Bob Kaufman: Beginnings

This past summer I was asked to join a panel on "Radical Materiality" for the 2012 Cultural Studies Association (CSA) conference in San Diego. The four other members of the panel, all brilliant and at this thing much longer than I, have been incredibly supportive as venture down this mysterious, possibly dead end road.

As I wrote last month, the late-poet Bob Kaufman has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Unfortunately, when it comes to Kaufman, there is a definite shortage of available secondary material on his life. This lack, in the absence of a more succinct phrasing, has become my object of inquiry (grad school talk for the thing I am going to write about). I have included my proposal for the conference below:

Radical Disappearances and Sonic Materiality: Remembering Bob Kaufman

Editor Raymond Foye recounts in his Introduction to Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-78, “Alone together, his pronouncements were extreme and final. ‘I don't know how you get involved with uninvolvement, but I don't want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.’” By the time of his arrival in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1958, Kaufman found himself known to many writers in an already established Beat scene in San Francisco’s North Beach. However, as a poet Kaufman remains mostly forgotten except to writers and a handful of academics. This paper examines Kaufman’s legacy as generative of a radical aesthetic break from his contemporaries, and a rereading of the relationship between space, voice, and poetics. Finally, it is my hope that by exploring the varied iterations and considerations of poetics in Kaufman’s work, this project will revisit Kaufman’s uninvolvement as a radical revaluation of the sonic materiality and performative socialities made possible by his poetry.

Moving forward, this uninvolvement or dearth of information about Kaufman creates a difficulty as I try to move between the poet, the poetry, and the literary movement he seems to vanish from every time he gains a place within it, I am forced to rely on interviews and ethnography. On the one hand, I am okay with it because it means I get to go hang out in San Francisco for a few weeks and bullshit. On the other hand, it means that the source or the trace of Kaufman's life and work is slowly receding back up Grant Avenue in North Beach, and giving way to tourist traps and condo conversions. In other words, my archive, the community and its members are losing footing. While City Lights, Cafe Trieste, and so many other spots remain, the temporal progression persistently alters the spatial reality of North Beach. This is a problem.

Now, I know that I have a few friends out there that deal with poetry, and a few more that deal with performance. That is to say, I would love to hear from some friends on this one. Do these things ever pop up for you in work? Or folks that do not this type of work, is there a way you specifically think about change when it comes to your home or neighborhood? This might seem like a banal question, but it is a huge impediment to me at the moment, and what good is this blog if I cannot use it to ask for help?

Some Kaufman for the road:

(The manifesto from his poetry journal)