Teducation: Selected Poems

by Ted Joans

Teducation Selected Poems Ted Joans "Black Dues! Black Blues! Black News!" -- Ted Joans trumpets in his tribute to Langston Hughes. One of the first black poets to become involved in Surrealism and a first-generation Beat, Joans is an expatriate poet whose work is enjoying renewed interest. This major collection of poems written during the past forty years is a significant contribution to American letters.

Genres: Poetry

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Theodore "Ted" Joans was an American trumpeter, jazz poet and painter.

Joans was born in Cairo, Illinois, but not on a riverboat as had been claimed. He earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University. He later associated with writers of the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village and San Francisco. He was a contemporary and friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In the 1960s, Joans had a house in Timbuktu. He claimed to be a brother of Leroi Jones, despite the spelling difference, but this appears to be apocryphal.

Joans' painting Bird Lives hangs in the De Young Museum in San Francisco. He was also the originator of the "Bird Lives" legend and graffiti in New York City after the death of Charlie Parker in March 1955. Joans invented the technique of outagraphy, in which the subject of a photograph is cut out of the image.

Joans died in Vancouver, British Columbia due to complications of diabetes.

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased this book for the poem on Langston Hughes. I am not a big poetry fan but like Joans' beat style.

[Johari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ted Joans is cool. I'm not a huge fan of beat poets but this book got me.

[Amy Yue-Yin Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ted Joans is pretty raunchy, which is sure to offend some people, but personally, I found his raunchiness so hyperbolic and in such good humor that it won me over. Lines like "Call the police I don't give a damn they'll give us some rubbers!" made me laugh so hard I was crying.

[Pachyderm Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first, second, third, or fourth glance as. you perse this book, Ted Jeans very heavily appears to be influenced by Imamu Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones; no familial relation) in terms of social justice. and radial equality.
Joan's societal musings, along with his misgivings as presented here, read like both Langston Hughes and Claude McKay on sterioids, both of them being equal rights advocates from a somewhat equally turbulent and "culturally comatose. and corrosive" period of identical economic ditscontent coupled with American citizens both at war within hemselves at home as continuing contenders of cultural change, along with being enemies of both Communist and socialist ideas and the collective ideologies behind them a few decades earlier.