“AN UNIMAGINARY LANDSCAPE THAT EXISTS IN A REAL UNREAL WORLD”
Bob Kaufman was, it’s often said, a poet of the streets, a poet whose life and work manifested a deep knowledge of its nooks and crannies, its hustles, its dogged, imaginative techniques of survival, and its flashes of surreal poetic clarity. The street is a place of protest, but also of homelessness, of addiction, of those cast outside without access to shelter, property, labor, the legitimized forms of social life. In moments of social unrest, the street comes alive, as autonomous zones are established and the police—that permanent army of occupation—are pushed back. But the street is also where the crowd splinters into many voices, heard and unheard. Like so much of the life of the street, Kaufman’s work has fallen through the cracks. In his lifetime, Kaufman published just three full-length books: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965), Golden Sardine (1967), and The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 (1981). Kaufman lived a peripatetic existence predominantly around San Francisco’s North Beach bohemia, with a spell in New York’s Lower East Side. He died at the early age of sixty in 1986.
