This volume brings together every known surviving poem by this major African-American surrealist, including the three books published in his lifetime, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, Golden Sardine, and The Ancient Rain.
Collected Poems is a landmark poetic achievement, bringing together all of Kaufman\'s known surviving poems, including an extensive section of previously unCollected work, in a long overdue return to City Lights Books.
Praise for Collected Poems of.
In 1967, Golden Sardine was published by City Lights in its famed Pocket Poets Series, and became an instant cult classic.
He was also a legendary figure of the Beat Generation, known as much for hopping on tables to declaim his poetry as for maintaining a monastic silence for months or even years at a time.
Kaufman produced just three broadsides and three books in his lifetime.
He seldom wrote his Poems down and often discarded those he did, leaving them to be rescued by others.
He is among the inaugurators of what today is characterized as the Afro-Surreal, uniting the surrealist practice of automatic writing with the jazz concept of spontaneous composition.
No one else wrote poetry like him.--Lawrence FerlinghettiBob Kaufman (1925-1986) was one of the most important--and most original--poets of the twentieth century.
No one else talked like him.
This is a necessary gift for poets and poetry readers.--BooklistHe was an original voice. ...
City Lights and the editors do a grand service to literature by publishing Kaufman\'s poetry in one collection.
Kaufman--with his commitment to the art, his surreal eye on the urban experience and beyond it, and his jazz timing--brings San Francisco to life.--San Francisco ChronicleTwentieth-century American poetry cannot be fully comprehended without Bob Kaufman. this book makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a meteor.--The New York TimesThe body of work is small but voluminous in intensity, spirit and soul, with a lineage that runs from Charles Baudelaire to Charles Mingus. ... 2020 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNERThe Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman is the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume that contains a lot of previously unCollected work.
This volume brings together every known surviving poem by this major African-American surrealist, including the three books published in his lifetime, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, Golden Sardine, and The Ancient Rain
