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Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman
"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 "Not many collected works deserve sustained place in the hands of readers and on the shelves of bookstore poetry sections. This is one of them."— Publishers Weekly “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
- GenresPoetry
276 pages, Hardcover
Published November 26, 2019
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January 13, 2020It's so good to finally see a comprehensive body of Kaufman's work, which includes previously uncollected work. The timeline of Kaufman's life and the concluding essays also makes this a useful gathering of Kaufman's work to better understand his range, imagination, and how he approached the page as a space. This would definitely be a good companion to the recent Billy Woodberry documentary "And When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead."
January 10, 2020
I don’t know about poetry, but I know what I like. And I like Bob Kaufman. His life comes through his workliked coded messages in his wild, humorous poems. They’re full not only of personal references, but a history of art, literature and culture. It might sound crazy, and it teeters on the edge of insanity, but never falls into the abyss. If you look at these poems, Kaufman will stare back at you.
March 3, 2021
This took me by surprise. I had heard very little of Kaufman, and frankly this was just a book I threw onto my wishlist and forgot about. But I am incredibly thankful that I ended up buying it.
Kaufman's work, unlike any other poet I have ever read, hit me like a train. The poems in this book really pull you in, they involve you like few poets ever could or ever will. You can be a good poet, but Kaufman exemplifies the idea of pure, raw talent that very very few people are blessed with. He strings words together to create a surrealist tapestry in a unique and beautiful way, creating poems that no other Beat poet could ever do. They're fun yet serious, simple yet enigmatic, and overall just downright enjoyable.
In my personal opinion, the only collected works that top Kaufman's in terms of front-to-back quality is Rimbaud's, but even then it is close. Seriously, if you don't know whether or not you should read him, I beg you to do so. Kaufman is fantastic.
Kaufman's work, unlike any other poet I have ever read, hit me like a train. The poems in this book really pull you in, they involve you like few poets ever could or ever will. You can be a good poet, but Kaufman exemplifies the idea of pure, raw talent that very very few people are blessed with. He strings words together to create a surrealist tapestry in a unique and beautiful way, creating poems that no other Beat poet could ever do. They're fun yet serious, simple yet enigmatic, and overall just downright enjoyable.
In my personal opinion, the only collected works that top Kaufman's in terms of front-to-back quality is Rimbaud's, but even then it is close. Seriously, if you don't know whether or not you should read him, I beg you to do so. Kaufman is fantastic.
September 23, 2020
208 pages of poems, many epigrammatic, and a chronology worth studying closely. Say you were someone trained in any of the MFA programs derivative of the Iowa system, you were probably taught to pay precisely no attention to the Beats, so you might have missed this Shelley among them. I was staying for a couple of weeks in San Francisco in 1985 with the poet Pauline Uchmanowicz and the photographer Ken Miller when Miller had the itch to photograph Kaufman, who, as the photographs in this collection attest, was a striking camera subject. So we went about the Haight and Mob Hill searching for the poet, rumored then to be living on the streets. The chronology tells me why there was difficulty locating him; he was dying of emphysema, luckily with editors Raymond Foye and Neeli Cherkowski still in touch with him. Publication was slowed for Kaufman in his transient years by his poems being in places other than where he was staying. By January the following year he was dead.
Three books by Kaufman (1925-1986) were published in his lifetime, though his exact role in their publication is a little puzzling. In particular I'm vexed by how early on Kaufman's epigrammatic style is set. If Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965) has poems that go back into the early Fifties (it is remarked that by 1953 Kaufman had begun being notorious for commandeering tables in North Beach bars) the reader is obligated to wonder what kind of poetic style would capture the respect of the North Beach scene. Beginning in 1957 (in the wake of On the Road) beat poets began to draw tourists, and Dave Van Ronk argues that in The Great Folk Scare (his phrase for the Second Folk Revival) the folk singers were bar-owners' technique for clearing the bars so that the poets could pack in the next crowd ready to pony up a two-drink minimum. Kaufman may or may not have shared Ginsberg's notoriety, but he was part of this scene, in both the Village as well as in North Beach; since New Directions was a NYC firm, it may well be that his Village reputation secured his first publication, edited by his wife, Eileen Kaufman.
