Body and Soul: Bob Kaufman's Golden Sardine

African American Review, Summer, 2000 by T. J. Anderson, III

The collection opens with the poem "Caryl Chessman Interviews the PTA (from his swank gas chamber)," a long piece which Maria Damon describes as a work that "joins social protest and physical fracturing through linguistic play" (41). The poem is a surrealistic prose narrative divided into several sections. Kaufman's subject is Caryl Chessman, a victim of the death penalty who, despite evidence of his innocence and pleas for clemency from Denmark, Brazil, Uruguay, Great Britain, the Vatican, and elsewhere, was executed by the State of California. [5] Throughout the poem, Kaufman creates analogies to Jesus's crucifixion and other human tragedies, as he describes the injustice of the American judicial system:

Here, Chessman, is the message to all garcias everywhere, longitude people, beyond the margin, I am glad now, sad now, home, in TIME FOR THE MURDER, guilty California is quiet (33)

Although the book achieved literary notoriety, particularly in France, where Kaufman was celebrated as the "Black Rimbaud," it appears that he had little interest in its success.

Golden Sardine is important in the study of jazz poetry because it marks the first time an African American poet of the generation following Langston Hughes would use bebop and scat improvisation to lend authenticity to his work. The collection is also important because it is the work of an artist who is unafraid to take risks. The inclusion of poetic "failures" as well as "successes" certainly marks a heroic moment in literature. The result is a miraculous unevenness of work that belies the Western critical desire constantly to create masterworks that often end up being closed and inflexible. Surely, Kaufman heard the surrealist Antonin Artaud's call from France advocating "no more masterpieces." And, in doing so, he frees up the page, allowing for the possibility of improvisation and demonstrating that good art can become simultaneously possible and impossible.

Golden Sardine shows Kaufman's wide-ranging interests. Several of the poems collected there make use of jazz-inspired rhythms but do not feature jazz as their subject matter. These include "Tidal Friction," "Why Write ABOUT," and "WAITING." On the following pages, I examine eight poems that relate more directly to jazz in order to explore how Kaufman used music to ascribe a particular vision of life.

One of the first poems in the book to deal directly with jazz is "Heather Bell Chorus." Kaufman indicates the musicality of the poem by defining it as a "Chorus." There is a duality of meaning that occurs in Kaufman's use of this descriptive word, which not only recalls the repeated set of musical phrases in a composition but it also evokes the idea of community. When we examine Western notions of choral music, we often envision several human voices singing in a style which makes it difficult to decipher individual voices, since the sound we hear is often collective. In African American culture, particularly in the tradition of the black church, the choral tradition exists as well. But, after listening to a choir perform, one observes that distinct voices can be heard among the collective, with various members singing in slightly differing cadences, timbres, or keys. Performing music in this fashion appears to imply that, although the communal voice is crucial in order to convey the general quality and spiri t of the music, it is also informed by the collection of individual voices in which every member has a "story to tell or a song to sing." This practice also occurs in jazz music. Additionally, it appears that Kaufman is signifying on the Greek chorus, i.e., the collective voice that would provide commentary to ancient texts like Medea or Antigone: