It’s hard to know how to begin talking about Bob Kaufman, Poet—should we talk about his beginnings in New Orleans and his connection to a blues and jazz tradition? His time in the Merchant Marine, which, as he spoke of it, began his vocation as a poet through his reading upon the high seas? Kaufman’s wanting to be “anonymous” and forgotten? Or, his stance as an oral poet, as a poet who reportedly rarely wrote down his work, which survives as much from others writing it down and rescuing it as from his composing it?
Perhaps I should begin with my poetic relation to Bob Kaufman, which began at least in part with the Dark Room Collective, the Boston-based black writers’ collective I was a member of, starting in the early 1990s. (Once in, you’re in forever.) Founded in 1989, the collective was interested in black culture and history, and the preservation of both, hosting readings and recording interviews with established and emerging black writers (before “emerging” became just another stick without much of a carrot). For us, Bob Kaufman was an avatar of sorts—an incarnation of poetry in what may be called its purest form, or perhaps, most accurately, its most useful, impure form, complete with a sense of music and line that can be hard to find. Rare, but not rarefied. (I have a T-shirt somewhere, hand-drawn, that reads “The Dark Room” with Kaufman’s “Golden Sardine” inked in yellow, swimming below it.) Kaufman’s sense of poetry’s immediacy, its performative qualities, his mix of speech and surrealism, appealed to us; he was one of the few people I know who could append the phrase “Poet” after his name, which is what he did in a poem-letter reprinted at the end of his second book, and have it stick. He was so dedicated to poetry that he didn’t write it down; he was so much a poet that he committed a vow of silence for over ten years, from Kennedy’s assassination to the end of the Vietnam War. While others were out in the street protesting, or in a VW van “dropping out” and dropping acid, Kaufman was silent, which is one kind of crucial protest. Perhaps the most crucial.
For now, let’s stick with what Bob Kaufman meant to me as a young poet, which was plenty. Thinking back on it, my internalized sense of what the important themes should be comes in part from Kaufman. “Music, silence, and noise” was my recent answer to an interviewer asking what I thought my own themes were,1 and in rereading Kaufman I see the presence of all three in his multiple, musical selves.
I should say that I’ve tried writing on Kaufman before, even getting a small grant while in college in the summer of 1991 to consider his legacy. With its five hundred dollars I went to San Francisco—where Kaufman spent most of his adult life—with the full intent of interviewing folks who knew him. After crashing with friends in Oakland—most of whom are fairly well known today—rotating off the futon in a Berkeley apartment with four other guys while staying with the generous house sitter for a pot dealer for the Bay Area who was off making some deals, I ended up with an August sublet shared with four stinky cats and two guys I didn’t know. (One nice, one something of a racist: when I once complained about the rats that would sometimes scratch below the floorboards all night, he mentioned they might nest in my dreads, implying they did already.) I lived in what was called the Lower Haight, but used to be the Fillmore—the lively black neighborhood and street that stretched north from Haight Street (and below and east of what became Haight-Asbury) and that had been urban-renewed mostly out of existence by the 1970s. A highway running through the neighborhood meant replacing black businesses with housing projects, and the working poor with crack.
By the time I got there, there were some divey, reincarnated bars and a few artists, or more accurately slackers, though it was still dangerous enough that one night I was nearly mugged on my corner, and strange enough that sitting in one of our favorite hangouts, Hotel Casa Loma, a place with a bar below, you could see more than your share of fights and car crashes. (A few years ago during the dot-com boom I went back to Lower Haight and there were SUVs parked on a curb in the neighborhood, and some young lawyer house party that left the door to her apartment wide open. I couldn’t bear it, so stood outside pretending to be a bouncer and asked the young esquires for IDs.)
That summer I enjoyed living in a traditionally, though not necessarily traditional, black neighborhood—no matter how different Lower Haight had grown. In feeling, if not fact, it seemed not so different from the Mattapan my aunt and uncle had lived in since the 1960s, and that was a refuge from ivy towers come holidays or whenever I needed one. That was the summer of MC Breed & DFC’s “Ain’t No Future in Yo’ Frontin’,” a forgotten hip-hop classic, whose Middle Eastern sample proved a rather regular, if welcome, alarm clock ringing from passing cars.
If I had to name the somewhere I lived, it was that roving neighborhood Bohemia. This I suppose I shared, albeit superficially, with Kaufman, and later, with Basquiat, whom I began to write about soon after. But I didn’t think of it that way then: I was simply living the life I hoped might lead me to a life of writing. It was enough to share the same air Kaufman had once breathed. Black Bohemia, like black surrealism, is a topic that deserves more and mo betta written about it—race I suppose is what some think isn’t discussed in bohemia, though that was exactly not my experience.