Epigrams become in the modern period a recrudescence for so many forms of early modernity. "Blue Slanted into Blueness" offers an example of the kind of things Kaufman wanted to do with epigram -- here, show its posthumous testimony [the use of all caps in what follows has to suggest the stone-maker's "style"]:
NO SEBASTIAN, NOT AGAIN, NOR A FIRST TIME EITHER
WHO WILL BE THE FIRST ONE TO BREAK THE ICE,
REST FOREVER IN THE AMMONIA TANK, IN AN ICE HOUSE
HUNG BY THE THUMBS
The epigram has a curious relationship to proof, as it demonstrates the epitaph's use of the epigram just as had a famous early (pre-1955?) performance piece:
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 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 of 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's 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'm not crazy.
The epigram-ist is a satirist, an elegist, a wisdom-mocker, offering anyway perspectival-upends. Bob Kaufman was a political man out beyond politics -- long before Bill Knott, Kaufman was an auto-necrophiliac dead to the public culture waiting for the next public man, the next Auden. When he was 17 he left New Orleans for Galveston and shipped out in the merchant marine, whence he came to find places to stay on both coasts while he lived nowhere, as he was a labor organizer who had his union card taken from him when he was 23, and thereafter was blacklisted and fell off the map after working for Wallace in the fall of '48. By then he'd already been married and divorced, and was being surveilled by the FBI not only for his earlier communist affiliation but because the mother of his child was a white woman. He'd been the wrong man to be taking such a political role in "the old free" [free for white men of a certain class] America. So the last line of "Unholy Missions" swings -- signifies [rocks between hyperbole and litotes] -- all over the place. On his way out of NYC in 1960 to go return to his second family who were living out in SF, Kaufman got picked up [no doubt beaten], and institutionalized. There he was lobotomized. He tried to keep it together and managed well until the JFK assassination. At that point he took a vow of silence and apparently commandeered no more barroom tables, at least into the mid-Seventies. Ancient Rain collects the poems of those years.
Ancient Rain collects some of his finest epigrams, but the long title poem, in prose, endeavors a counter narrative to post-assassination American politics, and ultimately tows away from the signifying claims in his most effective lines. Kaufman as a mystical poet is a report on the self, because beyond poets like Lorca there would be no heretical text to follow. He gets more sincere the more he gathers the tropes of the negative. The late turn towards Buddhism is exemplified in the dozen poems closing the volume.
Three books by Kaufman (1925-1986) were published in his lifetime, though his exact role in their publication is a little puzzling. In particular I'm vexed by how early on Kaufman's epigrammatic style is set. If Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965) has poems that go back into the early Fifties (it is remarked that by 1953 Kaufman had begun being notorious for commandeering tables in North Beach bars) the reader is obligated to wonder what kind of poetic style would capture the respect of the North Beach scene. Beginning in 1957 (in the wake of On the Road) beat poets began to draw tourists, and Dave Van Ronk argues that in The Great Folk Scare (his phrase for the Second Folk Revival) the folk singers were bar-owners' technique for clearing the bars so that the poets could pack in the next crowd ready to pony up a two-drink minimum. Kaufman may or may not have shared Ginsberg's notoriety, but he was part of this scene, in both the Village as well as in North Beach; since New Directions was a NYC firm, it may well be that his Village reputation secured his first publication, edited by his wife, Eileen Kaufman.
Epigrams become in the modern period a recrudescence for so many forms of early modernity. "Blue Slanted into Blueness" offers an example of the kind of things Kaufman wanted to do with epigram -- here, show its posthumous testimony [the use of all caps in what follows has to suggest the stone-maker's "style"]:
NO SEBASTIAN, NOT AGAIN, NOR A FIRST TIME EITHER
WHO WILL BE THE FIRST ONE TO BREAK THE ICE,
REST FOREVER IN THE AMMONIA TANK, IN AN ICE HOUSE
HUNG BY THE THUMBS
The epigram has a curious relationship to proof, as it demonstrates the epitaph's use of the epigram just as had a famous early (pre-1955?) performance piece:
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 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 of 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's 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'm not crazy.
