Bob Kaufman’s Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness: The Lost Beat

The Beat Century — post 36 of 100. Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965).

Bob Kaufman improvised his poems aloud and rarely wrote them down; his wife transcribed them onto napkins. The result is the strangest and least-read major book the Beat movement produced.

New Directions published Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness in 1965, assembling ten years of Bob Kaufman’s work. It contains odes to Charles Mingus, Hart Crane, Ray Charles and Albert Camus, love lyrics, political rants, a sequence of prison poems, the prose meditation “Second April,” and the Abomunist Manifesto. In San Francisco he was celebrated as the original Beat. In France they called him the American Rimbaud.

In the United States he is the Beat writer most people have not read, and the neglect is not an accident of taste. It follows directly from how the poems were made, from who was making them, and from a decade in which the poet deliberately said nothing at all. Every obstacle to his reputation is legible in the circumstances of the work itself.

A Book That Nearly Did Not Exist

Kaufman was an oral poet in the strict sense. He composed aloud, in performance, in bars and on North Beach streets, improvising in the manner of the musicians he took as models — and he frequently did not write the results down. He wrote them down at all only at his wife’s urging. Much of his surviving published work exists because Eileen Kaufman transcribed his poems as he conceived them, collecting them from napkins, matchbooks and paper sacks while raising their son Parker largely alone.

It was Eileen who assembled the transcriptions into the manuscript that New Directions published as Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. The book is therefore a rescue operation, and its existence rests on a piece of domestic labour that literary history has not been especially interested in. Kaufman himself repeatedly expressed a wish to be forgotten, as a writer and as a person, which makes the volume something close to an act of loving disobedience.

The Method Is Bebop

The comparison to jazz is not decorative. If Kaufman is taken seriously as an oral poet, the proper analogy is to musicians understood as creators and improvisers in the moment of performance rather than as composers working on paper. He was called the King of Bebop, and Raymond Foye’s judgement — that he was “the quintessential jazz poet” — describes a structural fact about the writing, not a mood.

What this produces on the page is a poetry of surreal, high-speed image chains, street talk collided with prophecy, syntax that moves by association rather than argument. The verse is spontaneous and prophetic, mixing vernacular and jazz with vision. Read silently it can seem to skid. Read as a score for a voice, it resolves — which is the essential problem of his reputation, since the American canon is assembled by silent readers.

Abomunism

The Abomunist Manifesto, first issued as a City Lights broadside in 1958, is Kaufman’s best-known performance: a deadpan parody of manifesto logic in which every declaration cancels itself. It opens “ABOMUNISTS JOIN NOTHING BUT THEIR HANDS OR LEGS, OR OTHER SAME,” proceeds through positions like practising anti-poetry for poetic reasons and believing only what they dream only after it comes true, and lands on “ABOMUNISTS REJECT EVERYTHING EXCEPT SNOWMEN.”

The joke has teeth. The 1950s produced manifestos in volume, and Kaufman — a Black man in a movement being packaged for a white readership — wrote the one that refuses to be a platform. He is also credited with coining the word beatnik, which is a further irony given how thoroughly the label he supplied was used to sell a version of the scene he stood outside of.

Silence

Robert Garnell Kaufman was born in New Orleans in 1925 to a German Orthodox Jewish father and a Martinique-born Catholic mother, spent roughly twenty years in the merchant marine — surviving three shipwrecks — studied at the New School in New York, and co-founded Beatitude magazine in San Francisco in 1959 with Allen Ginsberg and the publisher John Kelly. He was arrested by San Francisco police thirty-nine times. The harassment was constant and the record of it is plain. He was, by most accounts, harassed rather than prosecuted — picked up for existing conspicuously in North Beach while Black.

Beatitude is worth pausing on, because it is the physical evidence of what North Beach publishing actually was. It ran to thirty-five issues from 1959, produced on mimeographed sheets at the Bread and Wine Mission on Grant Avenue: illustrated construction-paper front cover, no back cover, stapled, twenty or thirty cents. Kaufman edited it from the October 1959 issue through at least 1960, printing Kerouac, Corso, Bukowski, O’Hara and William Carlos Williams. He was, for a period, one of the people deciding what the scene published — a fact usually omitted from accounts that treat him as the movement’s picturesque casualty.

After John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 he took a Buddhist vow of silence and kept it for roughly a decade, breaking it in the 1970s and eventually reciting in public again in the 1980s. He died in 1986 of cirrhosis and emphysema. Ten years of a poet’s speech withheld on principle is not a footnote to the work — for a writer who composed by speaking, silence was the most complete statement available, and he made it at exactly the moment the country’s official optimism collapsed.

Famous Elsewhere

The reception split along national lines almost immediately. Solitudes generated little interest in American literary circles on publication and made Kaufman a celebrity abroad — the American Rimbaud comparison is a European verdict, not a domestic one. The asymmetry is diagnostic. Read in translation, stripped of the North Beach folklore and the arrest record, the poems were assessed as poems and found to be doing something French readers already had a vocabulary for: surrealist image-logic driven at speed by a public voice. At home the biography kept getting in the way of the book.

Two further volumes followed and neither displaced the first. Golden Sardine came from City Lights in 1967, in the middle of the silence; The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978 from New Directions in 1981, after he had resumed speaking. Jack Micheline’s assessment of the work — that it was essentially improvisational and at its best when accompanied by a jazz musician — is a precise description of a body of writing whose ideal performance conditions a printed book cannot reproduce. The later poems grow more alienated and more openly mystical, but the transcription problem never changes: what reaches the page is a record of an event, not the event.

Why He Is Not Read

The reasons compound. He wrote little down. He was Black in a movement marketed as white bohemia. He was arrested constantly, jailed, addicted, and stopped speaking for ten years at the exact point when his contemporaries were consolidating their careers. He wanted to be forgotten and took practical steps toward it. His work reached the page only through his wife’s transcription and his publishers’ persistence.

What survives is enough to place him among the most inventive poets of the period. The 2019 Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, edited by Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye and Tate Swindell for City Lights, has made the case in full. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness remains the place to begin, and its title is as accurate a description of a life as any poet has managed in four words. He remains a test case for what the American canon can absorb: a poet whose primary medium was air, whose archive is a stack of napkins, and whose most eloquent decade produced no text at all.

ABOMUNISTS REJECT EVERYTHING EXCEPT SNOWMEN.

Bob Kaufman, “Abomunist Manifesto,” collected in Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New Directions, 1965)

Where to go next

Follow it with the 2019 Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman from City Lights, which finally gathers what the transcriptions preserved.

Previous: Josephine Miles, Collected Poems. Next: Madeline Gleason, Collected Poems. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.

Sources

• Bob Kaufman — Wikipedia
• Abomunist Manifesto — Academy of American Poets
• Bob Kaufman — EBSCO Research Starters
• Eileen Kaufman — Wikipedia
• Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness — New Directions Publishing

CD Damitio

CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA