"I want to be anonymous…My ambition is to be completely forgotten."
Bob Kaufman was born in
New Orleans in
1925, one of twelve children of a half black, half-Jewish
Pullman car porter and a black schoolteacher from
Martinique. He served in the
merchant marines for twenty years and became involved in
union organizing,
political activism, and the
jazz scene on both coasts. He finally settled in
San Francisco, married a
Irish woman named
Eileen Singe, and had a son, Parker, named after jazz musician
Charlie Parker.
Kaufman quickly became an integral part of the San Francisco
counterculture, operating mostly around the
Co-Existence Bagel Shop in
North Beach. His outrageous antics, including jumping on tables and cars to shout poetry, made him a target (as did his
interracial marriage) for police beatings, harassment, and arrest. In
1959 alone, he was arrested almost forty times, including once for urinating on an especially offensive policeman.
This was the guy
Herb Caen was thinking about when he coined the term "
beatnik".
Kaufman (a devout
Buddhist) was so stunned by the
assassination of
President Kennedy that he took a
vow of silence and kept it for
ten years. He surprised everyone by, on the day the
Vietnam War ended, suddenly jumping up at an exhibition and reciting first the speech of
Thomas à Becket from
T.S. Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral and then his own poem,
"All those ships that never sailed".
He remains the most underrated of the
Beat poets, far more appreciated in
France, where they call him "the
American Rimbaud", than he is in the
United States. He did not promote himself, and in fact did everything he could to remain unknown. He wrote down relatively few of his poems, preferring oral performance to the written word. Many of the ones we do have were transcribed by his wife or from tape recordings of
poetry readings. This is a terrible shame, because his poetry is a potent mix of
surrealism, jazz rhythm,
improvisation, and
spontaneity, and his
African American and
Creole roots.
He died in
1986 of
emphysema. In
New Orleans, a
marching band paraded down
Grant Avenue to the
Marina Green, where three boats waited. His ashes were scattered in the bay and a huge
rainbow appeared in the sky.
"He knew how to rumble. He knew how to live it. He lived it quick. He lived it fast. He was a real poet. How many real poets can you meet in your life? He was close to what was happening and he was out of it. He was into some magic of his own. He had magic. The man was a magician. He had beautiful magic." – Jack Micheline