Poetry Wednesday 10/21/09: Jazz Chick

Billie Holiday, 1915-1959
By Suzanne Cerny

Jazz Chick
by Bob Kaufman

Music from her breast, vibrating
Soundseared into burnished velvet.
Silent hips deceiving fools.
Rivulets of trickling ecstacy
From the alabaster pools of Jazz
Where music cools hot souls.
Eyes more articulately silent
Than Medusa’s thousand tongues.
A bridge of eyes, consenting smiles
reveal her presence singing
Of cool remembrance, happy balls
Wrapped in swinging
Jazz
Her music…
Jazz

Hello, and welcome back to Poetry Wednesday 10/21/09. You can sign in today and take the tour thru Thursday, so take your time.

I’ll be your hostess again this week. My sister, Sans Souci, has been very busy helping our mom get adjusted to her new assisted living residence, but she will check in.

Before we get started, please make sure that your post has a link to get back to this page to make it easier to take the tour:

1) Copy and paste the following link that I have provided for you from this page to somewhere on your poetry post.

Link back to the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita’s page

2) Leave the link of your poetry post in the comments section below. This is the link guests will click on to read your poem.

Born: April 18, 1925
Place of Birth: New Orleans, Louisiana

Bob Kaufman was, other than Langston Hughes, the greatest jazz poet who ever lived. He was one of 13 children born to a German Jewish father and a Black Catholic mother. He ran away from home and joined the Merchant Marines when he was 13, and circled the globe 9 times in the next 20 years. During that period Kaufman read literature and met a fellow Merchant Marine, Jack Keruac, who had been discharged from the Armed Forces after refusing to obey certain orders. Kaufman later travelled to San Francisco where he joined Ginsberg, Corso, and others during their literary “renaissance.” Kaufman was known in America as “the original bebop man” and was very popular in France, where he was known as “the Black American Rimbaud.” His three volumes of poems are:

Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New Directions)
Golden Sardine (City Lights)
Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 (New Directions)

It was Bob Kauffman who invented the word “beatnik”, sound poetry and performance art. At least, the San Francisco columnist Herb Caen struck by a rendition of the word “sputnik” chanted into cars by Bob Kauffman wrote of ” beatnik chanting sputnik”, and so a generation was born. Forget all that you had heard of that famous San Francisco Gallery Six reading from which he was excluded. This got the thing started.

Kaufman was so dedicated to the spontaneous, oral tradition of poetry that he sometimes would not write his work down, and only did so at the encouragement of his wife. He would carry his son, Parker, into coffeehouses in San Francisco and “hold court,” reciting his poems aloud and from memory. It is claimed that he invented the word “beatnik,” and his work is essentially improvised. His work varies from Symbolist to Surrealist, and often involves political and social protest. He was often persecuted by local authorities, and even given shock treatment against his will. After difficulties with heroin, and prison terms, he began to experience a sense of solitude. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Kaufman took a Buddhist vow of silence to protest the Vietnam war which lasted for ten years. During that period, until 1973, he neither spoke nor wrote anything. On the day the war ended, he walked into a coffeeshop and recited a poem called “All Those Ships that Never Sailed.”

In 1978, he withdrew again into solitude (but was not silent) for four years.

There is a special library at the Sorbonne in Paris which has the bulk of his “papers” and information about him. He was much more popular in France than in America. He also published several “chapbooks” or “manifestos” for City Lights in the early to late sixties. Those are completely unavailable, and “Golden Sardine” is out of print and only available at better libraries.

Kaufman’s poems include love poems, jazz poems and odes to Hart Crane, Charlie Mingus, Ray Charles, and Albert Camus. They often infuse jazz sounds and rhythms, and are meant to have musical accompaniment. He died in 1986. He remains one of the best 2 or 3 of the Beat poets and the most underrated of all American poets.

Morning Joy
by Bob Kaufman

Piano buttons, stitched on morning lights.
Jazz wakes with the day,
As I awaken with jazz, love lit the night.
Eyes appear and disappear,
To lead me once more, to a green moon.
Streets paved with opal sadness,
Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,
And jazz.
–Bob Kaufman

[mp3j track=”goodmorningheartachebillieholiday.mp3″]

Bob Kaufman reads from his first book at
The Coffee Gallery in 1959.

The tour starts here.

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