One reason black bohemia is rarely discussed, or discussed well—as it is, say, in How I Became Hettie Jones by Hettie Jones—is that it gets into questions that have more traditionally been addressed by the black expatriate. Perhaps expatriate life is where thinking about black bohemia begins—with literary exiles like Baldwin, Wright, and Du Bois, not to mention jazz musicians from Ada “Bricktop” Smith to Dexter Gordon. Bohemia may be the solution for a younger self, expatriatism for the older: bohemia is often what is being rejected by black folks as they progress toward self-imposed exile, whether moving Uptown as Baraka did; or abroad to Paris and then, literally, Timbuktu, like Ted Joans.
We might remember here that Joans used to be a beatnik for hire—a brilliant spoof on the artificiality of identity, and the commodification of both blackness and the Beat generation. It also earned him a few bucks. In this it is the counterfeit made flesh, his Rent-a-Beatnik providing partygoers both a laugh and a bit of frisson; the fiction of his belonging, of his being not invited (as was sometimes chic to do) but hired, makes him more than “help,” while also parodying it.
But returning to expatriatism, self-exile may seem redundant for the black writer—or perhaps it’s a case of rejecting bohemia before it rejects you, whether from the natural limits of artistic community or the painful limits of a perceived America. Yet as Langston Hughes or any other number of artists point out, black community and bohemian community overlap, confront, complement, distract, ignore, and often are no different from, each other—the life of the jazz musician is just one example of a life without labels but not without race.
Certainly, it seems, bohemia never meant the absence of blackness for Kaufman, as Kaufman’s work is infused with blackness—which is to say, music and silence and noise.
A brief bio: Kaufman, like jazz, was born in New Orleans. The year was 1925. Kaufman often claimed to have been half-black and half-Jewish, but his brother has said that that’s not true, that his distinctive last name came from a Jewish grandfather, or recent ancestor. In any case, Kaufman often identifies with Jewishness, I think to highlight his stance in an America that regards both Jewishness and blackness, especially in postwar America, as outsider identities. (In this, you could say his origin resembles the ways early writers saw jazz as an unholy hybrid made up of black and Jewish elements.)2 I’d also say that Kaufman is participating in the imaginary notions of identity discussed by the late Leslie Fiedler, who wrote that we’re all imaginary Americans. (Fiedler also wrote that all Americans spend their childhoods as Imaginary Indians, and their adolescence as Imaginary Negroes, an apt summary of the desires in our Imaginary America.)
After a stint in the Merchant Marine, Kaufman settled in San Francisco, living mostly in North Beach, an Italian neighborhood famous for City Lights bookstore and also the Condor, the first topless club in the States, and later the first bottomless one. The Condor’s full-figured neon sign was still quite a landmark when I was living there; last I was there it had turned into an open-air fern bar. (Though Kaufman never left bohemia, it left him.) As I mentioned, Kaufman reportedly chiefly recited or declaimed his work, making a name for himself locally and publishing in magazines including Beatitude, which he helped to found with his wife, Eileen, as well as in important broadsides like Second April and the Abomunist Manifesto, all published with City Lights in the late 1950s. Kaufman then took Harvard, New York, and even France—where he was called “the Black Rimbaud”—by storm. He published only three full-length books in his lifetime: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1964) and Golden Sardine (City Lights Pocket Poets no. 21, 1967) appeared in quick succession the 1960s, then nothing till the 1980s. Kennedy’s assassination aside, it seems no accident, or a fascinating coincidence, that Kaufman’s vow of silence in essence began with his first book publication.
The last book Kaufman saw into print was Ancient Rain, published in 1981—he died in 1986, survived by his wife and son. In an interview in the New York Times Magazine, even his son spoke of being unsure of his legacy, frustrated by folks telling him his dad was a genius when he didn’t have always pleasant memories of the poverty and instability of life as a poet’s son. Kaufman is often credited with inventing the term “Beat”—at the least, he best embodied it, not as what Norman Mailer called a “White Negro” but instead as a “Black Negro and Imaginary Jew,” exiled even from the Beat movement he helped name. He often falls out of black and Beat anthologies alike; he is rarely mentioned in either experimental anthologies or the recent spoken word revival though he was “spoken word” before it was a sales category, and experimental when it meant something musical, not just for its own sake. Surely Kaufman experienced Ginsberg’s lowercase “negro streets” quite differently, not seeking out madness or its cure, but instead suffering police harassment, frequent arrests for vagrancy, and on several occasions involuntary electroshock treatment while in custody.
Kaufman’s three lone volumes were like bibles to me, and the means by which I learned to love him—though now there’s Cranial Guitar, which contains uncollected poems and reprints the hard-to-find volume Golden Sardine. When I was looking for Sardine back in the day, the book’s elusiveness was part of its appeal, not to mention indicative of something of Kaufman’s character. The third edition from 1976 I eventually found contains photographs of him that show him young, clean shaven, and devastatingly handsome, long before the scruffy beard of later years. From the cover of my coffee-stained copy he stares, a kind of Bedouin in a scarf and hat. The pictures seem to capture both beauty and bitterness, as do the poems.
One of the most powerful pieces in Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness—one of those titles only Kaufman could get away with, and that, upon further reflection, renders a nice series of reversals and revisions, getting us to think of the difference between a crowd and solitude, between a voluntary aloneness and the isolation found even in a crowd—is “Jail Poems.” A sequence of thirty-four sections, or shorter poems, it begins:
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.
In what feels like solitary confinement, Kaufman’s loneliness is clear—made all the clearer by his desire for expansiveness, to be many selves, to “sit opposite every prisoner in every hole.” He is writing to be heard, literally saying later on, “Here—me—now—hear—me—now—always here somehow.” As the poem shifts between being “heard” and being “here,” meaning both in jail and being alive—a shift that occurs differently on the page from simply being heard aloud—Kaufman makes his presence known while facing the absence of justice.
The end of the poem lets us know it was “Written in San Francisco City Prison / Cell 3, 1959,” answering the “here” only partially. Or, only literally. Each section of the poem seems a day, or an hour, or an eternity; no wonder the sections get shorter as they proceed, as if losing hope or its expression. Here’s all of part 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.
The poem ends with sections that read in full:
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?
and finally
34
Come, help flatten a raindrop.3
The whole has the feeling not just of being written but of the urgency of speech—it is the utterance of the prisoner, furtive and filled with a wish for freedom and survival. I am reminded of the Amistad rebels’ letters from jail; or George Jackson, or Jean Genet, or even Ezra Pound; I recall too South African poet Breyten Breytenbach’s years in jail and his daily writing, which each night was removed by the guards. He called it pure writing, for survival—he had no notion he would see any of it again, if and when he got out.
On the outside, of course, there are other kinds of guards, often unseeable, who remove writing not necessarily from our shelves but from our cultural memory. Kaufman’s every book is a shadow book. Kaufman himself dares us to forget him—as an introduction to Ancient Rain says, he told the editor he wants us to. “‘I want to be anonymous,’” the editor’s note quotes Kaufman as saying. Kaufman’s poetry expresses much the same wish; consider “Unholy Missions”:
I want to be buried in an anonymous crater inside the moon.
I want to build miniature golf courses on all the stars.
I want to prove that Atlantis was a summer resort for cave men.
I want to prove that Los Angeles is a practical joke played on us
by superior beings on a humorous planet.
I want to expose Heaven as an exclusive sanitarium filled with
rich psychopaths who think they can fly.
I want to show that the Bible was serialized in a Roman
children’s magazine.
I want to prove that the sun was born when God fell asleep with
a lit cigarette, tired after a hard night of judging.
I want to prove once and for all that I am not crazy.4
Kaufman’s desire to be anonymous is both ironic and sincere, as is his wish to prove Heaven false, or himself “not crazy.” In wanting to expose Heaven, his is a blues irony, fingering the jagged grain between desire and its fulfillment, between tragedy and comedy. Only in this way is he “unholy”—crazy in the blues and bad man sense—and in sending up our assumptions in a way that Countee Cullen would also, a generation before.
A word about anonymity. Many have written on the importance of naming in the African American tradition, including this very study. Having been “called out our name” for centuries—being renamed, unnamed, invisible—African Americans view the act of naming oneself, whether Malcolm X or Frederick Douglass or Billie Holiday, herself further renamed “Lady,” as a powerful, symbolic act. (Hell, look how many names Diddy has had in the relatively short time he’s been on the scene—Sean “Puffy” Combs, Sean John, Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy, Diddy—all these are reclamations and rebirths, or at least marketing relaunches.) With this in mind, what does it mean to wish to be nameless?
Namelessness is not necessarily a symptom of being without a name, or between names, though it can be—Baldwin’s early works No Name in the Street and Nobody Knows My Name both make this unnaming trope visible. Nobodyness for Baldwin is a kind of resistance, related but somewhat different from Malcolm X’s—whose X stood for indeterminacy, for both his ancient, unknown African name, and for the one he was to take, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, when spiritually reborn. There’s also the nobodyness of Dunbar, Bert Williams, and even Dickinson.
