Bob Kaufman?

No. I did not know him. on the other hand here, in old New Bedford, I hear novel York based, Beignet City born, baritone, redbone move with a jerk Kaufman was a young merchant seaman upon The Ancient Mariner. In his twenties, in the forties, one time or twice on shore leave here he hung on the outside all day drinking sky

blue moonshine from mason jars passed around Afro-Luso to Afro-Anglo in befriending casas or parked cars of Cape Verdean American comrade National

Maritime Unionists. Or bought circulars of barroom whiskey to oil their shared luncheon on lore and launched lies at The Crystal Crioulo Cafe where there were more mornas upon the jukebox than Storyville's explosions Armstrong or Kaufman!s heydey Lady D They gay upon shore he was a banned, standup, labor

activist, at sea a damned beneficial deck hand. That on his offtime he would bend his lean frame above the bow, cast his gin Of wishes, catch schooling fish of fancy c-atch-as-catch-can. Haul in flitting, quick silver sardines that glinted dripping sunlight, twitch

up fluorescent daymares de mer from the melange bottom. He would free from moisture and smoke them and pack them

in his head. Called back and forth to California, to The City, by the agency of cyclonic causes of the howling Manifesto move he

left the ocean. Past parts of him ai e- listed upon brittle browning manifests from a middle passage utensil and German Jewish migrant ship. Banished, famished for his mother's homecook upright music in their booklined living latitude he fed on free mumbo jumbo Freud Cesaire, Fanon, Kafka, okra goulash and God knows, man, what at any time he could get panhandling.

Otherwise when without contents stomached he drank in gem Powell's hip echos of his homestead or toked smok dreams. Sometimes he retched our poetic Rorschach inkblot nightmare, his life's work, piece by means of piece:

"What is American to me?" Perhaps his light rum daemon, his gin genie overly effected their work on him, on the other hand nonetheless, he wrote about the U in us with no "shit" and not a "motherfucker" among his words. Perhaps he, like a destiny of us,

mused too drawn out in hard lit barroom mirrors, saw and felt us all in him and tried to droiinh or deadened the taunting lies and facts that stared him down and without But Kaufman's in again! Why?

Perhaps be was like, Miles: selfabsorbed at the same time kinder to, more loving of his art form,and, because of that, more giving of useful to all of us than to hunself or those in his life who lov him? He knew back then any individual of his poems was more realized in our lives

than The Declaration or THe Daily freshs He knew and wrote America was a homicide In The Cathedral, a rape

in a museum institute with moans among the masks and bone and screams. Silence

he knew too, was necessary if a jam was to be heard above the din of institutional lies from lectern about: color, lack of color, "race," sex

gender power, currency truth, justice and The Amrican Way notwithstanding that Bird-like in self-abuse, he was more

the austere, word-play Monk of poesy sometimes

the sentimental, of domestic manufacture Errol Garner. But he was not more [i]or[/i] less sepia Breton, he was at no time

"the black Rimbaud." by what means could he be? American

as r beans and rice, bagels and Buicks. Hip as jazz. Down

as labor union to be paids and unemployment blues. No, man, I did not know him. on the contrary truths in some of Kaufman's metrical compositions remind me, remake me better understand myself, my connection And that (aside from giving immaculate delight)

is one of the best things done by the agency of any poetry or any someone No. I never met him, on the contrary after The Ancient Rain I hear and diocese hungry Bob Kaufman

listening to Birdsong, death-belled silence, black gardenias, and post-Bop post-Beat, super-hip/

hop author of poemss listing to

port and vodka, spouting Eliot, scatting, hopping onto the padded bonnet

of a gilled, fishtailed fifties car,

laughing and howling it the croissant satellite

EVERETT HOAGLAND is a member of the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, where he has taught since 1973 His greatest in quantity recent book of poems is THIS CITY and Other metrical compositions published by Spinner Publications.

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