Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman - Softcover

Kaufman, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872867692 ISBN 13: 9780872867697

Verlag: CITY LIGHTS, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

2020 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER

"The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman is the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume that contains a lot of previously uncollected work. … this book makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a meteor."—The New York Times

"The body of work is small but voluminous in intensity, spirit and soul, with a lineage that runs from Charles Baudelaire to Charles Mingus. Kaufman—with his commitment to the art, his surreal eye on the urban experience and beyond it, and his jazz timing—brings San Francisco to life."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Twentieth-century American poetry cannot be fully comprehended without Bob Kaufman. City Lights and the editors do a grand service to literature by publishing Kaufman's poetry in one collection. … This is a necessary gift for poets and poetry readers."—Booklist

“He was an original voice. No one else talked like him. No one else wrote poetry like him.”—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Bob Kaufman (1925–1986) was one of the most important—and most original—poets of the twentieth century. He is among the inaugurators of what today is characterized as the Afro-Surreal, uniting the surrealist practice of automatic writing with the jazz concept of spontaneous composition. He seldom wrote his poems down and often discarded those he did, leaving them to be rescued by others. He was also a legendary figure of the Beat Generation, known as much for hopping on tables to declaim his poetry as for maintaining a monastic silence for months or even years at a time.

Kaufman produced just three broadsides and three books in his lifetime. In 1967, Golden Sardine was published by City Lights in its famed Pocket Poets Series, and became an instant cult classic. Collected Poems is a landmark poetic achievement, bringing together all of Kaufman’s known surviving poems, including an extensive section of previously uncollected work, in a long overdue return to City Lights Books.

Praise for Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman:

"Bob Kaufman volcanically en-veined the Beats as a mirage enveloped Surrealist; not as a formal poet, but one, like Rimbaud, who embodied butane. Following the scent of his butane on one anonymous North Beach afternoon led Philip Lamantia to audibly utter to me that Bob Kaufman as per incandescent singularity is 'our poet.'"—Will Alexander, author of Compression & Purity

"Bob Kaufman is one of our most vulnerable, mysterious, and beautiful poets, a nomadic maudit, surrealist saint of the streets, votary of silence, the consummate Outrider with trickster imagination and visionary power.”—Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism

"Uplifting the voice of this under-sung literary master to future’s light is the mission of the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman. This poet’s poet on the cliff edge of no ledge is still continuing to foster new surrealizations. Read this bebopian wordsmith, his pen turned saxophone and ink notes that are black tears."—Kamau Daáood, author of The Language of Saxophones

"To call these poems 'surreal' seems, now, to muffle Kaufman’s prophetic genius. He saw us, our images in pools of blood, milk, and saxophone spittle. Maybe it was ever our shivering made the ripples that distorted the reflections."—Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies

"Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman should finally liberate the kaleidoscopic surrealism of this San Franciscan, and in many respects, secular Franciscan, poet from the shadows of Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats. … Collected Poems is a memoriam of unmitigated joy and abysmal despair."—Tyrone Williams, author of As iZ

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans in 1925 and spent the 1940s in the Merchant Marine. After a brief period as a labor organizer, he lived a peripatetic existence before settling in San Francisco in the late ’50s, where he published three broadsides with City Lights Books. In 1959, he co-founded Beatitude magazine and maintained a decade-long vow of silence after the assassination of President Kennedy. He published two books during the 1960s, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness and Golden Sardine, and a third book, The Ancient Rain, in 1981. He died in San Francisco in 1986. He is considered by many to be the finest jazz poet of his generation.

Neeli Cherkovski was born in Los Angeles. He is the author of many books of poetry, including Animal (1996), From the Canyon Outward (2009), The Crow and I (2015), and Elegy for My Beat Generation (2018). He is the coeditor of Anthology of L.A. Poets (with Charles Bukowski) and Cross-Strokes: Poetry Between Los Angeles and San Francisco (with Bill Mohr). He has also published editions of his poems in Austria, Mexico, Italy, Germany, and Turkey.

Raymond Foye is a writer, curator, and editor based in New York City. He is the executor for the poets John Wieners, James Schuyler, and Rene Ricard, and has edited numerous editions of their works. Currently he is preparing an edition of the final unpublished poems of Gregory Corso from the years 1980-2000. He is also the publisher of Raymond Foye Books.

