Callaloo

Maria Damon
Introduction
Callaloo - Volume 25, Number 1, Winter 2002, pp. 105-111

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Maria Damon - Introduction to "Bob Kaufman: A Special Section" - Callaloo 25:1 Callaloo 25.1 (2002) 105-111 Introduction Maria Damon Way out people know the way out. --Bob Kaufman, "Abomunist Manifesto" Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) was a street poet, a people's poet, a poet's poet, a jazz poet, a surrealist poet, a modernist poet, a post-modernist poet, an African-American poet, a Black poet, a Negro poet, a New Orleans poet, a San Francisco poet, a poète maudit, a lyric poet, a Beat poet. Although he has come to be overshadowed by his white, formally-educated contemporaries Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, Kaufman was one of the founding architects and living examples of the sensibility of the Beat Generation, a counter-cultural phenomenon of the Cold War which attempted to embody dissent from the tyranny of consensus in its artistic and everyday practice; New York and San Francisco were its primary sites. At the height of the movement (1955-1960), he was a vibrant poetic force on the San Francisco street scene; his broadside, The Abomunist Manifesto, rivaled Ginsberg's Howl in its status as signature Beat text, and the term "beatnik" was coined by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen to describe Kaufman. In 1959 Kaufman co-founded the significant Beat mimeo-journal Beatitude, which has continued to appear sporadically into the present day. However, he also suffered from the racism -- sometimes romantic Negrophilia and sometimes...