Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States on April 18th, 1925 and is the Poet. At the age of 60, Bob Kaufman biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
At 60 years old, Bob Kaufman physical status not available right now. We will update Bob Kaufman's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.
Robert Garnell Kaufman (April 18, 1925 – January 12, 1986) was an American Beat poet and survivor as well as a jazz performance artist and satirist.
He was known as the "black American Rimbaud" in France, where his poetry had a large following.
Early life and education
Kaufman, who was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, was the tenth of 13 children. His paternal grandfather, a German Jew, was born in New Orleans, and his mother was from a long line of Black Roman Catholic New Orleans families. His assertions that his maternal grandmother voodoo were debunked later. Kaufman, a student at the New York University of Social Research, joined the United States Merchant Marine, which he left in the early 1940s to briefly study literature at The New School for Social Research in New York. William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were both reportedly in New York. However, Ginsberg has claimed that he did not know Kaufman before 1959 (Cherkovski, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, p. xv). In New York in the late 1940s, he knew photographer Robert Frank.
Personal life
Ida Berrocal, a Kaufman's niece, was married in 1944. They had one daughter, Antoinette Victoria Marie (Nagle), who was born in 1945 in New York City (died 2008).
In 1958, he married Eileen Singe (1922–2015); the couple had one child, Parker, named for Charlie Parker.
In San Francisco, he died at the age of 60 from emphysema and cirrhosis.
Career
During Kaufman's time in The New School and New York, he was inspired by Herman Melville's essays, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Federico Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Nicolás Guillén. He also identified with jazz musicians and improvisational performers, including Charlie Parker, whom he named his son after.
Kaufman moved to North Beach, San Francisco, in 1958, and spent the majority of his life there.
Kaufman has often expressed his desire to be forgotten as both a writer and a person. Although Kaufman, a poet in the oral tradition, didn't write down his poems, a large portion of his unpublished work survives by way of his wife Eileen, who wrote his poems down as he planned them. During his lifetime, City Lights published several books of Kaufman's poetry, including Abomunist Manifesto, Second April 1959, and Does the Secret Mind Whisper in 1960. With New Directions Publishing, Kaufman published The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956 to 1978. He reportedly wrote his poems on empty sacks and odd sheets of paper (Cherkovski, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, p. xxxi).
"I'm writing this on paper rather than sticking the pencil into the air." "Jail Poems"
Despite being baptized in the Merchant Marines at age 35 (Cherkovski, xxxiii), Kaufman, like many beat writers, became a Buddhist. Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly, A. D. Winans, and William Margolis were among the founders of Beatitude magazine in 1959, where he also served as an editor. However, he does seem to long for immortality in his poetry.
"I will die, not die" says the author.From "Dolorous Echo"
"I keep trying to die, but you won't let me," he told his wife before one of his last readings in San Francisco (L.A. Times, January 14, 1986).
Kaufman was the person who coined the term "beatnik," according to Raymond Foye, and his life was full of pain. He was the object of beatings and bullying by the city police in San Francisco, and his years in New York were fraught with hunger, heroin, and prison. Kaufman frequently paid the price for reciting his poetry aloud in public, and it's estimated that he was arrested by San Francisco police on disorderly charges 39 times during the "beatnik" fad in 1959 alone.
Kaufman appeared in The Flower Thief, a 1959 film directed in North Beach by Ron Rice. In 1960, he was invited to read at Harvard and then moved to New York City, giving readings at The Gaslight Café, The Paperback Book Gallery, and The Living Theater. In November of this year, he was arrested in November and admitted to Bellevue Hospital. On his release, Kaufman lived in Allen Ginsberg, where he first met Timothy Leary in January 1961 and took psilocybin with Jack Kerouac, possibly for the first time (Cherkovski, p. xxxii).
In 1961, Kaufman was nominated for England's Guinness Poetry Award, but he was disqualified by T. S. Eliot. He was arrested on Riker's Island in 1962 for an alleged assault at the nightclub Fat Black Pussycat and was jailed on Riker's Island. While Riker's, Eileen and Parker, Kaufman's infant son's, returned to San Francisco, he was on Riker's. (Cherkovski, xxxii) He was summarily arrested on Washington Square Park and incarcerated on Rikers Island and transferred as a "behavioral danger" to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, which had a major effect on his already bleak outlook on life in 1963. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which lasted ten years, he took a vow of silence. In the early 1980s, he was expected to return to this silence, although he was caught reading his poem "The Poet" at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981. He was given a National Endowment for the Performing Arts grant in September of this year. Beatitude at the Savoy Tivoli in 1982, he gave Beatitude poetry for Beatitude. In 1984, he appeared in "West Coast: Beat and Beyond" and in 1985, he gave a benefit poetry reading in North Beach, now for Beatitude. He died of pulmonary emphysema in 1986 (Cherkovski, p. xxxiii).
Ken Kesey recalls seeing Bob Kaufman on the streets of San Francisco's North Beach during a visit to the city with his family in the 1950s.