Bob Kaufman, Poet; Part 4

Simon Watson Taylor, the opposition leader, would make a point every time he went to San Francisco. I've seen government and I think he was the only book about companies in any Taylor field, really in the true story of his news as an old habitué of cafes and cafe meetings with Britain in the region, with groups in the and knew the real stuff and knew what it was like in French to and what French mind was in relation to government. And he was always totally respectful of customers being the great surrealist American poet. Though I'd been in the universities, it was in North Beach and I found the full liberty of poetry. And with someone like Bob Kaufman, I found one of the key catalysts because because he was indeed an extraordinarily inspiring human being, both from the ultimate question of why was the world like it all for why we were right to rule where we were wrong? Who's responsible for the last question?

How do we bring Wolf? And I think whatever was in his background or, you know, the kind of culture that came out? I was a total he was an American, I can say a product of America. One of those curious products, you know, the, you know, discursive kind of mixture he was. An American, do you know, on the real side, he was either a beautiful survivor or he was a sacrificial victim of society. I never thought he was going to go silent the rest of his life. There were a lot of people who gave up on me. I never gave up on who was just like I think he would come out and be as eloquent everywhere. And sure enough, you are listening to Bob Kaufman, poet. When you came back and said the Vietnam War was over,

we were going to a photographic exhibition in parallel and then we were going to start using Marine Park. And during the exhibition, there were people like cops and so on race to the mound, and there was a little chamber music playing in the harp and a couple of ribbons. And we were talking to people and all of a sudden Bob starts to recite murder in the cathedral. And that was the first thing he said when he came out of the thing. And then he came over to me and people were just startled. You know, they had their cups separated their mouth, and they hadn't heard him for years and years when he just started like that. And he said to me, all those ships that never sail today, I bring them home and let them fail forever. Most beautiful poem. And I didn't even know he was working on it.

But from then on, he was very, very lucid and he spoke, you know, and God is really good. Melvina painting that art. I never gave up on a new enterprise along when they come out with beautiful. All those ships that never sailed. All those ships that never sail. The ones where they see cops open that were scuttled in their stalls today, I bring them back huge and entrenched

like. And let them sail forever. All those flowers that you never grew, that you wanted to grow, the ones that were plowed underground in the mud. Today I bring them back and let you grow them forever. All those wars and truces dancing down these years, all in three flags swept today's rejected meaning of God. My body, once covered with beauty, is now a museum of betrayal. This part remembered because of that one's touch. This part remembered for that one kiss. Today I bring it back and let you live forever. I breathe a breath.

Yes, I love you and move you. For them. Remove the snake from Moses, his arm, and someday the Jewish queen will dance down the street with the dogs and make every Jew her lover. We were staying together in San Rafael on a place called Canal Street and an apartment complex. Parker Kauffman, son of the poet, that was the longest that we ever stayed together. While I was while I had I was able to remember, you know, I understand that we were all living together when I was a baby, but I don't have any memory of that. But he stayed with us for about eight months.

And it was interesting because it's like I didn't really have a father most of my life. And all of a sudden I do, you know, and he was taking total command of my life. You can't do this. You can't do that. You can't do this, you know. Hey, wait a second. Are you doing. Yeah, but it worked out. It was all right. I rebelled against it, of course. But I think everybody would, you know, but we we worked it out and we got buddy buddy. I mean, we were watching football games together and rooting for opposite teams and you want to bet, you know, and then it was fun and it was my mom and me and him and it was great. And I wish you could have continued. But his health got worse and he had to go into some kind of a hospital or something. He adored his son, Alex, and he loved to wrap up the tuna sandwiches for lunch. And he would go to the tennis court where Parker was playing and he would scream across the whole Valley Park.

