Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems

by Bob Kaufman, David Henderson (Introduction)

Poetry. African American Studies. CRANIAL GUITAR collects poems that first appeared in The Ancient Rain and Crowded with Loneliness, and includes the entire text of the long-out-of-print Golden Sardine, in the only major collection available of the late poet Bob Kaufman. Kaufman was active (except during a decade long self-imposed silence) in the poetry scenes of San Francisco and New York from the 1950s to the 1980s, and has attained cult status for his place at the forefront of the Beat movement. "Kaufman is also known as one of America's true surrealist poets, a premier jazz poet, and a major poet of the black consciousness movement. So much did he embody a French tradition of the poet as outsider, madman, and outcast, that in France, Kaufman was called the Black Rimbaud."--from the introduction by David Henderson.

Genres: Poetry, African American

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1995

Reviews

[Arthur Cravan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kaufman has been called the black Rimbaud. I don't know about that. Really, I don't know ANYTHING about that. But let's give it to him anyway. He apparently hung almost permanently around coffee joints, writing a poem & perhaps reading it or just leaving it there, but never keeping or collecting his works. This is shown in the book - a few poems have various iterations. I like the idea of them not being 'drafts' per se, but slightly different versions of the same thing, felt slightly differently at different times, but spilling forth from the same pool. I don't know what's in that pool. When I picture it, it's pink, & though I want to suggest it's a bit sludgy, I don't know why - it flows like it's somehow thinner than water.

His works are pretty uneven, which made me question my five-star rating. But you won't really find anything else like the poetry in this book. When he's killing it, he's really killing it. His truly surreal Beat-phrases explode your motherfucking mind. Sometimes you can smell his poverty. This book is enough to convince me to get a 'Collected Works' if one is ever published, so if you're into this kind of shit, you owe it to yourself - & possibly to his relatives, if there are any to make money off this - to check it out.

[Carmelo Valone · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most underrated and unheard of all of the beat poets...

[ommd · Rating 5 out of 5]

this may very well be the scattered word of god - a terror more certain...

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This really is very close to what I would call The Beat Manifesto (it does include his first publication called The Abomunist Manifesto too). If you only have the time or patience to read just ONE beat poet in your life, then go no further. Kaufman is....the man.

While other beat poets such as Lew Welch, Gregory Corso and Jack Micheline are all fantastic in their own ways, Kaufman is in another league of his own. In fact he's so good, it's scary. He can be lyrical, humorous, scathingly ironic and sad all within the same poem. So why he is one of these beats that most people have never heard of before? Well, that's exactly what I want to know. Is it because most people pictured the Beat Generation to be about a bunch of white working-class (and sometimes middle-class) poets and writers and artists? The female beats and the African-American poets, often associated with the beats, have not gained the attention and recognition they deserve. While Amiri Baraka is slightly better known to fans of the Beat Generation, Kaufman is more like a ....whisper .... a legend almost.....like Robert Johnson.

Well, this book is a fantastic one which contains most of Kaufman's poems but not all. The only reason I don't give this book 5 stars is because of the small selection of poems from The Ancient Rain, Kaufman's final work, and in this humble reviewer's opinion, his best. I believe that the reason for that was partly because The Ancient Rain was still in print as a separate book at the time this book was published in 1996. The Ancient Rain is sublime and divine. Gregory Corso once said that Shelley was the only DIVINE poet to have ever walked this earth. As much as I love Gregory, I respectfully disagree - I would put at least three in that category alongside Shelley - Homer, Shakespeare, and Bob Kaufman himself. I can't even remember the time that reading something like this gave me the goosebumps, in a good way.

As someone once said in an essay on Kaufman, he is indeed the "hidden master of the beats" both poetically and politically. If you have any interest in poetry, especially poetry that you will walk away from changed, reflecting on things differently, then this is it.

[Jon Corelis · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best beat poets

***** A Five Star Poetry Book: Recommended for All Readers

I've never understood why Bob Kaufman never had as much of a reputation as his fellow beat poets Ginsberg, Snyder, and Corso -- at his best, he's as good as any of them, and much of his work, for all its idiosyncrasy, is fairly accessible for a general audience, by the standards of most modern poetry. Though he's often not at his best, his best is so very good that I'm giving this collection as a representative of all his work five stars. Unfortunately, Kaufman has not been well served by publishers: to the best of my knowledge, there is no Collected Poems, and no really definitive Selected, just an assortment of collections of varying quality. Among them, this one I think is the best introduction to Kaufman's poetry. If you want a suggestion of where to start, among the poems in this book try Early Lovers, Believe, Believe, Plea, and To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next Room.

[Jonathan Holleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

An outstanding collection of Kaufman's work as a true renegade of his time...The French know him as the black Rimbaud (which, there are some connection, however few) but the biggest distincition of Bob from the other Beat Poets is that he was really dedicated to the poetry, no matter what. He did not care what others thought at all...Isn't that the point? Write YOUR poems. Speak your mind. Do you. Kaufman is a legend.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the lesser-known San Francisco beats. Frenetic, Wild , and wise.

[sydacot · Rating 5 out of 5]

The true beat poet… an underrated master of his craft.

[Pachyderm Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bob Kaufman's poetic work resonates with a curtain jangly juxtaposition of both contemporary and exemplary writing as an addition to any literary genre.

[PEN Center USA · Rating 5 out of 5]

1997 PEN Center USA Award Winner for Poetry