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Robert Garnell Kaufman (April 18, 1925 – January 12, 1986) was an American Beat poet and surrealist as well as a jazz performance artist and satirist. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the Black American Arthur Rimbaud.
In 1959, along with poets Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly, A. D. Winans, and William Margolis, he was one of the founders of Beatitude poetry magazine, where he also worked as an editor.
Kaufman moved to San Francisco's North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life.
Kaufman frequently expressed his desire to be forgotten as both a writer and a person. Kaufman, a poet in the oral tradition, usually didn't write down his poems, and much of his published work survives by way of his wife Eileen, who wrote his poems down as he conceived them.Knight, Brenda (2000) "Eileen Kaufman: Keeper of the Flame," in Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. New York: Conari, pp. 103–114. City Lights published several books of Kaufman's poems during his lifetime, however, including Abomunist Manifesto, Second April in 1959, and Does the Secret Mind Whisper in 1960. In 1981 Kaufman published The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956 to 1978 with New Directions Publishing. He apparently did write his poems down on empty sacks and odd sheets of paper.Cherkovski, Neeli, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, p. xxxii)
Although he was baptized at age 35 while in the Merchant Marines (Cherkovski, xxxiii), like many beat writers, Kaufman became a Buddhist.
According to the writer Raymond Foye,See Raymond Foye's introduction to Kaufman's The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–78 (New York: New Directions, 1981). Kaufman is the person who coined the term "beatnik", and his life was filled with a great deal of suffering. In San Francisco, he was the target of beatings and harassment by the city police, and his years living in New York were filled with poverty, addiction, and imprisonment. Kaufman often incurred the wrath of the local police simply for reciting his poetry aloud in public, and it is said that in 1959 alone, at the height of the "beatnik" fad, he was arrested by the San Francisco police on disorderly charges 39 times.
In 1959, Kaufman had a small role in a movie called The Flower Thief, which was shot in North Beach by Ron Rice. In 1960 he was invited to read at Harvard and moved to New York City, giving readings at The Gaslight Café, The Paperback Book Gallery and The Living Theater. He was arrested in November of that year and taken to Bellevue Hospital. On his release, Kaufman lived in the same building as Allen Ginsberg, where he met Timothy Leary in January 1961, and took psilocybin along with Jack Kerouac, apparently for the first time.Cherkovski, Neeli, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, p. xxxii)
In 1961, Kaufman was nominated for England's Guinness Poetry Award, but lost to T. S. Eliot.Winans, A. D. (May/June 2000) "Bob Kaufman", The American Poetry Review. In 1962 he was in court for an alleged assault at the nightclub Fat Black Pussycat and imprisoned on Riker's Island. While he was on Riker's, Eileen and Parker, Kaufman's infant son, returned to San Francisco.Cherkovski, Neeli, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, p. xxxii) In 1963 when he was to depart New York, he was summarily arrested for walking on the grass of Washington Square Park and incarcerated on Rikers Island, then sent as a "behavioral problem" to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital where he underwent electro-shock treatments, which greatly affected his already bleak outlook on society. He took a vow of silence after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which lasted 10 years. He was believed to return to this silence in the early 1980s, although he was filmed reading his poem The Poet at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981. In September of that year, he was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982 he gave a benefit poetry reading for Beatitude magazine at the Savoy Tivoli. In 1984 he appeared in a documentary West Coast: Beat and Beyond and in 1985 he gave a benefit poetry reading in North Beach, again for Beatitude.
He died in 1986 of cirrhosis and emphysema.Cherkovski, Neeli, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, p. xxxii) Angels of Ascent: a Norton anthology of contemporary African American poetry (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013).
From "Battle Report"
Poet Jack Micheline said about Kaufman, "I found his work to be essentially , and was at its best when accompanied by a jazz musician. His technique resembled that of the surreal school of poets, ranging from a powerful, visionary lyricism of satirical, near dadaistic leanings, to the more prophetic tone that can be found in his political poems."Winans, A.D. (May/June 2000) "Bob Kaufman." The American Poetry Review.
Kaufman said of his own work, "My head is a bony guitar, strung with tongues, plucked by fingers & nails."Kaufman, Bob (1996) Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems by Bob Kaufman. Coffee House Press.
After learning of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Kaufman took a Buddhist vow of silence that lasted until the end of the Vietnam War in 1973. He broke his silence by reciting his poem "All Those Ships that Never Sailed," the first lines of which are:
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