Book Description

"Bob Kaufman's life is written on mirrors in smoke."--Jack Kerouac "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."--David Henderson "He was an original voice. No one else talked like him. No one else wrote poetry like him."--Lawrence Ferlinghetti TheCollected Poems of Bob Kaufman brings together every known surviving poem by this major African-American surrealist, including the three books published in his lifetime,Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness,Golden Sardine, andThe Ancient Rain. With over 30 previously uncollected works,Collected Poems is the first comprehensive presentation of this truly original, streetwise autodidact and member of the Beat Generation. Included here are a foreword by devorah major, reminiscences by editors Raymond Foye and Neeli Cherkovski, and a biographical timeline by editor Tate Swindell, which chronicles this elusive poet's movements across the country and around the world.Collected Poems is a landmark poetic achievement and marks Kaufman's welcome return to City Lights Publishers. Praise forCollected Poems of Bob Kaufman: "With this magnetic new unveiling Bob Kaufman trenchantly sunders endemic retrocausal error and neglect that his casted his fate into a secondary enclave of lesser mastery. To set the story straight it was his spirit that helped sire the Ginsberg that we know and not vice versa. It was he who magically hoisted the invisible umbrella under which Kerouac and others such as Corso were enabled to protractedly flourish. Arrested 39 times for poetic brilliance via bravura he was the absolute contrary of the sterile academic scrounging for golden verbal eggs. Never concerned with immediate notoriety he passed across unerring emptiness as a poetic lahar sweeping in all directions at once. He 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 "Bob Kaufman is one our most vulnerable, mysterious and beautiful of poets, a nomadic maudit, surrealist saint of the streets, votary of silence, the consummate Outrider with trickster imagination and visionary power. What does it take to be such a poet-man, veils/layers of existence laced with hardship, suffering? Not many like this anymore. The Black American Rimbaud, as he was christened in France. His poems make me weep and bow with humility and wonder. I last saw him, shape-shifting shaman on Ken Kesey's stage in Oregon, swirling in a torque of rage, enlightenment, and prescience. Pure product of America's madness: fury and tenderness. The writing is complex and lays its soul baring down on jazz inflected syllables and riffs for all to read and tremble within. No serious canon is complete without this insistent rhythm, poetic acuity, and a body's last resort to sing."--Anne Waldman "Uplifting the voice of this under-sung literary master to future's light is the mission of theCollected 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 Daaood