In Kaufman’s case anonymity is not indeterminacy, but rather, namelessness as a state of grace, an acceptance of being part of the unnameable universe. You could say it is satori, the Zen concept of “enlightenment” fellow Beat Jack Kerouac adopted for his own 1966 novel Satori in Paris. But Kaufman’s desire to remain nameless in a crater on the moon proves a form of “acceptance” older than Beat, though perhaps not Buddhism; is the state of waiting to be named, as in Eden; or discovered and dubbed, like craters on the moon itself. It is also a desire for a secret name, one unknown to others, but not the self—a kind of protection sometimes offered in African societies, where one’s “real” name is never told to strangers. Anonymity is also Kaufman’s recognition of his being a “stranger at the gates,” to quote Baldwin—a recognition of blackness as strangeness—which then takes comfort in the vast blackness of outer space.
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman,” Virgina Woolf wrote, recognizing the ways in which anonymity is a symptom of not being valued or recognized by one’s culture. If so, Pseudonymous has always been black.
The pseudonym, the act of renaming, is a particular African American theme—but also a means of survival, of coding not just behavior, or art forms, but one’s own name, so that it can have many valences. Part of this is a nickname, which most all my kin have—I can tell a genealogy program I use to input my family tree wasn’t written by a black person because it has no space labeled “nickname” or better yet, “nicknames” plural. A sign of intimacy, history, respect, or just language sounding good, a nickname is something you can’t give to yourself, hard as you try—just as it can be hard to shake a nickname you may have grown out of or dislike. A nickname’s usually a sign of home. And home itself can mean a name for a person. Even Anatole Broyard, passing as white, was still “Bud” to his black Creole family that he rarely, if ever, acknowledged.
But the other aspect of the pseudonym is as a hiding place, or state, a means to go in secret, to move beyond the bounds either of external name or internal limits. This is not simply an alias but a “basket name”:
Most of the Gullah people use two kinds of given names. One is English, and they call it their real or true name and use it at school, in their correspondence, and in their dealings with strangers. The other is the nickname, known also as the pet name or basket name. In their homes and among their friends and acquaintances they use the nickname almost exclusively. In fact, so general is its use that many of the Gullahs have difficulty in recalling the English given-name. The nickname is nearly always a word of African origin.5
Kaufman embodies this self-naming, becoming “Bomkauf” in authoring the Abomunist Manifesto, the title even a kind of anagramming of his first and last name. Documents in the full manifesto, first published as a broadside and then sadly missing from Cranial Guitar’s reprint, ensure that it is a “mock” manifesto, much like Frank O’Hara’s “Personism”—but while Personism is a movement of one, Kaufman’s is a movement of none, of only Abominable Snowmen or other mythic creatures, like Bomkauf himself.
The manifesto has “Craxioms,” letters, “Notes Dis- and Re- Garding Abomunism,” an Election Manifesto and a “Rational Anthem,” “Boms” and “Excerpts from the Lexicon Abomunon.” One of my favorite words in the lexicon is Kaufman’s new verb, frink, which like “crunk” in recent hip-hop or the idea of “mingering,” seems a catchall term to describe whatever it is that the protagonist does, a sensual satori. Frink might be closest to “funk”—it too can be a stand-in for sex, but also remains an attitude, an activity so positive as to at times be troubling, frightening even. Kaufman’s lexicon defines frink this way:
Frink: v. To (censored). n. (censored) and (censored).
Silence indeed! The delight Kaufman takes in parodying dictionaries, censorship, Dead Sea Scrolls (found around the time of the manifesto’s creation), and the manifesto form, not to mention elections and lexicons, is infectious. It is also found in his various pseudonyms, not just Bomkauf but the lexicon’s being “compiled by Bimgo.” These serial names—who says you need just one pseudonym?—also parody the pseudoscience of the manifesto and manifestos alone, gathering evidence Bomkauf merely manufactures. Forges and stories. They are kinds of “boms” or “bombs” in the bebop sense: intense forms of percussion and punctuation, whose pleasure is in their sounds making a new kind of meaning.
I’m also interested in the form of “Unholy Missions”: Kaufman’s long lines reveal a kind of blues line, and influence on the wannabe bad-boy jazz prosody of Ginsberg and many of the other Beats. If Kaufman’s strophes don’t always predate or upstage “Howl,” they don’t copy it either: like the discovery of the double helix, the long lines seem to stem from some of the same sources as Ginsberg’s even as they are interested in something different. You could say that where Ginsberg’s is a “howl,” Kaufman’s work is a “shout”—not in the obvious sense, but in the gospel one. (Which would become R & B soon enough.) Kaufman’s line echoes Kamau Brathwaite’s sense of “nation language,” which “may be in English: but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave. It is also like the blues. And sometimes it is English and African at the same time.”6
Such shouting is as physical, and even silent, as it is vocal. As Hurston reminds us, “There can be little doubt that shouting is a survival of the African ‘possession’ by the gods. In Africa it is sacred to the priesthood or acolytes, in America it has become generalised. The implication is the same, however. It is a sign of special favor from the spirit that it chooses to drive out the individual consciousness temporarily and use the body for its expression…. There are two main kinds of shouters: (1) Silent; (2) Vocal.”7 The anonymity and silence Kaufman sought are as physical as they are vocal, as holy as they are unholy—an erasing of individuality in order to reach the cosmic.
Where Ginsberg’s line measures breath, the body’s pace (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix”), Kaufman’s line parses a kind of turning often found in the blues—a line not of breath but music.
The blues turn, between its repeated lines and the kicker, happens within Kaufman’s line, or right after, so each line becomes a series of leaps and reversals. (In this he reminds me of the caesura in the middle of the blues line, which I usually hear—and Langston Hughes represents in his poems—as a separate line.) There are several examples from all his books; one of my favorites is “Heavy Water Blues”:
The radio is teaching my goldfish Jujutsu
I am in love with a skindiver who sleeps underwater,
My neighbors are drunken linguists, & I speak butterfly,
Consolidated Edison is threatening to cut off my brain,
The postman keeps putting sex in my mailbox,
My mirror died, & can’t tell if i still reflect,
I put my eyes on a diet, my tears are gaining too much weight.
Skipping ahead, the second half broadens as the blues often do, speaking of submerged histories:
It is perfectly all right to cast the first stone,
if you have some more in your pocket.
Television, america’s ultimate relief, from the indian disturbance.
I hope that when machines finally take over,
they won’t build men that break down,
as soon as they’re paid for.
…
Why don’t they stop throwing symbols,
the air is cluttered enough with echoes.
Just when i cleaned the manger for the wisemen,
the shrews from across the street showed up.
The voice of the radio shouted, get up
do something to someone, but me & my son
laughed in our furnished room.8
What makes this a blues is the mix of emotions throughout, of humor and despair, with the strange transcendence of the ending. That this ending calls its attention to the music, or its delivery (“the radio”) proves interesting—and so is the final response, laughter. The room is not bare but furnished with pleasure, family, and ultimately a kind of resistance to cavemen extinctions, manmade scripts, machine-made men, shrews, symbols, or fruitless searching for the end of the circle. I suppose this resistance (or speaking “butterfly”) could seem passive or apolitical, as the Beats sometimes are seen, but when there’s a “caterpillar industry down in Washington D.C.” and television is “america’s ultimate relief, / from the indian disturbance,” deciding not to “do something to someone” might be a useful refusal. Another name for “nonviolence” is “passive resistance,” after all, a strategy that can, and does, overthrow empires.
To see how this strange hope carries through Kaufman’s other work, consider the end of “Fragment” from Solitudes:
Our Lady of Nicotine, madonna without child,
Releases her pale balloon, snatched from the folding year,
All the daring young headhunters, traumatic in inflammatory bathing
suits
Shriek grim fairy tales, while convenient needles fall out of haystacks.
Charlie Parker was a great electrician who went around wiring people.9
Nearly every line consists of a reversal, shifting back and back, both revising and rewiring, often in a single phrase—“madonna without child” or “grim fairy tales,” rather than Grimm’s. Instead of double entendre, the poem seeks double meanings—a doubled agency—invoking and violating clichés. In this it is a blues both in spirit and form, its form fighting the feeling of the blues, gone electric, “wiring people.”
As the last line of the poem indicates, not just blues but jazz—particularly bebop—influences Kaufman. He even named his son Parker and reportedly carried him in a clarinet case. Raymond Foye, in his editor’s note to Ancient Rain, says by “adapting the harmonic complexities and spontaneous invention of be-bop to poetic euphony and meter, he became the quintessential jazz poet.”10 Kaufman’s line could also be thought of as the series of riffs, of repetition with variation, that mark a jazz line. Kaufman riffs off Ginsberg himself in a poem called “Ginsberg,” beginning “Ginsberg won’t stop tossing lions to the martyrs.” And, “The Church is becoming alarmed by the number of people defecting to God.” But I am most interested in his line “I am not not an I, secret wick, I do nothing, light myself, burn.”11
In this, he is not just the great electrician Charlie Parker is, but a “secret wick” both unknown and glowing. What I want to call our attention to is the line’s negation of a negation—or negation as affirmation—which others, like Keith Byerman, have pointed out is a crucial aspect of African American culture. Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good.
