8.27.14

I know I've been on a jazz kick, and I'm going to move away from that, but the learning process keeps uncovering more and more that I want to share.

In my browsing, I came across work by Bob Kaufman, a beat poet with an incredible past. This blog post by fellow poet Cedar Sigo says it better than I could, but I will include some excerpts:

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.

heavy water blues 1967

The radio is teaching my goldfish Jujitsu
I am in love with a skindiver who sleeps underwater
My neighbors are drunken linguists, & I speak butterfly
Consolidated Edison is threatening to cut off my brain
The postman keeps putting sex in my mailbox,
My mirror died, and I can’t tell if it still reflects,
I put my eyes on a diet, my tears are gaining too much weight.

I crossed he dessert in a taxicab
only to be locked in a pyramid
With the face of a dog
on my breath

I went to a masquerade
Disguised as myself
Not one of my friends
Recognized

I dreamed I went to John Mitchell’s poetry party
in my maidenform brain

Put the silver in the barbeque pit
The Chinese are attacking with nuclear
Restaurants

My radio is teaching my goldfish Jujitsu
My old lady has taken up skindiving and sleeps underwater
I am hanging out with a drunken linguist, who can speak butterfly
and represent the caterpillar industry down in Washington D.C.

I never understand other people’s desires or hopes,
Until they coincide with my own
then we clash

I have definite proof that the culture of the caveman,
Disappeared due to his inability to produce one magazine
That could be delivered by a kid on a bicycle

When reading all those thick books on the life of god,
It should be noted that they were all written by men.

It is perfectly fine to cast the first stone,
if you have some more in your pocket.

Television, America’s ultimate relief, from the Indian disturbance.

I hope that when machines finally take over,
They don't build men that break down,
as soon as they’re paid for.

I shall refuse to go to the moon, 

Unless I'm inoculated against

the dangers of indiscriminate love.

After riding across the desert in a taxicab,
he discovered himself locked in a pyramid
With the face of a dog on his breath.

The search for the end of the circle,
Constant occupation of squares.

Why don’t they stop throwing symbols,
The air is cluttered enough with echoes.

Just when I cleaned the manger for the wisemen,
The shrews from across the street showed up.

The voice of the radio shouted, get up 

do something to someone
but me and my son 

laughed in our furnished room.

This trips me out, and not just because its filled with abstract images, surreal juxtapositions, and appears to represent the 60's so well. It's surprising because, between the wild lines that don't seem to follow (or use complete sentences) are these terse little aphorisms that balloon through the carnival. The repetition of a few of the phrases comes as a surprise too, since one might expect that they are apropos of nothing, until they repeat. I have a feeling a piece like this will offer me something different each time I approach it. Here's the other:

I Have Folded My Sorrows

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingles hippo becomes the gay unicorn.
No, my traffic is not addled keepers of yesterday's disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday's pains.
Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.
And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.
And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters. Still, they remain unfinished.
And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.

The tragedies are sung nightly at the funerals of the poet;
The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity.

This poem seems to have every difference from Heavy Water Blues, but I think they are different expressions of similar things. This appears to be sonnet, with some metric consistency, even with a little consonance for resolution. The phrases are mostly complete sentences, and the images are made with typical comparisons rather than surreal images mounted on one another. I feel like a lot of the surreal is still there, though, not just in the fabulous hippo-to-unicorn conversion, but also in the universe as it exists around the speaker. I am really intrigued by the small sample of his work I have looked at thus far.