So to our introductory mix of beat writers and beat poets, we thought it would be good and fun and edifying to add a little bit of Bob Kaufman. And at the very end, I want to describe for you or just name some of the books that Bob Coffman published or that were published in collaboration with him. Because he's, and none of them were in print a less. So you have to just buy used copies. But there's a Coffman renaissance like I guess you could say, Maria Damon has edited a special issue in Kaliloo magazine, I believe, about Kaufman. And there is exploration of unpublished poems and he really does broaden or widen our sense of beat poetry. Damon described him as quote, Maria Damon, a street poet, a people's poet, a poet's poet, a jazz poet, a surrealist poet, a modernist poet, a postmodernist poet, an African American poet, a black poet, a negro poet, a New Orleans poet, a San Francisco poet, a lyric poet, a beat poet. So he's been thought of in a multiplicity of ways. Later overshadowed by what she described as his white formally educated contemporaries Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burrows, et cetera. He was actually if you do the historical record he was a major force in the San Francisco scene from 1955 to 1960. He was known as a brilliant extemporizor, and so much of his extemporizing was performance in bars and outside of bookstores that are lost. He was famous for his rapid-fire aphorism mixed with the modernist poetry that he had memorized. He had memorized the whole modernist canon and mixed beat, beat improvisation and aphoristic sayings with that. He possibly, very possibly invented the term beatnik. N-I-K at the end. Which is a diminutive, Russian based suffix, that tends, if you put nik behind something it tends to be a diminution. It tends to be a kind of there, there, you're a beatnik, not a beat but a beatnik. But he meant it as a very positive. Either he did that or the newspaper columnist Herb Cain, who was following the beat movement for the San Francisco Examiner, used the word beatnik to describe Bob Coffman. So he was known for his outrageous antics. And really in our course, probably the clearest predecessor to him would be the pre-neo Dada, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the baroness. Outrageous antics, most of which were lost, performances, most of which were lost. Some of the San Francisco scene poets did not take him seriously, although Berg and Kerouac and others did. And he was regularly brutalized by the North Beach police for being a so-called vagrant. But he co-founded a, I have this book here, he co-founded a beat mimeograph magazine called Beatitude with Alan Ginsberg. And Several times, this is a 1960 Anthology, Beatitude Anthology co-edited by Bob Coffman and Alan Ginsburg. And in this book he publishes a series called jail poems which are a series of short poems that were indeed written in jail after he'd gotten beaten up one of those times. So what I'm going to do Is I'm going to read you a selection of the jail poems. >> Wait, can I ask a question? >> Yeah. >> So Beatitude is like, be-attitude but also the Beatitudes, maybe? >> Yeah. Let's say more about it because this is not so much beat as in I'm tired and worn down and beaten down, but let's say what Beatitude does. You've already started us. Be attitude, so it's beat attitude yes but it's also religious. >> Which that's like what? >> It's what happens when you're heading towards sainthood. >> Blessed are the weak yeah, blessed are the. >> So Coffman who was as close to poverty and the street and political marginalization, not to mention other kinds of marginalizations. He was as close as any beat poet, Corso was probably pretty close. Any beat poet was to the beat, as in the bottom. He was also the one that argued that beatnik is good and that beatitude is really, it's a kind of transcendence, so he's in a way a transcendentalist, a transcendentalist beat. So you have not, I want to state for the record that you have not seen these poems or heard them. I assume no one's read Jail poems. So you are seeing and hearing this for the first time and what I want to do is read you a selection of the sections of jail poems and just talk about them with you in any order, any response at all. So, I hope you enjoy this. I'm going to read starting with section three of jail poems. Three. In a universe of cells, who is not in jail? Jailers, in a world of hospitals, who is not sick? Doctors, a golden sardine is swimming in my head. We know some things man about some things like jazz and jails and God. Saturday is a good day to go to jail. Four. Now they give a new form, quivering jelly like, that proves any boy can be president of muscatel, muscatel? Cheap, sweet wine. That's the winos Wine. That proves any boy can be President of Muscatel. That's a great line. They are mad at him because he's one of them. Gray speckled white nakedness, stinking fingers grasping toilet bowls. Mister America wants to bathe. Look. On the