So that was written at the end of 2007.
At the end of 2019, I was invited
to honor the poet, Bob Kaufman, on the release of Collected
Poems of Bob Kaufman by City Lights Publishers.
And I thought the best way to honor him was with a poem.
In that poem, I adopted language that, to some extent,
is not my own.
I did this not as a plagiarist, but as an explorer seeking
language that fits the purpose of the poem.
I was born in 1955, the year that Allen Ginsberg read Howl
at Six Gallery in North Beach and in San Francisco.
And although my journey as a poet began in San Francisco,
I was not directly influenced by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
and the Beats.
I was, however, radicalized as a teen
during the Black Power, the anti-war, the American Indian,
the Raza, and the feminist movements.
And I assumed that those movements and the Beats
indirectly influenced my poetry.
Kaufman was among the poets in the anthology,
3,000 Years of Black Poetry, which I stole as a teenager.
And I credit many of the poets in that collection
for my adolescent audacity to claim myself as a poet.
And I allowed Kaufman's unique style
to possess me as I wrote a praise poem to him.
And I was writing in a form that was atypical for me.
And I only knew Kaufman through the wizardry of his words,
which is why my poem is entitled "Searching for Bob Kaufman."
Hieroglyphic petals illuminate an adolescent trek
through the paper fields, flat plains, and edited savannahs
of 3,000 Years of Black Poetry.
The traveling Trickster emerges centuries of chapters away
from Africa's ancient poets--
anonymous, spine-to-spine with those known--
Wheatley, Dunbar, Brown, Hughes, Brooks, King, Jones, Evans,
Giovanni, and Cruz--
bound to the sticky fingers of this Black boy,
seeking non-mystical space between liberation
and Ecclesiastes.
He never knew this-- sometimes, speaking-in-tongues,
saxophonius poet, except in sorcery, etched in ether,
in improbable perfect, juxtapositions,
in mind-bending visions manifest,
in maddening unmarked stone, and gravity-defying language
turning the underground upside down,
in silence deafening to those who want to listen,
in sonic waves of syllables soothing the soul
of blue whales, in explosive lines fueled by heavy water,
in inaudible beats drowning out fascistic love-ins,
in inescapable jailbreaks from forced criminality,
in masses of massive solitude out in the open,
in iterations blocking unblocked iterations,
in revelatory secret acts of resistance.
Inside the mind of a Milky Way, a black hole
absorbs our light to be enlightened.