrors
I have shot myself with my eyes
But death refused my advances.
I have walked on my walls each night
Through strange landscapes in my head.
I have brushed my teeth with orange peel,
Iced with cold blood from the dripping faucets.
My face is covered with maps of dead nations...
“Would You Wear My Eyes”
(from: Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness)
Ray Charles is the black wind of Kilimanjaro
Screaming up-and-down blues,
Moaning happy on all the elevators of my time.
He burst from Bessie’s crushed black skull
One cold night outside of Nashville, shouting
And grows bluer from memory, glowing bluer, still...
“Blues Note”
(from Solitudes…)
Love tinted, beat angels,
Doomed to see their coffee dreams
Crushed on the floors of time, -
As they fling their arrow legs
To the heavens,
Losing their doubts in the beat.
Turtle-neck and angel guys, black-haired
dungaree guys,
Caesar-jawed, with synagogue eyes,
World travelers on the forty-one bus,
Mixing jazz with paint talk,
High rent, Bartok, classical murders,
The pot shortage and last night’s bust
Lost in a dream world
Where time is told with a beat…
“Bagel Shop Jazz”
(from: Solitudes…)
Five square miles of ultra-contemporary nymphomania,
Two dozen homos, to every sapiens, at last countdown,
Ugly Plymouths, swapping exhaust with red convertible buicks.
Twelve-year old mothers suing for child support,
Secondhand radios making it with widescreened TV sets,
Unhustling junkies shooting mothball fixes, insect junk,
Unemployed pimps living on neon backs of
Unemployed whores…
“Hollywood”
(From: Solitudes…)
Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind
Kansas Black Morning/First Horn Eyes/
Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings
People shouts/boy alto dreams/Tomorrow’s
Gold belied pipe stops and future Blues Times
Lurking Hawkins/shadows of Lester/realization
Bronze fingers-grain extensions seeking trapped sounds
Ghetto thoughts/bandstand courage/solo flight…
“Walking Parker Home”
(from: Solitudes…)
The Poet Nailed On
The Hard Bone of the World
His Soul Dedicated to Silence
Is a Fish With Frog’s Eyes,
The Blood of a Poet Flows
Out With His Poems, Back
To the Pyramid of Bones
From Which He is Thrust
His Death is a Saving Grace
Creation is Perfect…
“I Am A Camera”
(from: The Ancient Rain)
Piano buttons, stitched on morning lights
Jazz wakes with the day,
As I awaken with jan, love lit the night:
eyes appear and disappear,
To lead me once more, to a green moon.
Streets paved with opal sadness,
Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,
And jazz.
“Morning Joy”
(from: The Ancient Rain)
In summation, part of Kaufman’s greatness lies in his absolute refusal to allow any external forces (academic or popular) to determine the form or content of his art. Kaufman was decidedly not interested in being a mascot-member of any literary/artistic club, clique, or “school.” He was always the authentic rebel and iconoclast who was never controlled by any literary sect. As a master craftsman of language who fused grand passion, a mad subversive sense of humor, and a cutting satirical intelligence in his work, Kaufman found new and innovative uses for late modernist poetics, as well as the ancient oral tradition of the griot, street troubadour, and bard. As the quintessential Jazz poet he prophesized the creative unity of text and sound that characterizes contemporary postmodernist writing and performance art. And as a consummate poet of the bittersweet ballad that stings and haunts Kaufman, an accomplished songwriter who influ¬enced Bob Dylan and a number of other folk and blues artists, was one of those poets responsible for bringing back lyricism as an effective method of expression.
Finally, the incredible range of Kaufman’s obvious intellectual and emotional references, sources, and influences: Modern American poetry, Modern Spanish and Latin American poetry (particularly Frederico Garcia Lorca), Walt Whitman, the Greeks, ancient Egyptian literature and history, the entire corpus of European “avant-garde” poetics and art, the Bible, the Harlem Renaissance writers (especially Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown), Eastern and Western religious iconography and philosophy, Native American literature and oral history, Blues and Jazz, not to mention American comedy, journalism and politics, is the mark of a great literary intellect with an extraordinary command of tradition.
During Kaufman’s life, his artistic talent and visionary spirit was able to survive drugs, imprisonment, racism, and even an unjust public obscurity. In death it is our responsibility to see to it that Bob receives the proper recognition for his prodigious efforts. I can’t think of a writer who deserves it more.
Kofi Natambu
Solid Ground: A New World Journal
Spring, 1987
Bibliography:
BOOKS:
The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978, (New Directions Books, 1981)
Golden Sardine, (City Lights Books, 1967)
Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness, (New Directions Books, 1965)
BROADSIDES:
Second April
Abomunist Manifesto
Does The Secret Mind Whisper?
(All published by City Lights Books, 1959, 1960)
MAGAZINES:
Beatitude, (founded 1959)
Articles about Kaufman:
“Bob Kaufman: Hidden Master of the Beats” (by Steve Abbott; Poetry Flash, February, 1986)
“Whatever Happened to Bob Kaufman?” (by Barbara Christian; The Beats In Criticism, 1981-Lee Bartlett, Editor)
“Private Sadness: Notes on the Poetry of Bob Kaufman” (by Raymond Foye; Beatitude #29, 1979)
REFERENCES:
Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters, City Lights Books and Harper & Row, 1981
Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, by Gerald Nicosia, Grove Press, 1984
Kerouac And Friends: A Photographic History of the Beat Generation, by Fred McDarrah, William Morrow, 1985
PHOTO: Bob Kaufman (1925-1986)