floor, lying across America's face, what am I doing, feeling compassion? When he comes out of it, he will help kill me. He probably hates beatniks. Seven. Someone who I am is no one. Something I have done is nothing. Some place I have been is nowhere. I am not me. What are the answers I must find questions for. All these strange streets I must find cities for. Thank god for beatniks. And now section 19. One day Adolph Hitler had nothing to do all the Jews were burned. Artists all destroyed. Adolph Hitler was very bored, even with Eva. So he moved to San Francisco, became an ordinary policemen, devoted himself to stamping out beatniks. And I said that was 19, it's actually 14. Now 19, two lines, sitting here writing things on paper, instead of sticking the pencil into the air. 22, caught in imaginary webs of conscience, I weep over my acts, yet believe. And two more, the last two of the sequence, there are 35 in Jail Poems. Here's 34. The defective on the floor, mumbling, Was once a man who shouted across tables. And 35. Come, help flatten a raindrop. Okay, so I'm dying to hear your, this is first reactions, haven't had a chance to think about it. The last one. >> What does the last one do, Anna? >> Help flatten a raindrop. >> What's it saying? >> No idea, but it's awesome. [LAUGH] >> What is flattening a raindrop? Is that just surrealism? >> I don't know, am I sitting on it? Am I squishing it? I don't know. This is great. Tamara, your thought? >> Let's see, come help flatten a raindrop, I wouldn't want to go and help flatten a raindrop. >> [LAUGH] >> It seems like it's not what he wants to do, not what he wants to be doing, ironic. All that. >> So it's sort of ironic in the sense that it may be you guys might be having a fight about this. It may be saying, you know, I'm not doing the standard romantic poetry. Dreamy, rainbowy. I'm more down and. >> Or it can't help but do that by being participating in this art form. Like If I'm going to write a poem about a rain drop, even if I write a good one, I'll still flatten it. >> Yeah. >> Because it's, because you're literally putting it onto a. >> There's a lot of literary consciousness here about the forms. Some of these are like imagist poems or haiku like things. So there's a lot of sense of the preciousness. He's always verging on the preciousness of an observation from his experience in jail, and it's a variety, there's real beat stuff. Things stink here. But, what's his social view of his comrades in the jails? Any, Dave. What evidence do we have of that. >> In number three that you read, it ends with, Saturday is a good day to go jail. >> What does that mean? It means something very specific. >> You can do it all weekend [LAUGH]. >> Exactly, it's not a good day to go jail. In fact, sometimes law enforcement will pick people up late on Friday just so they're not going to get to see a judge until Monday. So what he's saying is actually- >> Because the court's closed and we're not interested in these lousy cases. So Saturday's a good day to go to jail. He's saying he likes it in there, he's got a camaraderie in there. >> Or he needs a roof over his head, so he's going to go on Saturday so he gets to stay and not get flattened by raindrops. >> When he says in a universe of cells, who is not in jail? We're all imprisoned by something. >> Yeah. >> The world is free. >> [CROSSTALK] >> Yeah, or it's a genuine interrogation, it could be true that even he could be saying we're all imprisoned or something, but he could also be saying. Oppression is so systematic in this country that it's literally a world of cells and there are people who aren't in jail, their jailers. >> Likens it to sickness, to hospitals, when you get sick you're in a hospital, everyone gets sick. >> Right. >> So anyone that he's interested in is in jail. It's a very Thoreauvian, as in Henry David Thoreau view of who's out of jail. So, if his beat friends come who have some money, or just anybody who has some money to bail him out. What he would say is what Thoreau said to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a very proper pseudo radical or radical guy. And Thoreau famously said, Emerson said, David, Henry, what are you doing in there? Why are you in there? And Thoreau famously said, why are you out there? And I think in a verse of cells, in a universe of cells, who is not in jail is a way of saying, this is where the good people, you want to be beat. You wanted to be beatnik, they're in here. >> Right, because he answers his own question with jailers. So meaning if you're not in jail, you must be a jailer. >> So can we say more about, I mean, he says beatnik many times. He's affirming beatnik. It's not ironic, right? yeah that thank God for beatniks doesn't seem like, thank God for beatniks. It doesn't have that irony. >> All of these strange, great lines here. All these strange streets I must find cities for, thank God for beatniks. What do you think he might be saying sociologically maybe. >> He's maybe saying that. >> Beatniks