About Bob Kaufman
The introduction to Kaufman’s best poems tells us that he was born in New Orleans on April 18, 1925 and died in San Francisco on January 12, 1986. His father, who was half African American and half Jewish, worked as a Pullman porter for the railroad that ran between New Orleans and Chicago. His mother, a black woman from an old Martinique family, the Vignes, was a schoolteacher. “His Jewish surname and Creole-like features,” the introduction notes, “were shared with twelve brothers and sisters ... Up until his death from emphysema in January of 1986, Kaufman was known as a mostly silent, wiry black man who walked the streets of San Francisco’s North Beach district day and night, often appearing as a mendicant, madman, or panhandler. Yet various schools of American poetry have sung his praises.” Coming from a large and poor family, Bob Kaufman joined the merchant navy at a very young age, which allowed him to satisfy his taste for travel. His working life began at sea; he was a cabin boy on the Henry Gibbons.Returning to the United States, he began studying in New York where he met William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His work was influenced by jazz and French literature (Camus). Based in San Francisco, he worked on Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign, during which he was arrested and thrown into jail; early on he connected with the Beat poets and became one of the notable figures of the movement.
At the end of the 1950s, City Lights Books issued three of his broadsides. Disillusioned with the violence of the world, he sinks into violence and drugs. In 1963, following the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Kaufman took a vow of silence. He did not break this vow until 1973. In 1966, publisher Mary Beach found a leather folder containing unpublished poems by Bob Kaufman in a bin in the City Lights bookstore. She then succeeded in convincing Lawrence Ferlinghetti to publish these poems, under the title of Golden Sardine. Following the end of his vow of silence, the volume The Ancient Rain (1981) features new poems. Kaufman died in 1986, in a state of poverty and physical disrepair. Along with other poets (Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly and William Margolis) he was one of the founders of Beatitude Magazine.
Kaufman would declaim his poems and manifestoes at poetry readings and in other public places; often enough, the police would arrest him. Eventually, he began to drink under the strain; back in New York, he was arrested and given shock treatments against his will. After President Kennedy was shot, Kaufman took a vow of silence, maintaining it for a decade. Then he began writing again; the poems were rescued from a hotel fire by a friend and published as Kaufman’s third book in 1981. By the end, he had been a Beat poet, a surrealist, a sound poet, a jazz poet, and a poet of black consciousness.
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