Likewise, Kaufman often reverses not just our expectations but our very terms: defecting from church (or draft dodging) as heroism, anonymity as beatitude, defining jail by who is not there (jailers). Even the term black, of course, is a reversal, adopting a previously negative term to turn it beautiful. Kaufman reveals blackness as Beat, and turns it into a beat, a rhythm that stretches in lines like those that end “To My Son Parker” or in “Walking Parker Home,” or in the literal beat (versus the cop’s “beat” and “beatings”) discussed in “Bagel Shop Jazz.”
Besides meaning a beating, “bop” is also the name of a black poetic form begun by Afaa Weaver at Cave Canem, the writers’ workshop and community of black poets. Weaver describes the form this way:
“The Bop” draws on the several connotative meanings of the word bop, first of which is a Black man’s manner of walking, that distinctive manner that was his signature in the East Baltimore of my youth where young brothers worked diligently to have a walk that was singular and sharp. As a word, bop also draws on its application to BeBop, inasmuch as there was a certain cloaking involved in this musical form where Parker and others endeavored to encode jazz from the white artists who were imitating and thus stealing it for their own desires. Therefore, resistance is the very spirit of the bop as poetic form, which properly contextualizes the essential purpose of this particular poem, which is to realize a constructive and creative response to anger, whether the source be a broken heart or the soul aching from the dehumanization of racial oppression…. The procedural stages of the process of the Bop’s efficacy as form are thus—locate, work, resolve.12
Like the blues, like Kaufman’s blues line, the Bop’s tripartite form (whose “line lengths are to be determined by the pitch of emotions”) does not just evoke the music it circles but a strut, a sound, and a reference to the violence of those selfsame “guilty police” who arrive at the end of “Bagel Shop Jazz.”
Often Kaufman’s poems tell a sort of story (“Grandfather was Queer, Too”), but they are just as content to be just a fragment, a figment, “Results of a Lie Detector Test,” a fractured fairy tale (such as “Song of the Broken Giraffe,” which ends, “Yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Rumplestiltskin was emotionally disturbed”), or, as one of my favorite titles has it, “Novels from a Fragment in Progress.” He keeps jazz phrasing—not in the dated “bop prosody” of the Beats (consider Kerouac’s slight Book of Blues), but in the blues tone that bebop restored to jazz. Perhaps these aren’t so much “solitudes crowded with loneliness” as solos? Think of the last part of Kaufman’s “Battle Report”:
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.13
We see here the coding of destruction as creation, the ultimate negation as affirmation. If we take the term “Black Rimbaud” seriously, we also note that surrealism or a derangement of the senses is at the heart of much of Kaufman, that the destruction he invokes is much like destroying the song to see it new again, flashing its secret code.
We also see in a similar poem, “War Memoir,” the parenthetical notion that “(Jazz is an African traitor),” which I think beautifully and simultaneously invokes the African roots of jazz and its blooming in American soil. Even the phrase’s parenthetical quality echoes jazz as a secret name or language.
“War Memoir” also indicates the oral nature of Kaufman’s work, those qualities of repetition jazz and blues share and the “floating verses” passed around by the black and blues community. Such phrases provided a different sense of origin and originality based on making your own distinctive version, using the familiar to tell your own story. Such call and response is at the heart of African American culture: you could say that, in a larger sense, the blues singer represents a response to the call of the floating verse. Culture is the call; the black singer, or poet, or soloist of any form, the response. The very idea of a solo, after all, only gains power in a culture of recurring collective artistic endeavor.
In a song—or over time—the response quickly becomes another kind of call; the solo aspects of the blues are in turn answered by the collective creation of jazz. You could say that jazz returns us to the “we” of the spirituals. This germinal, collective aspect of African American experience cannot be overstated, just as it cannot be reduced to consensus. Of course, pseudonymous or not, the “I” of the blues is an “I” that is actually a “we,” gaining power by how it speaks to the group.
With jazz, however, it may be easier than with the blues to see just how the “I” (soloist) negotiates with the “we” (the jazz combo, the congregation). Singular and shared, this communal self represents a significant development from the “we” of the spirituals, the itinerant blues of freed slaves, and the traveling notes of the soloist who must, in the journey of the song, match and challenge the group. This group “I” provides a significant contrast to the denuded, deracinated “I” of the modern era, even while it serves as a vast parallel.
Though art, even jazz, is not democratic, it does provide an essential freedom—in the case of jazz, one based on “chops,” a vital form of meritocracy and excellence. You can’t join the throng till you got your own song. The contribution of the soloist to the whole can be seen as a quintessential part of the American experiment.