are maybe starting a more street-based revolution of some kind, that there isn't quite a city where they won't live and where they can live and won't get beta up. They're starting a new. But it's going street by street. And the rest of San Francisco does not look like the small pockets of the culture that there are. >> Start with Lily, but we'll go around. I'll reread section seven because, not only does it conjure up Dickenson's I'm Nobody, Who Are You, but it also conjures a Gwendolyn Brooks poem that we've talked about it mod po about a boy breaking glass >> Because that boy thinks of himself as having no identity or being invisible. All right, so to some degree this particular marginalization is about being no one and having no effect. Someone who I am is no one. Something I have done is nothing. Someplace I have been is nowhere. I am not me. What of the answers I must find questions for? All these strange streets I must find cities for. Thank God for beatniks. Thoughts Amarice, anything? >> I guess, going back, I wonder if he's saying that in a universe of cells, everyone is know by their. >> You know, numbering crime. And here he's sort of kind of lamenting but maybe also affirming the opposite, that beatniks are wandering the streets without identity, without a set purpose, without a set destination. And he's kind of thankful to be one of their number, and the policemen who trample around are the ones flattening the raindrops, maybe flattening individuals. Having that sense of sort of insolence in the face of the police force. >> Camara, your thoughts on invisibility here? Or his something I have done is nothing. Some place I have been is nowhere. He is pairing identity with place. I think that's interesting in terms of he's writing this in jail. In a place where your identity becomes very shifted from what it is outside of the facility and so I think he's trying to deal with that sort of dislocation of identity >> With setting while in jail. >> Mm-hm. >> I am not me, is pretty powerful and very, he creates such separation from himself. Thank God for Beatniks. That's hard to take seriously all these years later, but what if we just sort of get sincerely back there. Here's a guy who gets constantly beat up by the North Beach Police, who is egged into performance by his supposed colleagues or tourists who are touring through a literal way, you know poet Monty characters like Maxwell Bodenheim, the baroness, we're goaded into performances by people who were kind of touring through modernist radicalism. In that context Bob Kaufman, who has really something to say, can only find his colleagues when, after he's been beaten up and put in jail. And he finds, in a way, he's inspired to build a city based on that marginalization. So, thank God for beatniks. It's hard to see it as unironic, but in a way, I think he's saying this is how we will build the new city. Gwendolyn Brooks hid her critique in the poem, what's the name of it? >> Boy breaking glass. >> Boy breaking glass >> Is partly thinking about the way we design cities defensively so that glass cannot be broken. Maybe we should design cities where there's a ton of glass, or something like that. >> I read Thank God for Beatniks is also thank god for counter culture. >> Because I apologize, I can't help this. But I read someone who I am is no one. Something I've done is nothing. And I instantly think of. Something there is that doesn't love a wall. Because that double negative. Something? >> Well, I like the conjuring of mending wall, because of that Thoreau Emerson diade. Frost is standing outside the cell saying good thing we have a wall. But the wall is actually the bars of the jail. >> Well good thing that we have a wall to put you in, right? So to me, thank God for Beatnix is thank God for this counter culture that's going to. >> And the neighbor, by the way, is benighted in that poem. It's not a overtly racist poem. But the neighbor is dark. Lives in dark places, right. And doesn't understand what his father's saying is. So there is an interrogation, and Frost who is a Conservative poetically, I'm going to get beaten up for saying this, beaten up, no I'm not going to get beaten up, I'm going to be yelled at for saying this, but Frost Conservatism is about maintaining that line. Bob Coffman is saying, look if there's going to be this dividing between mainstream culture. And those who have this kind of transadental be attitude type idea, visionaries. If we have to be somewhere I guess I'm going to be on the other side of this particular wall. Sitting here writing things on paper instead of sticking the pencil into the air. Two line item. Want to do something with that? >> Maybe a contrast in >> Beat. The beat world between poetry that's written and poetry that's performed. Like you know, not necessarily. I mean it seems like he's the kind of person who will, as much work as he has written on paper. There must be like three times as much that was his performative work that there's