The epigram-ist is a satirist, an elegist, a wisdom-mocker, offering anyway perspectival-upends. Bob Kaufman was a political man out beyond politics -- long before Bill Knott, Kaufman was an auto-necrophiliac dead to the public culture waiting for the next public man, the next Auden. When he was 17 he left New Orleans for Galveston and shipped out in the merchant marine, whence he came to find places to stay on both coasts while he lived nowhere, as he was a labor organizer who had his union card taken from him when he was 23, and thereafter was blacklisted and fell off the map after working for Wallace in the fall of '48. By then he'd already been married and divorced, and was being surveilled by the FBI not only for his earlier communist affiliation but because the mother of his child was a white woman. He'd been the wrong man to be taking such a political role in "the old free" [free for white men of a certain class] America. So the last line of "Unholy Missions" swings -- signifies [rocks between hyperbole and litotes] -- all over the place. On his way out of NYC in 1960 to go return to his second family who were living out in SF, Kaufman got picked up [no doubt beaten], and institutionalized. There he was lobotomized. He tried to keep it together and managed well until the JFK assassination. At that point he took a vow of silence and apparently commandeered no more barroom tables, at least into the mid-Seventies. Ancient Rain collects the poems of those years.
Ancient Rain collects some of his finest epigrams, but the long title poem, in prose, endeavors a counter narrative to post-assassination American politics, and ultimately tows away from the signifying claims in his most effective lines. Kaufman as a mystical poet is a report on the self, because beyond poets like Lorca there would be no heretical text to follow. He gets more sincere the more he gathers the tropes of the negative. The late turn towards Buddhism is exemplified in the dozen poems closing the volume.
June 11, 2020
Phenomenal work. Volume collects all three full-length books published in Kaufman's lifetime, broadsides and uncollected poems (the suite of six Buddhist poems towards the end are particularly beautiful). Kaufman was always a surrealist, sometimes a 'Beat', an anti-imperialist poet of individual and collective alienation. In the world of the Bomb, the Cold War, ecocide and genocide, Kaufman's particular brand of apocalypticism simultaneously offers surrealist realism, prophetic warning, and glimpses of visionary hope. The earlier volumes, 'Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness' and 'Golden Sardine', were written whilst he was a part of bohemian communities in (anti-)San Francisco North Beach and New York's Lower East Side between 1958 and 1963, and tend more towards a recognisably 'Beat' subject matter and vocabulary--though the range of forms, topics, and the like make this work infinitely stranger and richer than the popular caricature of 'Beat'. In 1963, Kaufman famously took a ten-year vow of silence: a response to the combination of electroshock 'therapy'--it's estimated he was administered between 50 and 100 doses--the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Vietnam war. The smaller collection of later poems that close out his third volume, 'The Ancient Rain' (1981), were predominantly produced between 1973 and 1978 before he once more resumed poetic silence in the last decade of his life. Often rendered in all caps, in a combination of verse lines and prose paragraphs, poems like the phenomenal 'The Ancient Rain' are epics-in-miniature, visionary history poems which are also beautiful and wrenching reckonings with physical and psychical loneliness and the effects of individual/collective trauma. The poignant suite of six, previously uncollected late Buddhist poems that close out the volume further distill the frenetic energies of the earlier work to a stark reckoning with and making piece with the world--not an acceptance of the world as it's currently constituted, against which Kaufman's work serves as undying protest, but a way of being with one's marginalised place in and out of it, in the certainty that poems will endure. Required reading.
September 16, 2021
And now there is only the work. There are no cops to put him in jail nor scenes to gawk at him. There are no gifted, troubled poets who he loved more than they loved co-opting his aesthetic without giving him credit. There are no pop poetry scholars uncomfortable with his look, lack of machismo, or lack of political talking points. There are only his words here, paced in the syllables in which he made so much radical, beautiful music. And the outgone neon library of images and metaphors in his mind that can make these poems seem new to read right now. And a gift for transposing the rhetoric of black music and the black church on the page unparalleled by any poet I have ever read in my life.
I don’t know if The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman can do for its author what a generation of revivals did for Tennessee Williams plays (i.e., change the conversation around him from his tortured outsider persona to his rare in a century literary talent). Reading this collection, however, makes me believe that it’s something that direly needs to happen.