It's time for lunch. And of course, Parker, we didn't read anything. Oh, God. He really needed to hear a mile away. Parker, come home at your lunch. You know, and this is it was a wonderful thing. I was joining the baseball league and I didn't have anybody to practice with except for one team practice was. So I remember one day I said, well, I'm going to go up to the park and see if I can find somebody to practice with. And he goes, well, I'll hit you some balls. I go, Oh, yeah. And he goes, Yeah. So we went up to the park and he took about 35 strikes and he finally got one out to me. You know, I was like by that time I was sitting down on the grass on the field, you know, practically, I mean, not quite, but almost sitting down there. And all of a sudden this ball was laughing at me. I'm like, oh, my God, he hit the ball to me. You know, after that, he started hitting him pretty regularly. And it was it was a good session. We it lasted for about three and a half hours. Bob had been living with Eileen and Parker in Marin County, Jean Carlisle,

and something happened there where he was no longer welcome to live there. And he ended up living on it on a floor and a storefront of Cushiest Cloud House. And Bob was ill. He had bronchitis going into pneumonia. And this one particular afternoon, Alex Choa, you already called me and she said, you know, Bob's very sick. I wish we could find a place for him to live. I said, well, I have a big flat and perhaps I could accommodate him. And that's all I said. And the next thing I knew, I had Bob and Bob lived with us for two months, just a couple of nights before he came to me, he called on a bench in North Beach and he'd fallen off the pier at three thirty in the morning and he lost his teeth and his glasses in his hearing aid all at once. More than a decade would pass before Raymond Foy would discover and edit Kaufman's last

book published while he lived. The Ancient Rain Poems 1956 from 1978, published in 1981 by New Directions, has helped Kaufman to win a National Endowment for the Arts grant for twelve thousand five hundred dollars, the most money he ever had at one time in his life. I was living in a fleabag hotel on the corner of Broadway and Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. Raymond Foy and early one morning, a fire swept through that hotel and Bob was left homeless. I saw them on them that morning on the streets of North Beach, looking a little bit shaken, mumbling something about he just survived Dante's Inferno. And I didn't quite know what he meant. I thought it was just another flight of fancy. And as I walk down the street, I saw that this hotel where Bob was living had pretty much completely burned down. Later that afternoon, after the fire was put out and the firemen left, I snuck into the hotel. I knew where Bob's room was.

I'd never been up there before, but I knew where the location was. And although people had said that he had stopped writing years ago, I knew that that probably wasn't the case. It's very hard for a creative artist as intense as Bob Kaufman to really stop writing. So I went into the hotel, I climbed over the police lines and snuck in there. One night I went up to his room and the room was nothing more than a pile of charcoal. But at the bottom of this burnt out pile of wood and rubble, I found this famous Moroccan leather binding which contained his poems. And the poems were singed around the edges. But I carried them out and I brought them over to City Lights publishing office and they're up on the second floor. We carefully peeled these manuscript pages off one by one. They were singed around the edges and they were soaked with water from from the from the fire hoses. And we laid them out all around the office one by one looking at these extraordinary handwritten poems.

And I remember Ferlinghetti was there just beside himself. We really couldn't believe what we were seeing. It was like opening King Tut's tomb for the first time and seeing all these extraordinary relics. So we realized at that point that Bob still had been writing and that really became the core of the book, The Ancient Reign. I looked down on the earth and see myself wandering in the ancient rain, ecstatic, aware that the death I feel around me is in the hands of the ancient rain. And those who planned death for me and dreams are known to the ancient reign. Silent humming Raindrops of the ancient rain. The ancient rain is falling. The Washington Monument rumbles. The Lincoln Memorial is surrounded by stars. Mount Rushmore stares into every face. The Continental Congress meets in the home of the ancient reign. Nathan Hale stange immaculate at the entrance to the Capitol, Crispus

Attucks was taken to school by Thomas Jefferson. Boston is quiet. The ancient rain is the ancient rain is falling on the intellectuals of America. It illuminates Lorca. The mystery of America shines in the poet in New York. The Negroes have gone home with Lorca to the heaven of the lady whose train overflows heaven. It comes up a lot in the ancient reign part of Professor Nate Mackey. Kaufman's attraction to Lorca is to look at the attraction to black folk. I mean, there are a number of parallels between laughers, fascination with the gypsies and the moors and flamenco and the wind and the and common gravitation towards blues.