Kaufman himself is a collective and an “I,” a soloist and a small combo—Bomkauf, Boms, and Bimgo, all in one. A “cincophrenicpoet” as a short poem claims.14 Kaufman often riffs off himself, changing his own tune: “Jazz—listen to it at your own risk” appears in “War Memoir”; this line reemerges in Golden Sardine, rewritten as the title “O-JAZZ-O War Memoir: Don’t listen to it at your own risk.” Yet again, in Ancient Rain Kaufman has a poem “War Memoir: Jazz, Don’t Listen to It at Your Own Risk,” whose chief difference from “O-JAZZ-O” is that it ends with “And we listen / And feel / And live” instead of “& die.” A big difference—but one that Kaufman seems to say is all in how you look at it, such reversals being natural, or at least inevitable.
Let’s take a look at another poem, “I Too, Know What I Am Not,” ending with a catalog of everything the poet isn’t:
No, I am not the eyes of the infant owls hatching the roofless night.
No, I am not the whistle of Havana whores with cribs of Cuban death.
No, I am not the shriek of Bantu children, bent under pennywhistle
whips.
No, I am not whisper of the African trees, leafy Congo telephones.
No, I am not Leadbelly of blues, escaped from guitar jails.
No, I am not anything that is anything I am not.15
This poem has always reminded me of Langston Hughes—both “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “I, Too, Sing America,” with their respective bids for inclusion in history (and prehistory), and the present day. If Bomkauf the pseudonym seeks multiple selves, Kaufman’s riff off Hughes includes by exclusion, creating a self through rejecting “leafy Congo telephones,” “Cuban death,” and even Lead Belly, his fellow Louisiana native. Of course, even in rejecting Lead Belly, he must invoke him, if only for a moment: there’s a sense in the case of Lead Belly that the “cincophrenicpoet” is not negating the musician but one view of him—say, the same one that wanted, as Lead Belly’s white “discoverer,” John Lomax did, to keep him performing in prison stripes, preserving him in a “guitar jail” even after he’d been freed from an actual one. Kaufman proceeds by paradox, as does the blues—and even as Hughes does in singing praise for an America that might not value him.
Such negations and reversals, happening as they do in language, are even more dangerous than those of jazz, which Kaufman well knows, can silence a city. To be, or not to be; “Jazz—listen to it at your own risk”; “Jazz, don’t listen to it at your own risk”: even risk, or its realization in jazz, can be reversed.
These reversals also happen in terms of race. Golden Sardine ends with a 1963 poem-letter to the San Francisco Chronicle after his return to the city only “to find a blacklist,” asking, “Why are all blacklists white?” Notably, this is written right before his Buddhist vow of silence—which I once asked one of his fellow Beats about, and as he said, Kaufman kept silent alright, except to ask for drugs.16 Drugs of course can be just another kind of silence—“buddha” means grass, after all.
In Ancient Rain, Kaufman’s poems find fruition in titles like “Bonsai Poems” and “All Those Ships That Never Sailed.” Kaufman broke his silence in 1975 by reciting the speech from “Murder in the Cathedral” mashed-up with his own “All Those Ships,” a mix of modernism, martyrdom, and what I take to be a take on the Middle Passage. Ancient Rain also includes “Oregon,” one of my favorite works by Kaufman. In it, the word “Oregon” is repeated till it becomes not so much a place as a word, and not so much a word as a sound he fills with meaning:
You are with me, Oregon,
Day and night, I feel you, Oregon,
I am Negro. I am Oregon.
Oregon is me, the planet
Oregon, the State Oregon, Oregon.
In the night, you come with bicycle wheels,
Oregon you come
With stars of fire. You come green.
Green eyes, hair, arms,
Head, face, legs, feet, toes
Green, nose green, your
Breast green, your cross
Green, your blood green.
Oregon winds blow around
Oregon. I am green, Oregon.
You are mine, Oregon. I am yours,
Oregon. I live in Oregon.
Oregon lives in me,
Oregon, you come and make
Me into a bird and fly me
To secret places day and night.
The secret places in Oregon,
I am standing the steps
Of the holy church of Crispus
Attucks St. John the Baptist,
The holy brother of Christ,
I am talking to Lorca. We
Decide the Hart Crane trip, home to Oregon
Heaven flight from Gulf of
Mexico, the bridge is
Crossed, and the florid black found.