I don’t know if The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman can do for its author what a generation of revivals did for Tennessee Williams plays (i.e., change the conversation around him from his tortured outsider persona to his rare in a century literary talent). Reading this collection, however, makes me believe that it’s something that direly needs to happen.
February 25, 2022
This book is full of wonders - touching, strange, enigmatic, funny poems. After reading this collection, I feel more strongly than ever that Kaufman is my favorite poet.
January 17, 2020
One of the two major black Beat poets and someone now sadly overlooked by most. A truly great American poet if you can find and read his stuff. This collection is a good place to start. Recommended.
December 18, 2023
Bob Kaufman is officially one of my favorite poets, next to Lenore Kandel and of course Ginsberg. He is a poet-genius, “masking the absence of a person, the world caught in pockets of thoughts that feed on believing” as he wrote himself. He also wrote “Creation is master and man does not exist except as tools of art” His affiliates said he was a living breathing poem.
It was hard choosing excerpts for this one, I was highlighting every other passage in this book- so inspired that I was writing my own poems in the margins the whole time. This is quite literally a mystical text I will continue to reference for eternity because of how inspiring it is.
“My mirror died, & I can’t tell if I still reflect”
“Who crouches there in my Heart? Some wounded bird, hidden in the tall grass that surrounds my heart.”
“Destroyed angels and ancient dreams of old embryonic wonder, dreams of glory on rounded fields of strange bellies with sandpaper skins bruising tender hands, holding other lives cherished from memory of yesterday”
Both metaphysical & reflective, gorged on reality & dreams- he is wholly beatnik and very versatile. This is a must read essential of the Beat gen.
It was hard choosing excerpts for this one, I was highlighting every other passage in this book- so inspired that I was writing my own poems in the margins the whole time. This is quite literally a mystical text I will continue to reference for eternity because of how inspiring it is.
“My mirror died, & I can’t tell if I still reflect”
“Who crouches there in my Heart? Some wounded bird, hidden in the tall grass that surrounds my heart.”
“Destroyed angels and ancient dreams of old embryonic wonder, dreams of glory on rounded fields of strange bellies with sandpaper skins bruising tender hands, holding other lives cherished from memory of yesterday”
Both metaphysical & reflective, gorged on reality & dreams- he is wholly beatnik and very versatile. This is a must read essential of the Beat gen.
November 28, 2020
Perhaps the “San Francisco” poet par excellence. Although a few of his works seem pretty close to mainstream mid-century American poetry, most are at least loosely “Beat” or surrealist. So fine smaller pieces, some great individual lines, and some longer prose-poem pieces I most couldn’t read.
November 30, 2021
Absolutely incredible collection of poetry. Kaufman has an impeccable sense of rhythm and syntax. Poetry that burns off the page with an unbridled vivacity and unmatched dynamism. Everyone should read this book.
July 4, 2020
Absolutely first rate
August 16, 2020
Loved it
January 17, 2021
would you wear my eyes?
August 14, 2023
Tried some more beat poetry. Unfortunately, I’m still not a huge fan.
September 2, 2023
At once a time capsule and timeless. Rich, illustrative descriptions of life in San Francisco in his time.
January 6, 2024
One of the best Beat Poetry (collections) I’ve ever read.
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October 13, 2024carrion moonlight carries cognitive creation
March 8, 2025
Giving up.on this. Not for me. A little too convoluted and froo -froo.
November 14, 2022
the greatest beat poet. the frenzied surrealist who happened to land himself in north beach and write some of the most intense and greatest poetry ever. he died, and he didn't stay dead. the true American original.
favorite poem: The Mind for All its Complicated Reasoning
favorite poem: The Mind for All its Complicated Reasoning
June 28, 2023
Kaufman's one of the coolest Afro-Beat-Surrealist Poets I've ever encountered. He pays homage to Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Billie Holiday and a host of other Jazz Legends in his work. His writing is very smooth and wacky - as most surrealists are. His is a body of work worth exploring for anyone who loves Jazz, Music generally, Afro-American culture, surrealism, and Beat poetry.
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