Orphan of the Camus Storm

More than 20 years before his death, Beat poet Bob Kaufman (1925 - 1986) took a vow of silence that he honored for all but a handful of his remaining years. Unfortunately, this silence has seemingly made it easy to dismiss Kaufman in favor of self-promoting Beats such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. A growing number of scholars, however, are taking the time to reexamine the poetry of Bob Kaufman. As they do, they propose various explanations for his silence, which infects both his poetry and his biography. This book offers a new theory. It argues for a historical reading. It posits that Kaufman uses silence to respond to the oppressive conformity of the mid-twentieth century. By remaining obscure, Kaufman rejects the suburban middle-class value system of the time and prohibits the reader from placing him within taxonomies based on class, race, and gender. As such, Kaufman forces the reader to start from scratch when asking questions about identity. Jazz, then, becomes the ideal tool for Kaufman because it works through spontaneity and improvisation and the defeat of embedded forms and structures.