Bob Kaufman

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2000 by Winans, A D

To be fair to the San Francisco Police, they were generally permissive in their attitude toward the Beats, at least up until the time tourists and college student thrill seekers began moving into the neighborhood. The truth is that Kaufman often encouraged the wrath of the police, goading them on to a predictable confrontation. He considered the Bagel Shop his private domain, and reigned over it like a king. He would commonly enter the Bagel Shop, climb on top of one of the tables, and begin reciting a new poem he had written. Indeed, some people hung out at the Bagel Shop in the hope of seeing him come in and read his work. On the occasions Kaufman read his work, there was absolute silence, as the people hung on his every word.

His fate was pretty much sealed the day he wrote on the walls of the Bagel Shop, "Adolf Hitler, growing tired of fooling around with Eve Braun, and burning Jews, moved to San Francisco and became a cop." But the North Beach community would always be there to bail him out of jail.

Kaufman's third book of poems The Ancient Rain was published by New Directions in 1981. The book consisted of previously uncollected poems and newer work composed from 1973 to 1978.

From 1980 up to the time of his death, Kaufman would occasionally read his poems at local literary events, but by then he had been reduced to a ghost of his former self, walking the streets of North Beach twitching, blinking, and mostly unspeaking, the victim of an ailing liver, and a brain diminished by drugs and forced shock treatments undergone at Bellevue Hospital.

The last five years of his life saw Kaufman banned from every bar in North Beach, except the old Hawaiian Bar, located directly across the street from where the old Co-Existence Bagel Shop had been. It was only here and in Chinatown bars that Kaufman could go to enjoy a drink and a cigarette. But the Kaufman of the eighties was a tired Kauf man. As early as 1965, Kaufman had written,

My body is a torn mattress

disheveled throbbing place

for the comings and goings

of loveless transients

before completely objective mirrors

I have shot myself with my eyes

but death refused my advances.

Kaufman once said, "Why turn a perfectly good frog into a princess," and privately confided to friends "Death is hunting me down." On Sunday, January 12, 1986, the hunt ended: a victim at sixty years of emphysema and a failing liver.

On Friday, January 17, 1986, 250 poets and friends came to pay their respects to the most prominent black Beat poet of our time. The predominantly white background faced a black priest and jazz group at Sacred Heart Church in San Francisco, not far from the Fillmore District. Ferlinghetti read a letter from Allen Ginsberg, who was in New York and unable to attend the memorial. Michael McClure read a poem of Kaufman's, even as simultaneous ceremonies were being held in France, New York, Belgium, and Germany, designed to coincide with the San Francisco memorial services.

I remember thinking it odd seeing Kaufman eulogized in a church, since he had been a self proclaimed atheist, and the lines from one of his poems came to my mind: "God, you're just an empty refrigerator/ with a dead child inside, incognito/ in the debris of the modern junkpile."