Tate Swindell is the founder of Unrequited Records, which specializes in poetry records released in vinyl format. His collections of writing include Palpitations, Tearing Down Walls of Cellars and Basements, and The Creation of Deadlines. Tate, and his brother Todd, worked extensively on the Harold Norse archives, which were donated to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. He is currently working on an album of rare Gregory Corso readings from the late 1970s and early 80s that includes previously unpublished poems.

devorah major served as San Francisco's Third Poet Laureate (2002-2006). She has published two novels, four poetry books, and four poetry chapbooks, along with two young adult titles, and a host of short stories, essays, and individual poems published in anthologies and periodicals. Among her awards is a First Novelist award from the Black Caucus of the ALA and a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. She is a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts.

Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans in 1925 and spent the 1940s in the Merchant Marine. After a brief period as a labor organizer, he lived a peripatetic existence before settling in San Francisco in the late '50s, where he published three broadsides with City Lights Books. In 1959, he co-founded Beatitude magazine and maintained a decade-long vow of silence after the assassination of President Kennedy. He published two books during the 1960s, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness and Golden Sardine, and a third book, The Ancient Rain, in 1981. He died in San Francisco in 1986. He is considered by many to be the finest jazz poet of his generation.

Neeli Cherkovski was born in Los Angeles. He is the author of many books of poetry, including Animal (1996), From the Canyon Outward (2009), The Crow and I (2015), and Elegy for My Beat Generation (2018). He is the coeditor of Anthology of L.A. Poets (with Charles Bukowski) and Cross-Strokes: Poetry Between Los Angeles and San Francisco (with Bill Mohr). He has also published editions of his poems in Austria, Mexico, Italy, Germany, and Turkey.

Raymond Foye is a writer, curator, and editor based in New York City. He is the executor for the poets John Wieners, James Schuyler, and Rene Ricard, and has edited numerous editions of their works. Currently he is preparing an edition of the final unpublished poems of Gregory Corso from the years 1980-2000. He is also the publisher of Raymond Foye Books.

Tate Swindell is the founder of Unrequited Records, which specializes in poetry records released in vinyl format. His collections of writing include Palpitations, Tearing Down Walls of Cellars and Basements, and The Creation of Deadlines. Tate, and his brother Todd, worked extensively on the Harold Norse archives, which were donated to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. He is currently working on an album of rare Gregory Corso readings from the late 1970s and early 80s that includes previously unpublished poems.

devorah major served as San Francisco's Third Poet Laureate (2002-2006). She has published two novels, four poetry books, and four poetry chapbooks, along with two young adult titles, and a host of short stories, essays, and individual poems published in anthologies and periodicals. Among her awards is a First Novelist award from the Black Caucus of the ALA and a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. She is a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts.

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Eternal Poet - Foreword by devorah major

Bob Kaufman is a poet; Bob Kaufman is a man steeped in a mythology sprinkled with a few facts. For many he exists as the man who wrote poems on newspaper margins, the man flowing with piled jazz infused visions as wife or friend transcribed his surrealistic rants, the man yelling poems at strangers parking their cars on North Beach street corners, the man repeatedly and repeatedly arrested on San Francisco streets, at times after being harshly beaten by the arresting officers, the man who took a vow of silence unbroken for eleven years. For me he began as the father of a long-forgotten toddler playmate. He was my parents' friend who came to house parties and wreaked havoc. He was the author of a yellow-covered little book of poetry that held my father's favorite poem, which he often quoted:

The first man was an idealist, but he died,
he couldn't survive the first truth,
discovering that the whole
world, all of it, was all his . . . ('suicide')

He was the one who spoke, at least to my father and me, during his mythological monkish self-imposed silence. He was for me always most real on the page; he was for me, and remains for me, alive and vibrant as a poet whose truths continue to shine with a brilliance that even drugs, alcohol, and electro-shock torture could not snuff out.

My memories of Bob Kaufman are few and fleeting and always in concert with my father. My father and I were walking towards Broadway. I think we had just left City Lights Bookstore. We were in North Beach to get a gift, birthday I expect, for my mother. As we hit Broadway there was Bob Kaufman leaning against a light pole. My father called out; Bob saw my father and remembered him and the two of them hugged and laughed. It had been years since they had last talked, but the ropes that bound them as Afro-diasporic brothers of fate, as comrades of North Beach 1950s streets, and as part of the small cloister of Black male artists and writers who haunted those alleys and bars, were as strong as ever. Bob asked after my mother, my brother, and then me. My father told him repeatedly that I was standing right there, that I was grown now. Bob chuckled when he finally understood and invited us to his small hotel room.

We walked a couple of blocks to the room, which was dark and sparse, and sharing the bed while I perched on the one chair, the two of them talked in that shorthand way that only friends understand, a sigh here, a quiet laugh there, and an unspent tear on the other side. I was witness only. My father told Bob that I wrote poetry and was pretty good. Bob, as I remember, took no notice. We left and it seemed there was a certain sadness in my father's goodbye.

A couple of years later I was given a featured reading spot at the long-demolished Coffee Gallery where Bob had often held court. My father, a pipe smoker at that point, had gone outside to fill a bowl and inhale a few lungfuls of aromatic smoke. As he stood in the doorway, Bob walked up. My father asked Bob to come in and hear me read. Bob sipped on the beer my father had bought him and sat through a few of the opening readers until I was called to the stage. I signed the back wall with much humility upon seeing up close all the names of former featured readers etched large and small, printed and cursive, on this monument to North Beach poetics. Then I read my poetry, sincere but raw, infused with the passion of the '70s, with a Black Arts spin and a young romantic love compulsion. Bob drank beer with my parents and waited until I sat back down. He gave me his approval, 'Good stuff' or some such phrase, and left the place. I was absolutely buzzing with excitement. Just his presence, his quiet support, was my ticket to continue to ride the wild and sometimes tortuous seas of poetry.

That was the last time I remember seeing Bob in the flesh. But his words, his poems, had been my companion through my lonely and mis-fitting teens. I had carried Golden Sardine and Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness from San Francisco to Hong Kong, and then on to Kathmandu, Nepal, Kabul, Afghanistan, and Istanbul, Turkey, only to arrive in Paris, where I spent a couple of weeks working and sleeping at George Whitman's bookstore, Shakespeare and Co. One day, after finishing my couple of hours of chores to pay for my bed for the night, I came downstairs to see a young Parisian reading Bob's Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. I was amazed. "You like Kaufman?' I asked in my limited French, rich with vocabulary and impoverished with grammar. "Yes," he answered in English, 'he is the best.' He said something about Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I said, yes, I knew some of their poetry, too. I asked him if he had read Golden Sardine. "He has another book?' the young man asked in surprise. "Yes, I have a copy upstairs.' He appealed to me to let him read it. "I can't lose it," I told him. "It has carried me over half the world.' He promised me that he would not move from that spot. I brought him the book and he sat for the next couple of hours reading it and then returned it to me with effusive thanks. I was intrigued. In Paris Bob Kaufman was literary hero while in America he was mostly unknown, and when remembered, it was mostly mythology and lies. The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman presents the real Bob Kaufman, a man who lived and spoke through his poems.

In April of 1925, as the seventh of thirteen children, Bob Kaufman was born of mixed ancestry, in New Orleans, Louisiana with an Afro-Caribbean mother from Louisiana and a Jewish father of German and French ancestry, at a time when interracial marriage was illegal. Maybe it was that heritage'hewn in a city that was so racially conflicted and culturally rich, that heritage nurtured in a city where his Martinican grandmother's Vodun, the Catholicism of his mother, and the Judaism of his father'which taught him that the world was a complex place where love and spirit, and faith and reality, held central and often conflicting roles. Bob Kaufman was steeped in diverse traditions before he boarded a Merchant Marine ship as a teenager and spent six years sailing the world, and, in stories he told, survived four shipwrecks while circumnavigating the globe several times, tasting exotic foods, reading a breadth of literature, seeing wide swaths of art, and learning a global history from the underside up.

What is most exciting about this volume of poetry is that it shows that Kaufman cannot be fit into one box. He certainly is a Beat poet, although you will rarely find his name or his seminal role listed in articles and books about the Beats. But then he was not 'beat' in the meaning attributed to Jack Kerouac, beat down and beat back, rather he was of the beat and through the beat like the jazz poetry that he performed. He was a Beat poet who in his poem Oct. 5^th, 1963'which takes the form of a letter to the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle'noted that:

"It is not the beat played by who is beating the drum. His is a noisy loud one, the silent beat is beaten by who is not beating on the drum, his silent beat drowns out all the noise, it comes before and after every beat, you hear it in beatween, its sound is Bob Kaufman, Poet"

He can rightfully be considered a surrealist poet, as the French like to say, the 'Black Rimbaud.' After all he did 'acknowledge the demands of Surrealist realization' ('sullen Bakeries of Total Recall') and then again what other kind of poet would write, as in 'Bagel Shop Jazz':

Shadow people, projected 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 and last night's bongo drummer"

But I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: CITY LIGHTS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0872867692
• ISBN 13: 9780872867697
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 276
• Herausgeber: Cherkovski Neeli
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: BOOM ENTERTAINMENT; https://harpercollins.co.uk/; ; The News Building\n 1 London Bridge Street,; London; SE1 9GF; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland