Bob Kaufman, _Collected Poems_

 I OFTEN PLAY pool with one of the nation’s best poets—sounds like bragging, and I guess it is—but I mention it by way of explanation of how I came to pick this volume up. My pool partner once mentioned that he thought Bob Kaufman was the best poet of  “that whole scene,” which I took to mean the writers loosely classified as the Beats—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, et alia. I thought, but did not say aloud, “really?” What I actually said was probably something like “hmm,” since I had read only a few anthology poems and did not remember them well enough to confirm or contest any opinion of Kaufman’s oeuvre. I decided that I needed to look into this and ordered this volume, published by City Lights (how Beat is that?), from Open Books in Seattle.

First bit of new information, when the book arrived, was that Bob Kaufman was Black; I had lazily assumed, given his name, that he was Jewish. Judging from the foreword and biographical chronology at the beginning of the volume (which, following my usual practice, I read last), he had an almost painfully archetypal poète maudit kind of career: nomadic, with lots of couch surfing, sporadic, with many and brief stints of gainful employment, occasional stays in jails and institutions, drugs, a ten-year silence, Buddhism…he checked every box.

And the poetry, which is all that matters at this point, really is worthwhile. It has a lot of what I think of as classic Beat moves: strings of participial phrases, Whitman-like catalogs with surreal twists, a kind of bop rhythm. I wouldn’t say his best poems are better than Ginsberg’s best poems, but he has a lot fewer forgettable ones than Ginsberg does. And in three longer and later poems—“The American Sun,” “The Poet,” and “The Ancient  Rain”—he sounds more Blakean than Ginsberg ever did, tapped in more deeply to the visionary vein denouncing empire. “The American Sun” is actually terrifying, as it seems perhaps even more true about America’s global presumptions than it was at the time of its composition in the 1970s.

And then what seem to be his last poems, the ones at the end of the “Uncollected Works” section, which seem to be the fruit of his study of Buddhism—“A Closer Look,” “A Familiar Tune,” “The Struggle of Muscle,” “Falling Forward,” “Mining,” and “Human Being”—I expect I will be returning to these. This is how “Human Being” ends:

Thoughts
will come
and go
if we allow.
Just let them
go about
the business
of illusion
on their own.

If you think

them real,
at where

they came from.

gently look

at where

they came from.

No one’s home.

See?

Now you are free

to be.