A review by robertlashley
Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman by Bob Kaufman

5.0

And now there is only the work. There are no cops to put him in jail nor scenes to gawk at him. There are no gifted, troubled poets who he loved more than they loved co-opting his aesthetic without giving him credit. There are no pop poetry scholars uncomfortable with his look, lack of machismo, or lack of political talking points. There are only his words here, paced in the syllables in which he made so much radical, beautiful music. And the outgone neon library of images and metaphors in his mind that can make these poems seem new to read right now. And a gift for transposing the rhetoric of black music and the black church on the page unparalleled by any poet I have ever read in my life.


I don’t know if The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman can do for its author what a generation of revivals did for Tennessee Williams plays (i.e., change the conversation around him from his tortured outsider persona to his rare in a century literary talent). Reading this collection, however, makes me believe that it’s something that direly needs to happen.