It seems that the actual facts and dates of Kaufman’s life have been swallowed whole by prevailing myth. He was a merchant seaman, sailed around the world, gave endless monologues in North Beach, was harassed and often beaten by police, moved to New York, received shock therapy, narrowly missed a lobotomy, and took a 12-year vow of silence in 1963 following a dark vision after JFK’s assassination. He broke his silence in 1973 after the end of the Vietnam War and wrote a fascinating return sequence of poems now collected in The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 (1981), which is edited and with an introduction by Foye. His work could not be contained by the page. Foye writes, “So absolute was Kaufman’s dedication to the oral and automatic sources of poetry, it was only at the insistence of his wife, Eileen, that he began to write down his work.”He is credited with coining the term "beatnik" as well, according to Raymond Foye. From Wikipedia, Ken Kesey shares a memory of Kaufman:
I can remember driving down to North Beach with my folks and seeing Bob Kaufman out there on the street. I didn’t know he was Bob Kaufman at the time. He had little pieces of Band-Aid tape all over his face, about two inches wide, and little smaller ones like two inches long -- and all of them made into crosses. He came up to the cars, and he was babbling poetry into these cars. He came up to the car I was riding in, and my folks, and started jabbering this stuff into the car. I knew that this was exceptional use of the human voice and the human mind.This exposure to poetry, when you are least expecting it, is both intimate and intimidating. A class of mine once participated in a similar "Poetry Terrorism" experiment (not particularly successfully), which attempted to force those around you to become your audience in some attention-grabbing way. We think so much of poetry as being something that you come to, pull up a chair to, and engage with on your own terms and in your own way. Having it thrust in your face turns it into something else entirely. I have always wanted to try this again, but let's face it: I'm terrible at extemporaneous anything, and this sounds as terrifying for the speaker as it does for the audience. Let's have some poems, I've picked Heavy Water Blues and I Have Folded my Sorrows because they are so different.
A successful example of such an interaction occurred in Canberra in August this year where the Chicago-born performance poet, Miles Merrill, collaborated with the Gai Bryant Quartet in a concert held at the Street Theatre. Merrill is one of the country’s most accomplished performance poets and Gai Bryant is a strong saxophone player in the bop and post-bop tradition. The music was, for the most part, closely arranged to suit the poetry performance and convincingly reinforced the various moods established by the poet. Once, a more ad-lib approach was used and this too (though inherently risky) worked well. The whole event was reminiscent of Charles Mingus’ 1957 album The Clown, which featured improvising spoken word artist, Jean Shepherd. It’s worth noting here too that Bryant’s group also played several pieces without the poet — implying perhaps that such collaborations have their natural limits.(...)
In the work I (and sometimes fellow poet, Lynn Hard) have done so far with musicians including (...), I have tended to strike a different balance. In a performance Lynn and I gave with the Luke Sweeting Trio (piano, bass, drums) at The Loft in Canberra in June this year we viewed the music as a support and an intensifier to the poetry rather than the poetry’s being an addendum (or introduction) to the music. Several of Lynn’s poems were written as responses to well-known jazz standards such as ‘Whisper Not’ and ‘Milestones’ and began with a complete chorus of the tune played first by the trio, followed by the poem which was timed to take up one or two choruses. On this occasion all of our poems were about jazz in one way or another – though I have performed with jazz musicians (eg. Eric Ajaye on bass) some of my poems on other themes with, I hope, equal effectiveness.
Jazz Fantasia
Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes,sob on the long cool winding saxophones.Go to it, O jazzmen.
Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happytin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go husha-husha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.
Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops,moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like aracing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang!you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns,tin cans — make two people fight on the top of a stairwayand scratch each other's eyes in a clinch tumbling downthe stairs.
Can the rough stuff . . . now a Mississippi steamboat pushesup the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo . . . and the greenlanterns calling to the high soft stars . . . a red moon rideson the humps of the low river hills . . . go to it, O jazzmen.
driving in from the trackI always turn the radio onto the freeway traffic alert station. and the other day I heard the best one,the man said that the Santa Monica freewaynear the San Diego off ramp was congesteddue to an indecent exposure case.
"they're working on getting himoff of there now", he said,"meanwhile, I'd suggest you take an alternate route."
which, of course, nobody did.
In his keynote address at the 1996 PEN Literary Awards, Richard Howard offered “a modest proposal that may yet restore an art that was once the glory and the consolation of our race to something like its ulterior status. My proposal is simply this: to make poetry, once again, a secret.” Howard continued, “We have failed…to make poetry known; we have merely made it public. If we are to save poetry, which means if we are to savor it, we must restore poetry to that status of seclusion and even secrecy that characterizes our authentic pleasures and identifies only our intimately valued actions.” For Howard, a poem is an intimate act of communication, not an occasion for a group grope.
