'Moving through Here', for and from BOB KAUFMAN. Plus, and first, San Francisco's exemplary Centennial regarding the Poet.
MAY 5, 2025
Our close friend in northern California, NANCY YVONNE, mailed us an art-piece from the jam-packed BOB KAUFMAN Centennial celebration in San Francisco, April 17, 18, and 19 2025.
Please see this hand-crafted piece of loving homage below.
About a quarter-century ago—27 years, to be exact—a friend then and now, BOB BOOKER, scheduled GLENN SPEARMAN and me for the Poet’s Stage of the 1998 North Beach Festival. Bob suggested that I write about Bob Kaufman.
I was very moved by the prospect. I knew something of Bob Kaufman’s astonishing work and I’d seen on streets of North Beach for several years of my living at 1852 Stockton. He was someone touched by the supernatural as writer and being, I felt, and a poet deserving optimal attention and celebration. He was a piercing delineator of his decades in our world and his lines were music both lyric and abstact. So I wrote a poem and Glenn and I performed it that June.
Below, too, please find Links to many great apprecations of Bob Kaufman. Will Alexander, Raymond Foye, Denise Sullivan, and Tate Swindell are linked. Video my my performing at Chuck Perkins’ Cafe Istanbul in September 2012 concludes the Links.
Moving through Here (for and from Bob Kaufman) Of wires wrought, A wisping root, Like smoke and mirrors, Bob Kaufman floated and stung. Electric cane's-head ebony, Blowing demi-semi-quavers To tilt against the Domes That heap corpses under clouds! All of high signs! All in bold face! Yoruddish! Mondo Gumbo! Bolts a-channel through his veins! TV eyes lashed by pain! He stated light. O', Bomkauf, Receiver/Speaker like Lorca, Hart Crane, Diops, … Could you be Abomunible enough, A complete witch-doctor For those whom you would touch? How to tell the Rain around you, That Rain which wells within? No path along the Avenue, No Grove for your sung rites. He trembled with pity. He was seized and shocked and stunned. He staggered unto silences. Like Monk, Bob Kaufman knew rests May speak of vastness. He stated light. Wear his eyes! Try your eyes! Fuse from sources For which we thirst! Old Sprite, Graven and translucent, Resurrected, All time to come, Bob Kaufman, For your word and music.
Poster for the Centennial, courtesy, I think, Unrequited Records.
‘Bob Kaufman, born in New Orleans in 1925 to a black Catholic mother and a Jewish father, Merchant Marine and labor-organizer, poet after Blake, Hart Crane and Lorca among the 'Beat Generation', victim of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and of shock-treatment, poet also like 'Bebop' and 'Free Jazz' and the luminosity of jellyfish and nuclear explosions, left his corporal body's passages through San Francisco's North Beach in 1986. Check out good pieces online by Raymond Foye, A. Robert Lee, Karen Pressley, and more.’
Raymond Foye and Tate Swindell appear central to this Centennial. Tate I got to meet, thanks to Nancy Yvonne, when RICHARD HOWELL and I performed in an Upper Market Gallery show, featuring CHAD ABBLEY, DATHAN EPHRAIM, JIAYUE LI, and VIVIAN NGUYEN, last February, benefiting the Rhythms of the Village store in Altadena.
Denise Sullivan chronicles poetry and activism across California.You can read her capacious piece about Bob Kaufman HERE , occasioned by City Lights publishing his Collected Poems in 2019.
Good friend Devorah Major wrote the introduction of these Collected Poems that NEELI CHERKOVSKI edited along with Tate and Raymond Foye.
Below, WILL ALEXANDER remembers and evokes Bob Kaufman at the San Francisco Public Library in 2016. Will recorded with HAMID DRAKE and I on our second night at Beyond Baroque in Venice, Los Angeles, April of 2014, and he and I reminisced about the brilliance of Will’s friend RON ALLEN … another Rebel Poet among the ‘cosmic mosaic’ that we inhabit.
And at last we reach video of “Moving through Here”, September of 2012, the year before we began 2013’s Poetry Ball series … thanks again to Chuck Perkins of Café Istanbul. Videography by LESLIE COOPER and editing by MATTHEW ROSENBECK. ‘Fuse from sources / For which we thirst!’