Bob Kaufman was born in 1925 in New Orleans, where he remained until he left junior high school to join the Merchant Marine. For the next twenty years he developed his interest in literature, and upon settling in San Francisco in the early sixties he found himself at the center of the Beat movement. His “Abomunist Manifesto” was published as a broadside in 1959 by City Lights, the press that had released Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” three years earlier. Kaufman’s Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness followed in 1965.
Kaufman’s poetry imbibes the pulse of urban life, particularly as accented and underscored by the tonal movements and rhetoric of American jazz. Though noted as an experimentalist, Kaufman wrestled as well with literary convention in a way that can infuse his work with a startling tension.
During the Vietnam War, Kaufman fell into a prolonged silence, which lifted briefly in the late 1970s. At times he had difficulty making a living and suffered regularly from dire poverty. The silences and the poverty punctuate his collected work, The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978, which was published in 1986, the year of Kaufman’s death in San Francisco.
One thousand saxophones infiltrate the city,
Each with a man inside,
Hidden in ordinary cases,
Labeled FRAGILE.
A fleet of trumpets drops their hooks,
Inside at the outside.
Ten waves of trombones approach the city
Under blue cover
Of late autumn’s neoclassical clouds.
One hundred drummers, each a stick in each hand,
The delicate rumble of pianos, moving in.
The secret agent, an innocent bystander,
Drops a note in the wail box.
Five generals, gathered in the gallery,
Blowing plans.
At last, the secret code is flashed:
Now is the time, now is the time.
Attack: The sound of jazz.
The city falls.
He was first seen in a Louisiana bayou,
Playing chess with an intellectual lobster.
They burned his linoleum house alive
And sent that intellectual off to jail.
He wrote home every day, to no avail.
Grandfather had cut out, he couldn’t raise the bail.
Next seen, skiing on some dusty Texas road,
An intellectual’s soul hung from his ears,
Discussing politics with an unemployed butterfly.
They hung that poor butterfly, poor butterfly.
Grandfather had cut out, he couldn’t raise the bail.
Next seen on the Arizona desert, walking,
Applying soothing poultices to the teeth
Dentists all over the state brought gauze balls,
Bandaged the mountain, buried it at sea.
Grandfather had cut out, he couldn’t raise the bail.
Next seen in California, the top part,
Arranging a marriage, mating trees,
Crossing a rich redwood and a black pine.
He was exposed by the Boy Scouts of America.
The trees were arrested on a vag charge.
Grandfather cut out, he couldn’t raise the bail.
Now I have seen him here. He is beat.
His girlfriend has green ears;
She is twenty-three months pregnant.
I kissed them both:
Live happily ever after.
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 belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times
Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization
Bronze fingers—brain extensions seeking trapped sounds
Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight
Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts
New York altar city/ black tears/ secret disciples
Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates
Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes
Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions
Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground.
Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding
Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/ beauty speared into greedy ears
Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions
Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/
Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/
Death and indestructible existence.
In that Jazz corner of life
Wrapped in a mist of sound
His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn
Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams
Inviting the nerveless to feel once more
That fierce dying of humans consumed
In raging fires of Love.
1
I am sitting in a cell with a view of evil parallels,
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?
Painter, paint me a crazy jail, mad water-color cells.
Poet, how old is suffering? Write it in yellow lead.
God, make me a sky on my glass ceiling. I need stars now,
To lead through this atmosphere of shrieks and private hells,
Entrances and exits, in … out … up … down, the civic seesaw.
Here—me—now—hear—me—now—always here somehow.
3
In a universe of cells—who is not in jail? Jailers.
In a world of hospitals—who is not sick? Doctors.
A golden sardine is swimming in my head.
Oh we know some things, man, about some things
Like jazz and jails and God.
Saturday is a good day to go to jail.
4
Now they give a new form, quivering jelly-like,
That proves any boy can be president of Muscatel.
They are mad at him because he’s one of Them.
Gray-speckled unplanned nakedness; stinking
Fingers grasping toilet bowl. Mr. America wants to bathe.
Look! On the floor, lying across America’s face—
A real movie star featured in a million newsreels.
What am I doing—feeling compassion?
When he comes out of it, he will help kill me.
He probably hates living.
5
Nuts, skin bolts, clanking in his stomach, scrambled.
His society’s gone to pieces in his belly, bloated.
See the great American windmill, tilting at itself,
Good solid stock, the kind that made America drunk.
Success written all over his street-streaked ass.
Successful-type success, forty home runs in one inning.
Stop suffering, Jack, you can’t fool us. We know.
This is the greatest country in the world, ain’t it?
He didn’t make it. Wino in Cell 3.
6
There have been too many years in this short span of mine.
My soul demands a cave of its own, like the Jain god;
Yet I must make it go on, hard like jazz, glowing
In this dark plastic jungle, land of long night, chilled.
My navel is a button to push when I want inside out.
Am I not more than a mass of entrails and rough tissue?
Must I break my bones? Drink my wine-diluted blood?
Should I dredge old sadness from my chest?
Not again,
All those ancient balls of fire, hotly swallowed, let them lie.
Let me spit breath mists of introspection, bits of me,
So that when I am gone, I shall be in the air.
7
Someone whom I am is no one.
Something I have done is nothing.
Someplace I have been is nowhere.
I am not me.
What of the answers
I must find questions for?
All these strange streets
I must find cities for,
Thank God for beatniks.
8
All night the stink of rotting people,
Fumes rising from pyres of live men,
Fill my nose with gassy disgust,
Drown my exposed eyes in tears.
Traveling God salesmen, bursting my ear drum
With the dullest part of a good sexy book,
Impatient for Monday and adding machines.
10
Yellow-eyed dogs whistling in evening.
11
The baby came to jail today.
12
One more day to hell, filled with floating glands.
13
The jail, a huge hollow metal cube
Hanging from the moon by a silver chain.
Someday Johnny Appleseed is going to chop it down.
14
Three long strips of light
Braided into a ray.
15
I am apprehensive about my future;
My past has turned its back on me.
16
Shadows I see, forming on the wall,
Pictures of desires protected from my own eyes.
After spending all night constructing a dream,
Morning came and blinded me with light.
Now I seek among mountains of crushed eggshells
For the God damned dream I never wanted.
18
Sitting here writing things on paper,
Instead of sticking the pencil into the air.
19
The Battle of Monumental Failures raging,
Both hoping for a good clean loss.
20
Now I see the night, silently overwhelming day.
21
Caught in imaginary webs of conscience,
I weep over my acts, yet believe.
22
Cities should be built on one side of the street.
23
People who can’t cast shadows
Never die of freckles.
24
The end always comes last.
We sat at a corner table,
Devouring each other word by word,
Until nothing was left, repulsive skeletons.
26
I sit here writing, not daring to stop,
For fear of seeing what’s outside my head.
27
There, Jesus, didn’t hurt a bit, did it?
28
I am afraid to follow my flesh over those narrow
Wide hard soft female beds, but I do.
29
Link by link, we forged the chain.
Then, discovering the end around our necks,
We bugged out.
30
I have never seen a wild poetic loaf of bread,
But if I did, I would eat it, crust and all.
31
From how many years away does a baby come?
32
Universality, duality, totality … one.
The defective on the floor, mumbling,
Was once a man who shouted across tables.
34
Come, help flatten a raindrop.
Written in San Francisco City Prison
Cell 3, 1959