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Books by Bob Kaufman
Solitudes
Crowded with Loneliness /
The Ancient Rain:
Poems 1956-1978 /
Second April
/
Cranial
Guitar: Selected Poems /
The
Golden Sardine
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Bob
Kaufman
(1925-1986)
By Katherine V. Lindberg
Poet, prose poet, jazz performance artist,
satirist, manifesto writer, and legendary figure in the Beat
movement, Bob Kaufman successfully promoted both anonymity and
myths of his racial identity and class origins. While
romanticized biographies ascribe him with such names as griot,
shaman, saint, and prophet of Caribbean, African, Native
American, Catholic, and/or Jewish traditions, respectively,
Kaufman was most likely the tenth of thirteen children of an
African American and part Jewish father and a schoolteacher
mother from an old New Orleans African American catholic family.
After an orderly childhood that probably included a secondary
education, he joined the merchant marine and became active in
the radical Seafarer's Union.
An itinerant drifter and self-taught poet (but a brief stint
at the New school for Social Research and among the Black Arts
and Beat literati of New York), he identified with the lives and
cryptically quoted the works of poet-heroes such as Herman
Melville, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire,
Federico Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Langston
Hughes, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Nicholas guillen, as
well as improvisational artists and jazz musicians, including
Charlie Parker, after whom he named his only son. In individual
poems he is, variously, an experimental stylist in the Whitman
tradition ("The American Sun"), a French surrealist
and existentialist ("Camus: I Want to Know"), a jazz
poet after Langston Hughes, and in dialogue with bebop and the
Black Arts movement ("African Dream," "Walking
Parker Home").
As editor of Beatitude, a San Francisco literary
magazine, Kaufman is credited by some with coming
"Beat" and exemplifying its voluntarily desolate
lifestyle. He enjoyed an underground existence as a "poets'
poet" (in Amiri Baraka's poem "Meditation on Bob
Kaufman," Sulfur, Fall 1991) and as a legendary performer
in the much memorialized street scenes of San Francisco's North
Bend and New York's Greenwich Village during the late 1950s
through the late 1970s.
Kaufman is best known for short lyric poems in African
American (Langston Hughes, ed. The New Negro Poetry,
1964, being the first) and avant-garde anthologies (New
directions in prose and Poetry #17, 1967, covering poetry and
prose, The Portable Beat Reader, 1992). Works originally
published by City Lights Bookstore of San Francisco are
collected in two New Directions publications,
Solitudes
Crowded with Loneliness (1965) and
The Ancient Rain:
Poems 1956-1978 (1981). Three early broadsides, Abomunist
Manifesto (1959),
Second April (1959), and Does
the Secret Mind Whisper (1960) extend his eclectic
aesthetics into prose fiction and programmatic prose poetry.
The
Golden Sardine (1967) was translated and influential in
France (as William Burroughs, Claude Pelieu, Bob Kaufman,
Paris, 1967). The latter, along with South American and other
translations, have earned Kaufman a wider reputation abroad than
among mainstream critics in the United States.
Rather than address electoral, protest, or even literary
politics in traditional ways, his elusive and allusive writings
as well as his tragicomic life sustain a critique of the subtle
rules and terrible punishment that, as he knew them, enforce
American bourgeois values of race, class, sexuality, and
rationality. Answering Mccarthyism, Beat, and Black Arts
manifestoes with Dadaist anarchism and surrealist irrationalism,
"Abomunism" (his contraction of, among other things,
communism, atom bomb, Bob Kaufman,
and abomination) is serious in its "black
humor."
From the late 1960s onward, through stretches of withdrawal
and suffering the ill effects of political blacklisting and
harassment, alcohol, drugs, electroshock treatments, and
imprisonments, Kaufman recorded both with humor and pathos the
pain of society's victims. While no booklength study has yet
been devoted to Kaufman, several recent essays affirm his
deceptively broad intellectual interests and the ambiguous power
of individual acts of cultural resistance in the continuing
struggles of oppressed peoples.
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See Barbara Christian, "Whatever Happened to Bob
Kaufman?' Black World 21 (Sept. 1972): 20-29.
Maha damon,
"'Unmeaning Jargon' / Uncanonized Beatitude: Bob Kaufman,
Poet," South Atlantic Quarterly 87.4 (Fall 1988): 701-741.
Kathryne V. Lindberg, "Bob Kaufman, Sir Real,"
Talisman 11 (Fall 1993): 167-182.
Gerald Nicosian, ed.
Cranial
Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman, 1996. |
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Round About Midnight
By Bon Kaufman Jazz radio on a midnight
kick,
Round about Midnight.
Sitting on the bed,
With a jazz type chick
Round about Midnight,
Piano laughter, in my
ears,
Round about Midnight.
Stirring up laughter,
dying tears,
Round about Midnight.
Soft blue voices, muted
grins,
Excited voices, Father's
sins,
Round about Midnight.
Come on baby, take off
your clothes,
Round about Midnight,
* * *
* * Jazz Chick
By Bob Kaufman
Music from her breast,
vibrating
Soundseared into burnished
velvet.
Silent hips deceiving
fools.
Rivulets of tricking
ecstasy
from the alabaster pools
of Jazz
Where music cools hot
souls.
Eyes more articulately
silent
Than medusa's thousand
tongues.
A bridge of eyes,
consenting smiles
reveal her presence
singing
Of cool remembrances,
happy nalls
Wrapped in swinging
Jazz
Her music . . .
Jazz. |
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Bob Kaufman
(April 18, 1925 – January 12, 1986), born Robert
Garnell Kaufman, was an American
Beat poet and
surrealist inspired by
jazz music. In France, where his poetry had a
large following, he was known as the "American
Rimbaud." . . . His poetry made use of jazz
syncopation and meter. The critic Raymond Foye wrote
about him, "Adapting the harmonic complexities and
spontaneous invention of
bebop to poetic euphony and meter, he became the
quintessential jazz poet."
Poet
Jack Micheline said about Kaufman, "I found his
work to be essentially
improvisational, 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 of
John F. Kennedy, Kaufman took a Buddhist vow of
silence that lasted until the end of the
Vietnam War in 1973. He broke his silence by
reciting his poem "All Those Ships that Never
Sailed," the first lines of which are
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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 |
Source:
Wikipedia
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 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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