Robert Pinsky responded to Howard, asserting that poetry is “part of our shared communal life, as surely as is the Internet.” The participation of poets in the public scene is “part of the civic life of art, a part of the way society held onto the art of poetry, thereby preserving it for the unborn.” Using a distressingly mercantile figure of speech, he avers that poetry is “part of the marketplace where we all gather.” Dana Gioia’s prescription for popularizing poetry through public events goes even further. He says poets should read other poets’ works at readings, include some music and visuals, and in general mix the media, efforts that he believes will “attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.” High school and college poetry teachers, he says, should “spend less time on analysis and more on performance.”
“I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough and random style of it, often so ungrammatical, and crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; and take no time over this; and forbid her to let the eye of man behold it. And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash and vigour and sometimes hits an unexpected bull’s eye. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink. I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. Moreover there looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously and scrupulously, in fiction"
Founded in 1995, Open Books: A Poem Emporium is a poetry-only bookstore in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood. The aesthetically diverse stock contains over 10,000 new and used volumes published by presses from large to tiny. The calendar of events runs September to June with readings by visiting and local poets as well as the bookstore discussion group, Poetry in Conversation.
The Grolier Poetry Book Shop was founded in September 1927 by Adrian Gambet and Gordon Cairnie; the subsequent owner, Louisa Solano, a 1966 graduate of Boston University, took over operation of the store in 1974 after Cairnie's death. The original owners were independently wealthy and were able to run the business at a loss, giving away books to favoured customers without charge, falling behind with bills and turning a blind eye to theft. Much of the activity at Grolier's under Cairnie's management was of the social kind: visitors lounged on a red couch while sharing drinks with the owners.
Solano was unable to support the store with her own money and turned it into a self-sustaining business. She found innovative ways to promote poetry in the Cambridge community; for many years the Grolier has sponsored an annual, national poetry contest as well as a reading series in nearby Adams House, a dormitory at Harvard. Solano's knowledge of poetry was well known in the Cambridge and Harvard community, and in the era before internet bookselling, she was considered a valuable source for people seeking rare and unusual poetry titles. Under Solano's management, for example, the store was the first to stockLanguage Magazine, the periodical that launched the avant-garde L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement.
In 2002, a 75th anniversary celebration[1] by the Poetry Society of America drew a crowd of over 800 people, and Grolier's is listed as a "poetry landmark" by the Academy of American Poets.[2]
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping
slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket
sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
What a wonderful namesake for a shop; I would love to have a place like that to relax in. These are just a few of the first hits I came upon in my perfunctory googling, I'm sure there are many more poetry-friendly book shops worth mentioning. This list has quite a few, check it out for more ideas. Do you have a favorite shop or locale for enjoying poetry?
The responsibilities of the state poets laureate are similar to those of the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom and the equivalent Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in the United States, to make public appearances at poetry readings or literary events, and to promote awareness of poetry within their geographical region.
As of 2013, 44 states and the District of Columbia have poets laureate, although a few are presently vacant. The terms can vary in length from state to state. Most states appoint a poet laureate for a one- or two-year terms, fewer to several years, and some states appoint a poet to a lifetime tenure. Two states, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, previously had such posts but abolished them in 2003. There has never been an official State Poet Laureate in Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, or Ohio. While Idaho does not have a post of "poet laureate", per se, the state appoints a "Writer in Residence", which can be held by a novelist or poet.
I loved this, it's really great to remember that we are not the sum total of the things we make. A nurse isn't her patients treatments, a chef isn't his meals, and a parent is more than just their children. Especially at the "entry" levels of poetry and learning, it can be frightening to share work, offer, and receive criticism, since we are so steeped in how personal and emotional the work can be. There is also the question, do we thrust our work out there and let it take on a life of its own, or are we curators in a way, responsible for it's interpretation, growth, and evolution?I’m sure that each of you made sacrifices to be here, to write the work you’ll read to us soon. You've each taken risks of one kind or another, you've mined your intellect, your imagination, your life.And because of that personal investment, it might be tempting to equate the result of that investment with yourselves. But I want you to know, because I wish I’d known it much, much sooner: You are not your work.The master furniture maker puts all her effort into crafting an elegant, perfectly balanced table. And when it’s sold and someone takes it home, she doesn't think it’s a piece of herself that they are now eating dinner on.At some point, the work belongs to your readers. And you move on.Paradoxically, the more deeply personal your work, the more others are going to take what they need from it, to make what they need with it, despite whatever it was you intended or thought you were creating.And when the work fails, as it must sometimes if you’re stretching yourself and risking in new and meaningful ways, you are not a failure.You give yourself to your work, but you are not your work. As Sarton put it, “the ripening fruit falls but does not exhaust the root.”