20 Facts About Bob Kaufman

Robert Garnell Kaufman was an American Beat poet and surrealist as well as a jazz performance artist and satirist.

Bob Kaufman's paternal grandfather was a German Jew, and his mother was from an established Black Roman Catholic New Orleans family.

At the age of 18, Bob Kaufman joined the United States Merchant Marine, his final voyage was in 1949.

Bob Kaufman studied at New York City's The New School for Social Research.

Bob Kaufman knew the photographer Robert Frank in New York in the late 1940s.

Bob Kaufman identified with the works of jazz musicians and improvisational artists such as Charlie Parker, whom he named his son after.

Bob Kaufman moved to San Francisco's North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life.

Bob Kaufman frequently expressed his desire to be forgotten as both a writer and a person.

In 1981 Bob Kaufman published The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956 to 1978 with New Directions Publishing.

Bob Kaufman apparently did write his poems down on empty sacks and odd sheets of paper.

Bob Kaufman often incurred the wrath of the local police simply for reciting his poetry aloud in public, and it is said that in 1959 alone, at the height of the "beatnik" fad, he was arrested by the San Francisco police on disorderly charges 39 times.

In 1959, Bob Kaufman had a small role in a movie called The Flower Thief, which was shot in North Beach by Ron Rice.

On his release, Bob Kaufman lived in the same building as Allen Ginsberg, where he met Timothy Leary in January 1961, and took psilocybin along with Jack Kerouac, apparently for the first time.

In 1961, Kaufman was nominated for England's Guinness Poetry Award, but lost to T S Eliot.

Bob Kaufman took a vow of silence after the assassination of John F Kennedy, which lasted 10 years.

Bob Kaufman was believed to return to this silence in the early 1980s, although he was filmed reading his poem The Poet at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981.

Bob Kaufman's poetry made use of jazz syncopation and meter.

Bob Kaufman's technique resembled that of the surreal school of poets, ranging from a powerful, visionary lyricism of satirical, near dadaistic leanings, to the more prophetic tone that can be found in his political poems.

Bob Kaufman broke his silence by reciting his poem "All Those Ships that Never Sailed," the first lines of which are:.

Bob Kaufman married Eileen Singe in 1958; they had one child, Parker.