A VOYAGER ARRIVING IN a darkened opal port, his verbal lenses honed by an ingrown aural preciseness, by an absence of buried mechanics. I think of the aboriginal Kaufman inwardly floating through explosive anonymities, never once singed by mundane repetition or sequel. His hearing is replete at the level of intuitive terminology, at the root of its most seminal spinning. His language, part aurora and lava, flowing from a central vitrescence. It partakes of the spell, being hypnotic and genetic in demeanor. I mean, there is insight into life which sustains itself by means of intrinsic purity, by means of necessitous obscurity, which can never be subject to rational decoding, to exoteric decipherment. Language then, is not a given, not a sum to be captured and examined under prevalent electron regalia. Verbal obstacle then leaps, the accessible as sense, the quotidian as assumption.
By his electrical presence Kaufman’s language escapes the analytical, the moment by moment vacuum deemed climactic according to a precedent assumed by the rules of a rational exegesis. And such exegesis denies and destroys the spontaneous in favor of pattern. Again Kaufman, not a deleted fuchsia, but original respiration. A voice capable of traversing acres of fire, his mandibles torched by elemental tattoos, by various interior Grails. And what compels such attention is his superior analogical power aged by a fabulous turbulence. As if he had been cast into frictive waters at the center of a brimstone mountain. It is a poetic energy which continues to prevail, and by prevailing I mean sustained hypnosis as experienced by the reader.
When I first encountered the poem “To My Son Parker Asleep in the Next Room,” an urgency, a vortex occurred within me, as if awakened to a new viridity. Such reaction is not an exaggeration for a nascent poet to experience, especially one instinctively seduced by subconscious dioramas. It is a writing seemingly soaked by a surreptitious light from a vacated sun. Then reading poems like “Sheila,” “Unhistorical Events,” “Blue Slanted Into Blueness” became for me, like obscure motions spinning in a transfixed carbon house. I was magnetically engulfed.
As Kaufman poetically appeared with his broadsides he was already of seminal import, he was already the nizam, the rajah. According to the photographer Jerry Stoll, Kaufman was a “pioneer,” a “functioning … critic of society,” “much more social and political … than any of the other poets in North Beach … ” He carried his own migrational light which led “people like Ginsberg” into a greater activists’ capacity. In this regard, Kaufman was the proto-source, the engendered proto-Sphinx, who simply appeared without formal literary precedent, much in the manner of Lautreamont or Rimbaud. Of course, this is plain to us now, but in the atmosphere of the 1950s, with the case against the Rosenbergs still hissing, with the rasping carcinogens of McCarthy generally rife throughout the atmosphere, he showed unprecedented character. General threat corroded the foreground; metropolitan areas swarmed with informers, all enigmas were suspected. Noncondoned behavior was thought of as allergic, as partaking of treasonous errata. And Kaufman at this moment was the inscrutable lightning rod, possessed of courage and greenish defiance, who transmuted life into sound; into supernal ensembles of magic verbal liquid.
His “flaming water,” his “Indian suicides,” capable of conversing with a box of amoebas, capable of “shining” on “far historical peaks.” Kaufman in this register remains eminently uncontainable. In this he literally embodies the surreal in that not a single line is operatically planned or thought out as regards publishable criteria. But upon reading his work, levels of intensity are not lacking, nor is a spectacular use of oral language convened to suicidally incinerate the printed page with aleatoric detachment. No, the language remains powerful in book form, fused in its leaps by antisedentary scorching. Yet Kaufman seemed to swelter with an inborn hostility to literature and its sustained identity in the reductive. Because of this, his verbal tremblings remain profuse with usurpation and voltage as he acknowledged “the demands of surrealist realization,” as he challenged “Apollinaire to stagger drunk from his grave and write a poem about the Rosenbergs’ last days” while smouldering in the “Death House.” In the poem “Voyagers,” he speaks of
Twice-maimed shrews, ailing
In elongated slots
Of public splendor.
or, in “Afterwards, They Shall Dance,” he speaks of his face being “a living emotional relief map, forever wet.”
Where do we find lines like Kaufman’s in the present poetic American pantheon; lines stunning with irregular galvanic, with endogenous wingedness, with relentless surprise?