It is tempting to unpack the many meanings the poem incorporates: the references to St. John the Baptist, Revolutionary War martyr Crispus Attucks, and two great modernists who died young, Hart Crane and Federico García Lorca. The poem rephrases Lorca’s “Sleepwalking Ballad,” which has a line translatable as “Green how I want you green”; here green becomes “Negro,” becomes Oregon, with all becoming a verdant place of possibility based in language. “Oregon is me, the planet / Oregon, the State Oregon, Oregon”: once again simply a word, the state is also now more than that, a state of mind, and self. A Cosmos. “The florid black,” a riff off a contemporaneous translation of Lorca’s ballad, means both the space and destination the word and poem “Oregon” eventually achieves.
We might also find the fertile, florid black in the poem, “Untitled,” that follows; it always seemed to me a rereading of the poem “Oregon” facing it. In full “Untitled” reads:
THE SUN IS A NEGRO.
THE MOTHER OF THE SUN IS A NEGRO.
THE DISCIPLES OF THE
SUN ARE NEGRO.
THE SAINTS OF THE
SUN ARE NEGRO
HEAVEN IS NEGRO.17
By rewriting even heaven, Kaufman manages to make it not just a place disproved but improved, a place where he is included and not anonymous, the stars not so much named as nicknamed and Negro. Which I take to mean both culture and color. In this, he follows in the remapping of heaven found in the spirituals, which saw the afterlife as an empowering Elsewhere (not to mention the rendering of outer space as the black haven to come). As critic James H. Cone puts it:
In the black spirituals, the image of heaven served functionally to liberate the black mind from the existing values of white society, enabling black slaves to think their own thoughts and do their own things. For Tubman and Douglass, heaven meant the risk of escape to the North and Canada; for Nat Turner, it was a vision from above that broke into the minds of believers, giving them the courage and the power to take up arms against slave masters and mistresses. And for others, heaven was a perspective on the present, a spiritual, a song about “another world… not made with hands.” It was a black life-style, a movement and a beat to the rhythm of freedom in the souls and bodies of black slaves. It was a hum, a moan, and a hope for freedom. Blacks were able, through song, to transcend the enslavement of the present and to live as if the future had already come.18
Besides siding with the spirituals, “Untitled” also sides with Countee Cullen’s ironic epitaph “For a Lady I Know”:
She even thinks that up in heaven
Her class lies late and snores,
While poor black cherubs rise at seven
To do celestial chores.19
The lady’s dream of heaven is a white one, of course, Cullen indicting not just a segregated afterlife but a daily life of injustice. Cullen’s poem is also quite funny, skewering the selfsame “rich psychopaths who think they can fly” as Kaufman’s “Unholy Missions.” In his nameless “Untitled” Kaufman manages to transform the notion of heaven from a place filled with ladies who know less than they think, into an all-black one, a kind of Oregon above, and within, less a place than a state of being. As Kaufman seems to suggest blackness is.
Of course, in his dance between the self and the society, Kaufman invokes Whitman (and not the self, or soul, as a society that is found in Dickinson). He too is larger than life, one of the roughs; like the Rimbaud he was sometimes nicknamed, he gave up writing in a world more surreal than he could possibly make it. Kaufman also manages, in Golden Sardine, a language beyond words—or jazz, if you prefer.
DERRAT SLEGELATIONS, FLO GOOF BABER,
SCRASH SHO DUBIES, WAGO WAILO WAILO.
GEED BOP NAVA GLIED, NAVA GLIED NAVA,
SPLEERIEDER, HUYEDIST, HEDACAZ, AX—, O, O.
DEEREDITION, BOOMEDITION, SQUOM, SQUOM, SQUOM.
DEE BEETSTRAWIST, WAPAGO, LOCOEST, LOCORO, LO.
WOOMETEYEREEPETIOP, BOP, BOP, BOP, WHIPOLAT.
DEGET, SKLOKO, KURRITIF, PLOG, MANGI, PLOG MANGI,
CLOPO JAGO BREE, BREE, ASLOOPERED, AKINGO LABY.
ENGPOP, ENGPOP, BOP, PLOLO, PLOLO, BOP, BOP.20
That this poem appears, only slightly adjusted, in The Abomunist Manifesto is one of its pleasures. (There, it is credited as written by “Schroeder.”) Here, it is a separate poem called “Crootey Songo”: the word “songo” both “bop” and suggestively African, ancient and modern, a hum and a moan, spoken and unstated, a scat sung. Part of the wordlessness that goes beyond silence and beyond words themselves.
As for me and the grant, I never did compile the Kaufman bibliography I said I would—I fear, even now, it would have proved quite short. I did manage to write some of the poems that made up my first book—trying to get down the music of my family, my ancestors, in our shared Louisiana origins. Mostly, I drank the money away at local watering holes, listening to a lot of live underground jazz. Bomkauf would have been proud.