Bob Kaufman and the (In)visible Double

Someone whom I am is no one.
Something I have done is nothing.
Someplace I have been is nowhere.
I am not me.

--Bob Kaufman, "Jail Poems"

"Jail Poems," from Bob Kaufman's first book, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, ends with the postscript, "Written in San Francisco City Prison Cell 3, 1959" (61), and while the poems emote the horrible alienation of imprisonment--"I sit here writing not daring to stop, / for fear of seeing what's outside my head" (60)--the tone of these poems expresses cultural isolation, as well. Moreover, Barbara Christian, in perhaps the earliest critical assessment of Kaufman's work, indicates that the loneliness present in Kaufman's poems is "not just the loneliness that might come from solitude, but an even more devastating psychic loneliness that can come only from knowing so few people who share his perceptions" (111). Thus, not only cultural isolation, which Christian describes as "the lack of any expansive Black cultural context" (111), but also artistic alienation haunt much of Kaufman's work. Regarding "Jail Poems," Christian writes that they "protest both America's injustice and succinctly, painfully reveal his own psychic prison" (111).

The doubling, often paradoxical, of theme, tone, and imagery in Kaufman's poems reflects, in part, what Maria Damon describes as the ambiguous distinction between mythologizing and obscuring in regards to Kaufman the poet, specifically as it applies to the anonymity imposed upon him socially and his own desire for anonymity (36-38). In making a vow of silence, for instance, Kaufman "turns the tables on authority by choosing, as an iconic poet-shaman, the silence of religious withdrawal and political disillusionment rather than submitting to the silence socially enforced on him as a Black person" (42). However, the "self-mythologizing and powerful aspects of Kaufman's silence are counterweighted by his actual critical neglect" (42).

The doubling I hope to elucidate regarding Bob Kaufman, therefore, involves both his poetics and the dynamics of identity revealed in his work. Through the polysemic trope of visibility/invisibility this essay engages semantic nuances and metaphysical complexities as well as issues of cultural marginality and the devastating state of social and artistic alienation found in Kaufman's extremely rich poetics. Because Kaufman's poetics resist a monolithic interpretive approach, the plurality of meanings surrounding visibility/invisibility circle around the periphery of each singular focus on the (in)visible doubling at work in his poetry.

For example, the line from "Jail Poems," "Someone whom I am is no one" (58), signifies on one literal level the anonymity of being a prisoner. As evidenced by the anonymous postscript to "Jail Poems"--"Written in San Francisco City Prison Cell 3, 1959" (61)--the prisoner's identity becomes defined by little more than an intersection of place and time, all other places and times eclipsed along with autonomy. Thus, "Someplace I have been is nowhere" (58). The line "Someone whom I am is no one," however, makes the poet narrator visible through and despite his invisibility, his loss of autonomy, while simultaneously abnegating his subject/object identity. That is, "Someone" and "I," each being both subject and object in relation to one another, being semantically equivalent, collapse into "no one" which paradoxically implies a plurality (all the "other" no ones in prison) as well as a negation, or, to revert to Hegelese, if the dialectic (Someone and I) does not synthesize into Spirit, into We, then it stalls in the negation of each dialectic term.

Similarly, the line "I am not me" doubly refutes subjectivity and objectivity, and elicits this paradox of plurality and negation. Considering the biographical note on the back cover of Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, that in France Kaufman is known as "the American Rimbaud," "I am not me" can be retroactively seen as the antecedent of Rimbaud's line, "Je est un autre" (6). In his letter to Georges Izambard, May 13, 1871, in which this line appears, Rimbaud spurns "subjective poetry" and calls for "objective...