Jazz. I mean, you know, flamenco has been called, you know, the blues of Spain. And, you know, so there are parallels. There parallels that. And and look at his famous essay on the dwindling that quality and an influence on music that some people have translated to, you know, using the black vernacular sense of the term soul. You know, he talked about black sounds, you know, whatever happened when they you know, whatever headwind they had to have black out. And, you know, he's harking back to to that that Moorish contribution to the mix that is Spain. So I think all these you know, that sense of hybridity and and is is operative. And in Cartman's fascination with Llorca, Federico Garcia Lorca wrote Black man, black man, black man for the mall and the water jet, stay out of the cleft.

Seek out the great son of the center, the great sun gliding over Dryads, the sun that undoes all the numbers yet never crossed over a dream. The great sun gliding over Dryad. The sun that undoes all the numbers that crossed over a dream at once, I am there at the great sun feeling the great sun of the center, hearing the local music in the endless solitude of crackling blue ness. This image of crackling blueness, which comes up in the last the last few lines of the poem, and it's come up at several points in the poem. And that that is a sampling of Llorca crackling blue is an image, a phrase that occurs in a poem that's in port in New York called Standards and Paradise of the Black Blacks. And it's one of the three points in that second section called the Black. And it's you know, it's a complicated, you know, multifaceted image, crackling blueness, which I mean,

suggesting the sky, suggesting the blues crackling, suggesting a certain quality of voice. That horse broken quality anatomical singer or blues singers voice, you know, thunder. It carries a lot, you know, I mean, it carries a lot of meaning and a lot of suggestion. And, you know, in a poem called The Ancient Reign, certainly, you know, lightning and thunder would be one of the things suggested. But, you know, it's just very explicit when Kaufmann writes stuff like hearing the look of music in the in the solitude of crackling blues and hearing the local music and the endless solitude of crackling blue ness, I could feel myself a little boy again in crackling blue ness, wanting to do what Lorca says in crackling blue ness to kiss out my frenzy on bicycle wheels and smash little squares and the flash of a soiled exaltation.

Federico Garcia Lorca, sky immaculate, scoured sky equaling only itself, contained all the distances that Lorca is that he came from Spain of the Inquisition is no surprise. His poem of solitude. Walking around Colombia my first day in crackling blueness, I walked off my ship and rode the subway to Manhattan to visit Grant's Tomb. And I thought because Lorca said he would let his hair grow long someday, crackling blueness would cause my hair to grow long. I decided to move deeper into crackling blueness. I think he woke up a lot when he got that. National Endowment for the Arts Grant McPartlin Wilder. Life began again with her, with a new new person and a new family. And he hadn't been in a family way for years. Many years he'd lived alone.

And what he said he was lonely when he didn't want to live, be alone anymore. And he asked me to come and stay with him. And I think for the first year and a half, I was in total of him. And of course, there was that difference in our ages, 22 years old. And that's a gap that takes a lot of looking and understanding, silent understanding to begin to understand who is this person? Where is this person coming from? We had a radio when we lived in this little hotel in North Beach and there was no window and there was no heat because there was a rent strike in the hotel that winter. But we used to play jazz 24 hours a day. The radio never got turned off and he would stay in bed to get warm.

Sometimes I wrapped blankets around right in the cold, you know, under piles of blanket. So he wasn't too well. Then the objects that were just beyond the requirements of human necessity were there for poetry. So the room in itself had a habitation that was not necessarily of the material world and people were aware of this and people were aware of the poetry in the room, and when people sometimes we'd have 13 people in a room hardly larger than a bed, you know, people sitting on top of each other in the corners, eight people on the bed and Nataline and Bob screaming poems at each other all night. People came into the room with her poetry people we knew from the drug underworld who would stop by just to say hello for the experience. Bob was constantly, constantly sick, wasn't paying no attention to and hadn't gotten his hearing.

And also his eye, our hand, a poet, he needed really needed glasses. So there's no telling how much of his being out there on his own someplace else seemingly crazy was attributable to and actually seeing and hearing and being disoriented. And what would you wear? My eyes. My body is a twin mattress, disheveled, throbbing place for the comings and goings of lovely transient. The whole of me is an unfinished room filled with tank baths escaping in gas to nowhere before a completely objective mirrors, I have shot myself with my eyes, but yet refused my advances. I walked on my Wall Street tonight through strange landscapes in my head. I brush my teeth with orange peel.

I used to with cold blood from the dripping passage. My face is covered with maps of dead nations. My hair is littered with drying ragweed, bitter raisins haphazardly from my nostrils, while schools were glowing minnows, sperm from my mouth, the nipples of my breast. Her son Brown Kakhaber long forgotten Indian tribes fight battles on my chest, unaware of the sunken ship rotting in my stomach. My legs are the charred remains of burnt cypress trees. My feet are covered with mud from bayous flowing across my floor. I can't go out anymore. I shall sit on my ceiling. Would you wear my eyes? Society systematically murder your support. And certainly Lawrence Ferlinghetti decimates the subjective and everyone. That's what. Materialist society does, and whether it's Catholics to communists, that's

what it does. The state needs in the budget process and subjective is constantly under attack. So that the position of Bob Kaufmann, who's the classic position, the only valid position for a port these days is like the bearer of arrows or the free individual personification of the truly free individual. He filled the position of the poet as enemy of the state, which I consider admirable position for an artist or poet, and the only one valid, as I said before, in the face of the continual attack on. The full freedom of the individual and the subjectivity and et cetera, the bomb was a sacrificial victim in the sense that there was no compromise with him. He couldn't move any way but the way you left.

So I wrote this poem from the core bone, each hair stands out distinctly personal when I touch hands, clasp minds, meet. There is no death in words of love across the world through all travail. The poem is Love. I remember gesture raised high, a last kiss. My friend Bob Kaufman has died with his head upraised in mourning er after they created up and down Grand Avenue with New Orleans marching band paraded down to go to the Green Green and there were three boats and one with the press on it, the one with Brown's relatives and the one with the poets. And they went out into the middle of the bay and scattered his ashes. It happened then when the boat came back

into the dock and the poets got off their boat and were just standing by the dockside and huge rainbow appeared in the sky across the whole bay, you know, had a rumble and he knew how to rumble. He. It delivered quickly with the fast he was a real poet. How many were posted, meaning that he was close to what was happening and he was out of it, he was into some magic of his own and then had magic. The man was a magician. He had beautiful magic. You've been listening to Bob Kaufmann, poet, a two hour documentary that explored the life and poetry of an African-American man, the opening collage featured poets Allen Ginsberg, Jack Hirschmann, Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kaufman's widow, Eileen Kaufman. The closing collage featured poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Micheline and Lynn

Wildy, Roscoe Lee Browne read all those ships that never sailed. And from the ancient rain. Bob Kaufman read, Would You Wear My Eyes? And From the Jail Poems. And I'm glad we sat down at a table of Kaufman. Poet was written and produced by David Henderson, associate producer and production coordinator Vic Bedoian, mix engineer Michael Yoshio, editors Barry Korngold, Gina Hata. Narrator Al Young. This program was produced in association with KPFA FM Berkeley with Multitracking at Naito Studios, Berkeley Special thanks to New Directions Publishers for quotations from Bob Kaufman's solitudes crowded with loneliness and the Ancient Trade Poems 1956 to 1978 and also to City Lights Books for Quotations from Golden Sardine, Grateful Acknowledgments to the Estate of Bob Kaufman, Cloud House Archives

of San Francisco. The Allen Ginsberg Archives, New York, D. Davis Enterprises, New York, the Henry Jacobs Archives, Sausalito and the David Henderson Archives. Three long delayed waded into a room and that banned the opening and closing theme was Song for My Father, performed by the Horace Silver Quintet. Peter, Paul and Mary sang Rocky Road from their LP In the Wind, while other instrumental music by Charlie Parker and various sidemen. Assistance in compiling this program includes Dr Barbara Christian, evaluating scholar Karen Michel McPherson, David Barsamian, Barry Scott Norman Jio, Mae Gardiner, James Bell and CGY and New Radio Boulder, Colorado. I weep over my act, but I believe cities should be built on.

One side of this program was made possible by the Financial Assistance of the California Council for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Zellerbach Family Fund, Coatis Books, most books, Black of Books and City Lights Bookstore. I'm your host, Ed Markman. Opinions expressed on this program are those of the producers and not the sponsors and reflect the views of David Henderson, who are solely responsible for its content. This project is made possible in part by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Zellerbach Family Fund.