Bob Kaufman, Poet; Part 2

Bob Kaufman, Poet, The Life and Poetry of an African-American Man. He's trying to put Bob in jail every time you saw him on the street. Yeah. Drunk and disorderly, but they didn't put any person down yesterday from jail and then they didn't like it and hopped up on tables and spouted poetry. They were against us from the get go. We were one of the first blatant no interracial couples in that case and other children, one that was so they were really they were afraid of a pattern there, you know, and they got on their bodies to stop the elevator between floors. And at that point.

Yes, I think Bob was interested in seeing his work in print and communicating and reading. But of course, the results that ensued from that for Bob socially were quite dire. I mean, he was targeted by the police as a subversive. He was arrested 36 times in one year. I mean, Bob Kaufman and the great French poet Vion shared one thing in common, which is that when they write the biography, they are going to have to go back to the police records for the bulk of the information. Bob really paid dearly for a lot of the positions that he took at that time in his poetry and in his in his lifestyle. KPO, I'm sitting in a cell with a view of a parallel, waiting to speak to me and tell me it is not enough to be in one cage with oneself. I want to sit up every prisoner in one cage with one.

So I want to sit opposite every prisoner in every hole. Doors roll and bang every slam. A friend that. Fingerprints left lying on black ink, gravestones, noises of pain seeping through steel walls crashing reached my own. I become part of someone for whatever. Painter, paint me a crazy jail, mad watercolors, Seattle's poet. How old is suffering? Write it in yellow. Let God make me a sky on my glass ceiling. I need stars now to lead through this atmosphere of shrieks and private health entrances and exits

in uptown. The civic seats are here me now. Hear me now. Always hear somehow some. In a universe of cells who is not in jail, gaolers. So. The San Francisco Chronicle writer Herb Cain, Jim Johnson is still fighting for our space, and to me at that time it was notoriety because I didn't like what he was doing, talking about the beat generation. But at that time, he was vying for space by saying that the beat

generation was a kind of outlaw type of people. He didn't understand really what the ME generation were, people who just couldn't find themselves. And they were actually a lot of World War Two veterans who was around at that time and who had been over and seen so much and couldn't. And when he came back, they couldn't fit into society. The community. Jerry Stone had been photographer. Yes. And intimidated for a long time by the McCarthy period, found an issue, a human rights issue, first of all, in this symbolic representation of an individual like Jesmyn who was going to be executed. Right. And then from that moved into the civil rights struggle very, very actively. I mean, Bob was ahead. He was ahead of that movement. In other words, he was writing his poetry and talking about these kinds of things. Before the Chessmen movement

in the civil rights movement began, Bob had placed a surrealist text. Raymond Fondo editor published that Hitler had been reincarnated and was back in San Francisco, and his name was Big Irini, the police officer whose beat was North Beach. And he came into the bagel shop and he took it down big Irini. Yeah, we had a real hatred for beatniks, Paul Landry, poets, the coexistence and talks and poetry author. And Bob just stood up and pissed off the guys when he was talking to them while he was talking, he took it out on a guy. Yeah, I looked down and saw what it was and they took him off. And from what I understand it, what they call icebox him for about a month, meaning at that time, wherever you went, it was a Bob Kaufman can buy the door that you put. You put your nickels and dimes and quarters.

And you, because it was Bob was constantly in jail and you were constantly bailing out. Yeah. And what they would do is they put him in long enough. One night at one place, you go down with your money to get them out and they hustle him off to some other place and they put him in jails all over the city and keep them circulating until finally he could get them get into the system for an enough to get him back, get to know him, you know, is somehow in a universal cell who is not in jail. Jail is in a world of hospitals who is not sick. Doctors go to an Sardina swimming in my head. We know some things about jail and jazz and God. Saturday is a good day to go to jail. Now they give me a new farm equipment jellylike that proved anybody can be president of muscatel great speckled, unplanned nakedness, sinking fingers, grasping colored bows.

Mr. America wants to bathe, look on the floor, lying across America's face, a real movie star featuring a million new reels. What am I doing? Feeling compassion when you come out of it. He would help kill me. He probably hates living nuts and bolts clanking in stomach, scrambled society, gone to pieces in a very bloated the great American windmill tilting at itself. Good, solid stock, the kind that made America drunk to written all over history, tricked our successful type successful forty home runs in one inning. Stop suffering, Jack. You can't fool us. We know this is the greatest country in the world. He didn't make it. And the window and sell three have been to many years. In the short span of mine. My slow demand the cable up thrown like the giant 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 went inside out and I not more than a matter of mantras and rough tissue must break my bones, drink my wine, diluted blood to dredge the sadness from my chest. Not again. All those ancient balls of fire had only swallowed rotten line. Let me spit breath. Mist of introspection. But to me, so that when I'm gone, I shall be in the air, someone whom I am is No. One. Something I have done is nothing. Some place I have been is nowhere. I am not me. One of the answers I missed my question for all the strange treats I must find suited for. Thank God for beatniks. And three year period, Kaufman published three broadsides with City Lights, books and the

same publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which published Allen Ginsberg's Beat Generation anthem How Those Broadsides Does The Secret Behind Whisper, a bombing. His manifesto and 2nd April made Bob Kaufman famous among the Beats Bagel Shop Jazz. Shadow people project it on coffee shop walls. Memory formed echoes of a generation past beating into now. Nightfall creatures eating each other over a noisy cup of coffee. Mulberry eyed girls in black stockings smelling vaguely of mint jelly in last night's bongo drummer, making profound remarks on the shapes of navels, wondering how the short sunset week became the long Grant Avenue night love tinted beat. Angel's doomed to see their coffee dreams crushed on the floors of time as they fling their legs to the heavens, losing their doubts in the beat.

Turtleneck, angel guys, black hair, dungaree guys, Cesar Jide with synagog eyes, world travelers on the 41 bus mixing jazz with paintwork, high rent baatar, classical motors, the parts shortage and last night's bust. Lost in a dream world where time is told with a beat. Coffee first, Ivy Leaguers in Cambridge Jackets, whose personal Harvard was a Fillmore District step weighted down with conga drums, the ancestral cross, the Othello led curse. Talking of Bird and Diz and Miles, the secret terrible hoods wrapped in cool hipster smiles, telling themselves under the talk, the shot must be the end. Hoping the beat is really the truth, the guilty police arrive. Very beautiful shadows burned down walls of night.

You have the people who gather in this coffee shop, Professor Charles Nehalem, and who talk about then they talk about the idle's, the marketplace, they talk about their ideals and all the time they're certainly posturing and a certain realization that they haven't quite come where they think they are. And so that when we get to the notion that the young man who are described in the part of this poem are lost in a dream world where time is told with a beat so that almost the only reality they are that that holds us together is the beat. It's it's the it's the effect of the jazz. Then the beat has several meanings here. And as he goes through the poem, he talks about

the things that way. The young man down, black young man are weighed down with conga drums. The drums provide a beat and a certain sense, but the drums also suggests maladaptation. They're making a suggestive sort of cultural phenomena. The ancestral cross, your fellow Wakehurst. And while these young men are they are they are hip young man. So they they talk about bird and they talk about the Gillispie. They talk about Miles Davis. And as they talk, they are hoping the beat is really the truth. The attitude originally was a weekly poetry magazine, Raymond FOI editor and publisher, which Bob Kaufman and William Margolis and John Kelly and Bernie Aronowitz published at

a place called the Bread and Wine Mission, which was a coffee house in a soup kitchen run by Pierre Delauter in San Francisco in the North Beach neighborhood. And it was really meant as a kind of very flexible, spontaneous forum for poets to publish. Their work was kind of sporadic, Neeli, cherkovski, poet and biographer. They brought out 16 issues and then it was edited by Sitilides. He did a first Beatitude anthology. You had Bob Kaufman's G.L. Poems are in there and the Obama manifesto. But he started this magazine for the community again. He you know, he had I consider that he had been a labor organizer. He had this idea of the social, you know, the social unit. And but it was more like convening. He founded the magazine, but he let other people edit it. He didn't take strong editorial control or even that much quality control.

You know, let everybody be a part of it. Let's let the carnations blossom, if you will. You know, Bob Kaufman was there on the mimeograph machine. Allen Ginsberg, poet, do the actual work of putting you beatitude. I think that was the first time I met him. And it was really it was wonderful because I hadn't seen anybody like so much involved in the North Beach poetry scene adding a kind of enlightened sociability and generosity and contact with the poets around and getting it all organized in good taste and earnestness and energy. Parker said on one occasion when he was talking about jazz theory,

that he found that by using the high interval of a chord as a melody line and then backing them up with appropriately related changes that he could play, the things he had been hearing. And this idea of playing the things that he's been hearing is an idea that the. He is picked up in court and when he talks about his cranial guitar and the kinds of things that have come into his his his intelligence as a result of his experiences, and it's a dramatic way of presenting his life story. In fact, that's what with this particular point over the fence, walking Parker, home sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind, Kansas black mourning, first horn eyes, historical sound pictures on new bird wings. People shouts, boy out of dreams, tomorrows

gold ballad type of stops and future blues times. Lurking Hawkins Shadows of Lester Realization Bronze Fingers Brain Extension Seeking Trapped Sounds, Ghetto Thoughts Bandstand Courage Solo Flight Nerve Wracked Suspicions of newer songs and Doubts. New York Alter City Black Tears Secret Disciples Hammer Horn Pounding Soul Marks on swinging gates. Culture Guards Mob Sounds, Visions of spikes panic excursions to tribal jazz wounds and transfusions, heroin ninths of birth and soaring over buppie newground smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding cool revelations

shrill hopes beauty speared into greedy ears Byrdland on bop mountains the saxophone revolution day rooms 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 are jazz tinted dawn wailing, his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams, inviting the nerveless to feel once more that fears dying of humans consumed in raging fires of love. Charles Nylon is professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder,

author of Faulkner and the Negro. He delivered his paper, Bob Kaufman, Black Speech and Charlie Parker at the Modern Language Association conference in Montreal in 1987. The Music of the Bebop. Charlie Parker's music is his also in the blues tradition. It has an oral quality and it's that oral quality in a sense, I suppose, that resembles black speech. Yeah, I like the the blues. I suppose one of the things that occurs in this poetry is that if we listen to the lyrics that Bessie Smith sings, those lyrics sometimes fairly commonplace. But she she makes them Skåne. That is the the, uh, the vocalization provides the scansion that gives them the music that they they don't have. If we simply read them straightforwardly as they actually are.

And her scansion provides a a patterning of sound and rhythm. And in a certain sense, this is the kind of thing that is happening here with with Kaufman. If we take Parker's ornithology as an example of playing with a particular composition, you know, and notice how he plays with that and he takes this progression of chords that were Morgan is how high the moon when he uses the same chords in in his work. But, uh, you get a comparison, I suppose, in looking at what Parker does with ornithology and then what, uh, is done by Kaufman Walking

Parker home. The smooth, uninterrupted line may represent the original chords, the phrases that are varying length, separated by slash a compare those to the Parker's improvising that results in new melodies and covering pyramid's of notes. Spontaneously exploding coup revelations shrilled hopes Butchy speared into greedy ears. Byrdland night on mountains when the saxophone revolution day rooms of junk and melting walls and circling back a dozen doesn't decorate the existing melodies. Actually what he does is to to improvise new ones. And each of his choruses, each chorus of a solo constitute a new set of musical ideas in that particular work. And it's it's this similarity, I suppose, that brings together both the the language,

the black language, which is related, I suppose, to Blues Roots and Charlie Parker's music that has blues roots and the the kind of goals I think that Kaufman is able to achieve when he makes the use of these two kinds of things. We went together herd Lady Day at the Blakroc one time in 59, and she knows no one can talk to him and he gave her he gave her some polls, not long hair, and she took him very gracefully. I met Bob and can't be going. I guess it was like a week in Maine, North Beach and the beach stayed in on the weekend.

They didn't go up because, oh, when they got to Sham's came out, you know, they put on beards and, you know, strange dress and they come down to the place like the coffee tower and the bagel shop and they took it over. It was like tourists. But, you know, they were phoning nobody inside and be one night and mom was in there and he'd been drinking quite a bit and he was attacking people in the coffee shop. And I thought he was he was so elegant in the way. And he did it because people were buying him drinks fast as he could say anything. And as soon as they say somebody bought him a drink, he would insult, you know, that they they had to take it because there's no way they can do anything because he was so well, you know, and I hooked up with him and I said, this is a person that my own heart this is how I feel about these people, too. I could see he displayed it to me. You just presented it to me. I saw myself constantly being one of these people down there on Friday night and I didn't want to be.

He always said that writing was a trap. You never want to get caught in it, but it was the only way he knew to express himself. He could be inebriated to be beyond belief and yet be able to recite a poem or make one up. But he made a joke about me, what might be inspection a bit go badly when we were sitting there. He was pretty well gone. I mean, it's it's mind boggling. Think located in this state of mind couldn't possibly be reading or even thinking even forget his name. But he made a point about me being sort as I am and I have seven feet and going on and on for a good 20 minutes or so of go down and hear this man if anybody else would fall off the stool to be able to speak here. He had incredible mind zero in his deluded, very large, deluded. We have not now ever been a member of diluted. The spoon is the cup. The door is closed.

I Grambow bleeds all over my stolen pants to one for the ratio now and double. Dylan had quadruple none's. White stainless steel walls moved out like an ordinary Puerto Rican full of love and death, trapped in modern icons, forgetting to rage as his day died and Prosek night felt like it always does. They watch, we hide snake make in corners. That's the thing of thing. World watchers thing. My Negroes suit has Jew stripes. My yarmulke was drowned in a flash flood while I married with Navajo's about building session. Double zeros, bare floors can railroad darkness, San Juan Ballhaus and young boy brilliants whites steak lunch under the bed as if I could sell a projected angloness on Maria's wrinkled heaven. I read Sartre while they watched tonight. Députés Blan. We are blending ice cubes that you.

Bob Kaufman, Poet written and produced by David Henderson, associate producer and production coordinator, Vic Bedoian. This program was made possible through the generous financial support of the California Council for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Zellerbach Family Fund. Suzanne Cockrill read Bagel Shop Jazz.

Bob Kauffman, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis read from jail poems. Roscoe Lee Browne read Walking Parker Home All From Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness by Bob Kaufman, published by New Directions. I'm your host, Ed Markman.