Bob Kaufman

Robert Garnell Kaufman was born on the eighteenth of April, 1925, in New Orleans, Louisiana, one of thirteen children. His heritage braided two worlds: a father of German-Jewish descent and a Black Catholic mother rooted in New Orleans, whose own family carried the city's deep Afro-Creole and spiritual traditions. From this confluence of Jewish, Catholic, and Afro-diasporic inheritance, Kaufman drew a voice that would become one of the most original in American letters.

As a young man he went to sea with the Merchant Marine, sailing the world many times over and surviving shipwreck and hardship. Coming ashore, he moved through New York and settled in San Francisco in the late 1950s, where he became a central figure of the Beat literary movement. In 1959, alongside Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly, and William Margolis, he helped found the poetry magazine Beatitude, a proving ground for a generation of new writers.

Kaufman was a poet of the oral tradition, composing his surreal, jazz-inflected verse aloud in the cafes and streets, much of it preserved only because his wife Eileen wrote it down. Steeped in the rhythms of bebop, his work earned him renown in France as "the American Rimbaud." After the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, he took a Buddhist-inspired vow of silence that he kept until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

He died in San Francisco on the twelfth of January, 1986. Long unsung in his own country, Bob Kaufman gave the Beat era its most improvisational and spiritually daring voice — a poet who lived his art aloud, and whose silence spoke as loudly as his song. May his words, carried by those who loved him, endure.