New Bob Kaufman Collected Poems Reviewed

Tomorrow is the official publication date of City Lights's Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman. At Datebook, Denise Sullivan examines Kaufman's life and surveys this essential collection. Sullivan begins by discussing Kaufman's 10 year vow of silence, which spanned the 1960s and early 1970s, then considers his legacy as a Beat writer. From there:

Yet, unlike those of his contemporaries Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Kaufman’s legacy as a Beat Generation writer has been slower to reveal itself. Just three books — “Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness,” “Golden Sardine” and “The Ancient Rain” — were published in his lifetime (he died in 1986). His poems from Beatitude, the arts publication he co-founded in 1959, and other works were left scattered in broadsides and previously uncompiled (he didn’t always write them down). Prone to depression and self-medicating, he faced other factors contributing to his lack of renown, and not least among them the fact that he was black in a largely white literary world.

On Tuesday, Nov. 5, City Lights Books will finally publish “The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman,” edited by his friends, the poet Neeli Cherkovski and Kaufman’s final editor, Raymond Foye. The book includes a discovery timeline by Beat historian Tate Swindell, with a foreword by poet Devorah Major.

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. Though as dramatically as the city has changed since the Beat era, some things have stayed the same. His poem titled, “Oct. 5th, 1963,” is addressed to the Chronicle’s letters to the editor and reads, “Arriving back in San Francisco to be greeted by a blacklist and eviction, I am writing these lines to the responsible non-people. One thing is certain, I am not white. Thank God for that. It makes everything else bearable.”

Time to read on at the SF Chronicle's Datebook.