In addition to three broadsides published by
City Lights Books: Second April (1959), Abominist
Manifesto (1959), and Does the Secret Mind Whis-
per (1960), Kaufman published three collections of
poems: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965),
The Golden Sardine (1967), and The Ancient Rain
(1981). In addition, his work has appeared in sev-
eral journals, including Swank, Nugget, and Jazz
Hot. Published also in French, Solitude brought
Kaufman immediate international attention, mak-
ing him better known in France than in America,
even among black poets.
Stylistically and thematically, Kaufman’s poetry
is often imprinted with the sound and beat of Af-
rican-American music, specifically BLUES and jazz,
the heartbeat of his New Orleans birthplace, as one
finds, for example, in “Walking Parker Home,” in
which a roll call of jazz masters is improvisingly
sounded:
Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind
Kansas Black Morning/First Horn Eyes/
Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings
Lurking Hawkins/shadow of Lester/
realization.His speaker in “Blues Notes,” dedicated to Ray
Charles on his birthday, is equally celebratory: “He
bursts from Bessie’s crushed black skull / One cold
night outside of Nashville, shouting, / And grows
bluer from memory, glowing bluer, still.”
Kaufman’s surrealistic prose poems and free
verse are not only the centerpieces of his oeuvre but
also, more important, tropes of his life. Like many
of the musicians he invokes, Kaufman, a nominee
for England’s coveted Guinness Poetry Award and
the recipient of a grant from the National Endow-
ment for the Arts, also descended into a devastating
world of drugs and alcohol, engulfed by a darkness
of self-imposed silence and insanity. He describes
his internal turmoil in his autobiographical poem,
“I Wish” with biting irony and humor:
I wish that whoever it is inside of me,
Would stop all that moving around.
& go to sleep, another sleepless yearlike the last one will drive me sane. (Golden
Sardines 66)Kaufman died in his sleep in January 1986. His
life fulfilled his proclaimed commitment to his
first love: “This is the end, / Which art, that proves
my glory has brought me / I would die for Poetry”
(Golden Sardines 24).BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clay, Mel. Jazz, Jail and God: Bob Kaufman, an Im-
pressionistic Biography. San Francisco: Androgyny
Books, 1987.
Hayden, Robert, ed. Kaleidoscope: Poems by American
Negro Poets. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1967.
Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black
Poetry. Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic Ref-
erences. New York: William Morrow & Company,
1973.
James CelestinoKelley, William Melvin (1937– )
William Melvin Kelley, who was born in the
Bronx to William Kelley, an editor, and Narcissa
Agatha Kelley, grew up the only black child in his
Italian neighborhood. He was president of the
student council of Fieldston School, a private,
mostly white high school. He attended Harvard
University, where he studied creative writing with
Archibald MacLeish. Kelley delighted readers
with five books before 1970: the novel A DIFFER-
ENT DRUMMER (1962); his collection of short sto-
ries, Dancers on the Shore (1964); and the novels
A Drop of Patience (1965), dem (1967), and Dun-
sfords Travels Everywheres (1970). His short story
“Carlyle Tries Polygamy” was published in the
August 4, 1997, issue of The New Yorker. Though
Kelley’s stories from Dancers on the Shore were
frequently anthologized through the early 1970s,
and though A Different Drummer was the subject
of more than two dozen critical articles and book
chapters, Kelley stopped either writing or publish-
ing in 1970.296 Kelley, William Melvin