2020 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER "The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman
is the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume
that contains a lot of previously uncollected work. ... this book
makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American
original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a
meteor."-The New York Times "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."-San
Francisco Chronicle "Twentieth-century American poetry cannot be
fully comprehended without Bob Kaufman. City Lights and the editors
do a grand service to literature by publishing Kaufman's poetry in
one collection. ... This is a necessary gift for poets and poetry
readers."-Booklist "He was an original voice. No one else talked
like him. No one else wrote poetry like him."-Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) was one of the most important-and most
original-poets of the twentieth century. He is among the
inaugurators of what today is characterized as the Afro-Surreal,
uniting the surrealist practice of automatic writing with the jazz
concept of spontaneous composition. He seldom wrote his poems down
and often discarded those he did, leaving them to be rescued by
others. He was also a legendary figure of the Beat Generation,
known as much for hopping on tables to declaim his poetry as for
maintaining a monastic silence for months or even years at a time.
Kaufman produced just three broadsides and three books in his
lifetime. In 1967, Golden Sardine was published by City Lights in
its famed Pocket Poets Series, and became an instant cult classic.
Collected Poems is a landmark poetic achievement, bringing together
all of Kaufman's known surviving poems, including an extensive
section of previously uncollected work, in a long overdue return to
City Lights Books. Praise for Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman: "Bob
Kaufman volcanically en-veined the Beats as a mirage enveloped
Surrealist; not as a formal poet, but one, like Rimbaud, who
embodied butane. Following the scent of his butane on one anonymous
North Beach afternoon led Philip Lamantia to audibly utter to me
that Bob Kaufman as per incandescent singularity is 'our
poet.'"-Will Alexander, author of Compression & Purity "Bob
Kaufman is one of our most vulnerable, mysterious, and beautiful
poets, a nomadic maudit, surrealist saint of the streets, votary of
silence, the consummate Outrider with trickster imagination and
visionary power."-Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism
"Uplifting the voice of this under-sung literary master to future's
light is the mission of the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman. This
poet's poet on the cliff edge of no ledge is still continuing to
foster new surrealizations. Read this bebopian wordsmith, his pen
turned saxophone and ink notes that are black tears."-Kamau Daaood,
author of The Language of Saxophones "To call these poems 'surreal'
seems, now, to muffle Kaufman's prophetic genius. He saw us, our
images in pools of blood, milk, and saxophone spittle. Maybe it was
ever our shivering made the ripples that distorted the
reflections."-Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies "Collected
Poems of Bob Kaufman should finally liberate the kaleidoscopic
surrealism of this San Franciscan, and in many respects, secular
Franciscan, poet from the shadows of Allen Ginsberg and the other
Beats. ... Collected Poems is a memoriam of unmitigated joy and
abysmal despair."-Tyrone Williams, author of As iZ
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