In the surge of Lamantia there are parallels, there are moments in Corso and Crane, in the visions of Daniel Moore, which synaptically lurk in the ricochets of his concussive charisma. He remains ulterior, clandestine, in the way his verbal cancellations deduct their actions in crossing subversive esplanades. And he poetically protracts this vapor across dialectical respiration being “eternally free in all things.” He spoke of “Java,” of “Melanesian mountain peaks,” of Assyria’s “earthen dens,” of Camus as a “sand faced rebel from Olympus.” So Kaufman continues to exist for me like a verdigris Phoenix, arising and re-arising from the poets’ ill-begotten lot even as he smoulders “in a cell with a view of evil parallels.”
The quintessential scion of chance linguistic praxis, Kaufman’s poems continue moment by moment to irradiate electricity. Continue within the range of immaculate verbal searing, spun from green elliptical finery.
Saying this, do I place Kaufman on a pedestal just to celebrate him in death, to claim inspiration from the sum of an abstract mirage? I can answer without hesitation, no. During the late 1970s and the early 1980s I would travel to North Beach as towards some internal Mecca, wandering its labyrinths around sundown, just to catch sightings of the darting giant flitting in and out of enclaves. These illusive glimpses were like poetic talismans for me, sparks of gold in the labyrinth. I would always see him on angles from a distance, and near the end of one auric afternoon we stood face to face at oblique remove, and I called out his name, and at the evaporation of his name from my lips he literally vanished into one of the teeming dives in the vicinity of Vallejo. Which immediately brought to mind the parallel of Pessoa and his spontaneous disappearances during his walks across Lisbon.
During this period he lived adjacent to Philip Lamantia. And it was one morning after emerging from a dozen-hour dialogue with the latter, that we walked across Harwood Alley to Neeli Cherkovski’s, who tended Kaufman during those days. It was about 8 A.M. one Monday morning, and Kaufman remained sequestered in the other room, as both of us peered at the original typewritten manuscript of The Ancient Rain. I mention this episode because both Kaufman and Lamantia have had instantaneous impact upon my poetic formation. Have made foray after foray into my hermetically sealed lingual athanor, and their verbal osmotics continue to seep into my imaginal ozone, letting me know moment after moment that imaginal radiance can prevail.
In discussing Kaufman, all academic insertion is passionately declined, is ravaged, with all its footnotes exploded. The contours blurred, the circumferences alchemically splayed by the beauty of mathematical absence. And I mean mathematics in its lower form, in its niggling banter concerning the petty matters of equated equidistance.
When poets sought shelter beneath an academic archway, Kaufman assaulted police, and was arrested more than thirty times in a single year. When poets sought for the proper form to ensconce their subject matter, Kaufman wrote of “Unholy Missions,” of “Heather Bell,” of the previously mentioned “Sheila” “cast out of rainclouds … on warped faded carousels.” The verbal structures collapse and revisualize, not in terms of a furtive literary comment, nor as an ironic line sustained by the pressure of brilliantly acceptable wit. Kaufman’s language condenses to aboriginal ubiquity, being that status of poet who heard his words as untranslated molten, like an abnormal eaglet deciphering his reptilian forerunners with intangible preciseness; the sound spun by “illusionary motion,” by the liquor of exploded roses, blazing as quantum mass beyond the reasoned scope of antideracination.
A poet who followed his own endogenous helical road, roaming through “vacant theaters,” erasing “taxable public sheets,” Kaufman so derealized the archives that he negated all rational effort by sifting through auricular winds of dialectical transparency, thereby mining an inevitable verbal aurum. The three dimensions magnificently destabilized and fleetingly focused like “Tall strips of carrion moonlight sparing only stars.” Thus he occupied a seditionary grammatical bastion, implying “a horror of trades.” He knew like Rimbaud that “The hand that guides the pen is worth the hand that guides the plow.” Thus, he threw routine and stasis into the quarrelsome antidotes of debris.
And even in death, Kaufman continues to magically advance across a blinding reticular sea, without the mercator’s imprisoning symmetries, electric with Utopias, far outside the parochial reportage of mechanical matching burins, poised as they are against the pure “fluidity of desire.”
Of course, Kaufman refuses to match, to sustain the subject of “conferences” à la Kerouac and Ginsberg, so crucially pointed out by Maria Damon. He continues to exist “beyond official Beat history,” beyond its canon as inscribed by the Whitney Museum, beyond the delineated form of the countercultural figure within the scope of defined exotic boundary. No, there is a more sustained projection from his blood, which at present remove naturally leaps the specific mercury of a bygone era, transcending its once arresting intent, spiralling into an expanded counterrotation, which occupies the poets’ true domain, which Parker Tyler on another occasion deemed the interior kingdom of “Elsewhere.”