no way to get. There's no trace of it. It's ephemeral. >> So maybe it's sitting here writing things on paper, being me, putting your words down verses sticking pencil into the air being a more performative gesture. >> Mm-hm. >> Or protest gesture. >> Mm-hm. >> I think he's struggling with maybe the idea that writing isn't enough and that. >> There should be more action that he could be doing. And maybe that's because he's in jail or because he's just struggling with that in general. And trying to do more. >> Mm. Let's keep going with this. Anybody else, I mean, the form of this poem is 35 little pieces, fragments. And when in you're in jail and there's a lot of interruptions, he wrote these in jail apparently. And when you're in jail and there's a lot of people being thrown in the cell with you, this is not penitentiary, this is not Alcatraz. I hope you never made it to Alcatraz, I don't know enough about him to know how much jail time there was, but I assume this is holding for the weekend or a week while he dries out. But he writes these things in pieces, a little like Laney Brown's daily sonnets with the constant interruption of her motherhood. Basically saying, this is the way it's going to have to come out. And sticking the pencil into the air seems either, some of you, one of you just said it's like polemical gesture. But I actually think of it as a kind of blocked bullshit poet whose not just sitting in a cafe somewhere. I don't know. I think he's actually writing things on paper, and not doing that poetic performance thing. I think he's actually trying to get the work done. I don't know. What I want to do is say a few more words about Bob Kaufmann and to give the titles of some books. Books. And then I'm going to ask you each to just give a final, it's not final because this you just seeing this for the first time, but to give one more response to what Coffman's doing. And maybe some of you or all of you want to compare this to the other more mainstream beat poetry. How does this fit or not fit >> I think philosophically and politically it fits very well, but in terms of the writing, it seems more thoughtful about modernism, and more thoughtful about fragmentation. So after lots of poetic and political activity, he was affiliated for a while with the Communist party of the United States, actually. That's little known but he was. He, by the way, published a pamphlet called the Abomunist Manifesto, as opposed to the Communist Manifesto. So, abomunist means like an abomination. So this is, he was still very radical, but he split from the Communist Party. So after lots of poetic and political activity through the 50s and the early 60s, he declared solidarity with the world's poor. And disenfranchised and took a vow of silence around 1963. Some people say it was a response to the assassination of Kennedy. Some people say it just happened in 63. Took a vow of silence. Didn't write, and didn't speak for a about ten years. Until a few days after the end, or the stated end of the Vietnamese War. American involvement in Vietnam at which point he stopped his vow of silence and wrote some more poems. Here are the books that he wrote and has gathered the poems from the first period and the second period. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. That's his early book. Cranial Guitar. Which actually has a Wallace Steve Blue Guitar on the cover. Wallace Stevens reference cranial guitar selected poems. The Ancient Reign poems 1956 1978. The Abomunist Manifesto that I showed you and a really great pamphlet before his vow of silence called Does The Secret Mind Whisper, which is a kind of long line, Whitmanian, maniac conspiracy thing. Does the secret mind whisper, which is partly about atomic annihilation? So, Kaufmann is a little new to you, you've just freshly looked at him. Think about the other beats and just say whatever you'd like to say. Starting with Anne Maurice. >> I guess he does feel sort of in this poem very similar to the Gwendolyn Brooks Boy Breaking Glass that we were talking about earlier. And since he is in this position of isolation and his paper is his cry and he's describing the situation, and the oppressors around him. And seen the transformation in his cellmates. And I think the line "I weep over my acts yet believe" is a really nice hopeful line saying he is just going to keep setting pen to paper regardless of the injustice that has been done to himself repeatedly. Great, thank you, Dave? >> I keep seizing on a couple lines. But what of the answers I must find questions for really sticks out to me because it's as if the answers, he knows they're almost universal truths and the questions are the contrived societal aspects and that to me echoes >> 22 caught in imaginary webs of conscious where the imaginary webs of conscious are laws. These laws that you break this law then it's being unethical. But they're just laws they're made up. And in a lot of cases they don't really have anything to do with ethics. >> Especially the vagrancy laws. Basically allowed the police to clear out anybody who looked like they didn't belong or was disturbing the tourist flow of San Francisco. Including the tourist flow that came to see Beatniks. This is really upsetting. I mean, I find this very upsetting. Here we are midway through the second decade of the 21st century as we meet, and police in cities, there really isn't that much of a difference to the vagrancy laws. This seems like a long time ago, but there must be Kaufman-like statements out there that we need to listen to, for sure. Anna, final thought? You like this, does this fit with your conception of beats? And you've never heard of Kaufman? >> Never heard of Kaufman. I am [SOUND] I like a poem and a project that can do so much kind of subversion while still taking so much kind of delight in language. His little kind of, you said he's kind of known for his little aphorisms. This isn't one that you read, but it says people who can't cast shadows never die of freckles. That's very funny and also kind of political, isn't it? >> It is. >> Yeah, interesting. Lily, your thought? >> Yeah, I think that this is diverse from a lot of the other things we'll read this week, and that it has a pretty defined structure. But at the same time, the structure is just that it's broken into fragments really. So theoretically if you removed all the spacings and the Roman numerals and you just put this all together, I feel like it would read a little more like, maybe not exactly like Howl but maybe more like a Kerouac bowel flow type of a thing. But the different fragments really give the kind of space to think and breathe more that a lot of beat stuff doesn't really allow you to have because it's just about going and going and going. So that's an interesting element to bring to reading beat work for me. >> Great, thank you Lilly, especially for the context, appreciate it. Kamara? >> What I really like about these are how spatial they are. Is it debatable whether he wrote these in jail or not, or is it like? >> I don't think we really know. >> Okay. >> But the word is that they are jail poems, he wrote them in jail, yeah. >> Yeah, so I just keep on thinking of the space and the experience, and the place and the setting of the writing. And the process of writing this in that type of situation, in that space, in general. But one thing, in seven. What of the answers I must find questions for? The idea that the oppressed have to find the answers. The idea that the jailers are in this world full of hospitals that aren't healing, that the doctors are the ones that are hurting. I think he's really getting at this idea that people who are trying to help aren't really helping. And trying to subvert that system and bring that sort of to back to the boy breaking glass. He's trying to with the lack of tools he has he's trying to put some sunlight in there. >> A cry of art. Yeah. Well that's great. Thank you. All my final thought is really about 34, section 34. I'm a student of the literally left of the 1930s and 1950s. In the 30s it thrived, in the 50s it got marginalized, blacklisted, jailed in a couple of cases. The defective on the floor, defective is a noun, the defective person on the floor, the defective on the floor. This guy who's gone insane, who's mumbling, who's vomiting on the floor here, who's reaching for the toilet. This guy, the defective on the floor mumbling was once a man who shouted across tables, was engaged in intense discussions. And this is what happens in my world, Bob Kaufman is saying. To those who have an idealistic project, those who are optimistic about the future, they get put in jail and they're thought of as insane. This is the great beat reversal. Ginsberg was very good about it and how, because he wrote it for Carl Solomon, who was put in a psychiatric institution, as Ginsburg was, given shock treatments. So you get One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which comes as a slightly later generation. Maybe roughly the same generation, the idea that these people who are saying I am America, you made me crazy. I read Time magazine. Time magazine makes me crazy. Can you look at us, please? Can you look at this post war generation? We have all these criticisms of America and we're all so all focused on centrism, and consensus, and mainstreaming in suburbanism, and worrying about running over toads and all that stuff. When the best minds of my generation, this defective on the floor was once someone who participated loudly in the political conversations that America is supposed to be about. And now this person is thought of as insane, in fact the people who are ready to have the real conversations that the society needs are in jail. And that's why it's a jail poem, because he's going to look for the guys there and revive them. So I think of this, his project as a finding, an unforgetting, a reconstruction of all those lost voices. And really, a kind of fun celebration of them. Because he uses that beat humor.
