Published in 1965, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness assembles ten years' work of Bob Kaufman, celebrated in San Francisco as the original Beat and in France as "the American Rimbaud." Kaufman promotes a spontaneous, prophetic verse, mixing street talk and jazz with vision. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness contains odes to Charles Mingus, Hart Crane, Ray Charles, and Albert Camus as well as love lyrics, political rants, "Prison Poems," and the prose meditation "Second April."

Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New Directions Paperbook)

Literature & Fiction

KAUFMAN, BOB

Poetry

New Directions

Surrealistic poems make use of improvisation and dream-like imagery to portray the modern world

The Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956-1978

"Mr. Kaufman has a genuine lyric talent, and his poetry is sensuous, exciting, and charged with vitality." ―Publishers WeeklyThe Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 is San Francisco poet Bob Kaufman’s third collection and his first to be published since the late 1960s. One of the original Beat poets (the coinage "beatnik" is his), Kaufman’s work has always been essentially improvisational, often done to jazz accompaniment. And he became something of a legendary figure at the poetry readings in the early days of the San Francisco renaissance of the 1950s. With his extemporaneous technique, akin in many ways to Surrealist automatic writing, he has produced a body of work ranging from a visionary lyricism infused with satirical, almost Dadaistic elements to a prophetic poetry of political and social protest. Born in New Orleans of mixed Black and Jewish parentage, Kaufman was one of fourteen children. During twenty years in the Merchant Marine, he cultivated an intense taste for literature on his long sea voyages. Settling in California, in the ’50s, he became active in the burgeoning West Coast literary scene. Disappointment, drugs, and imprisonment led him to take a ten-year vow of complete silence that lasted until 1973. The present volume includes previously uncollected poems written prior to his pledge and newer work composed in the years 1973-1978, before the poet once again lapsed into silence.

The Ancient Rain, Poems 1956-1978

Cost-Effective Telecommunications Management: Turning Telephone Costs into Profits

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

CBI Pub. Co.

Golden Sardine (Pocket Poets Series, No. 21)

City Lights Books

Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman

"The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman is the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume that contains a lot of previously uncollected work. … this book makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a meteor."—The New York Times
"The body of work is small but voluminous in intensity, spirit and soul, with a lineage that runs from Charles Baudelaire to Charles Mingus. Kaufman—with his commitment to the art, his surreal eye on the urban experience and beyond it, and his jazz timing—brings San Francisco to life."—San Francisco Chronicle
"Twentieth-century American poetry cannot be fully comprehended without Bob Kaufman. City Lights and the editors do a grand service to literature by publishing Kaufman's poetry in one collection. … This is a necessary gift for poets and poetry readers."—Booklist
“He was an original voice. No one else talked like him. No one else wrote poetry like him.”—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Bob Kaufman (1925–1986) was one of the most important—and most original—poets of the twentieth century. He is among the inaugurators of what today is characterized as the Afro-Surreal, uniting the surrealist practice of automatic writing with the jazz concept of spontaneous composition. He seldom wrote his poems down and often discarded those he did, leaving them to be rescued by others. He was also a legendary figure of the Beat Generation, known as much for hopping on tables to declaim his poetry as for maintaining a monastic silence for months or even years at a time.
Kaufman produced just three broadsides and three books in his lifetime. In 1967, Golden Sardine was published by City Lights in its famed Pocket Poets Series, and became an instant cult classic. Collected Poems is a landmark poetic achievement, bringing together all of Kaufman’s known surviving poems, including an extensive section of previously uncollected work, in a long overdue return to City Lights Books.
Praise for Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman:
"Bob Kaufman volcanically en-veined the Beats as a mirage enveloped Surrealist; not as a formal poet, but one, like Rimbaud, who embodied butane. Following the scent of his butane on one anonymous North Beach afternoon led Philip Lamantia to audibly utter to me that Bob Kaufman as per incandescent singularity is 'our poet.'"—Will Alexander, author of Compression &amp; Purity
"Bob Kaufman is one of our most vulnerable, mysterious, and beautiful poets, a nomadic maudit, surrealist saint of the streets, votary of silence, the consummate Outrider with trickster imagination and visionary power.”—Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism
"Uplifting the voice of this under-sung literary master to future’s light is the mission of the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman. This poet’s poet on the cliff edge of no ledge is still continuing to foster new surrealizations. Read this bebopian wordsmith, his pen turned saxophone and ink notes that are black tears."—Kamau Daáood, author of The Language of Saxophones
"To call these poems 'surreal' seems, now, to muffle Kaufman’s prophetic genius. He saw us, our images in pools of blood, milk, and saxophone spittle. Maybe it was ever our shivering made the ripples that distorted the reflections."—Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies
"Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman should finally liberate the kaleidoscopic surrealism of this San Franciscan, and in many respects, secular Franciscan, poet from the shadows of Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats. … Collected Poems is a memoriam of unmitigated joy and abysmal despair."—Tyrone Williams, author of As iZ

City Lights Publishers

"The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman is the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume that contains a lot of previously uncollected work. … this book makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a meteor."—The New York Times
"The body of work is small but voluminous in intensity, spirit and soul, with a lineage that runs from Charles Baudelaire to Charles Mingus. Kaufman—with his commitment to the art, his surreal eye on the urban experience and beyond it, and his jazz timing—brings San Francisco to life."—San Francisco Chronicle
"Twentieth-century American poetry cannot be fully comprehended without Bob Kaufman. City Lights and the editors do a grand service to literature by publishing Kaufman's poetry in one collection. … This is a necessary gift for poets and poetry readers."—Booklist
"Not many collected works deserve sustained place in the hands of readers and on the shelves of bookstore poetry sections. This is one of them."—Publishers Weekly
“He was an original voice. No one else talked like him. No one else wrote poetry like him.”—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Bob Kaufman (1925–1986) was one of the most important—and most original—poets of the twentieth century. He is among the inaugurators of what today is characterized as the Afro-Surreal, uniting the surrealist practice of automatic writing with the jazz concept of spontaneous composition. He seldom wrote his poems down and often discarded those he did, leaving them to be rescued by others. He was also a legendary figure of the Beat Generation, known as much for hopping on tables to declaim his poetry as for maintaining a monastic silence for months or even years at a time.
Kaufman produced just three broadsides and three books in his lifetime. In 1967, Golden Sardine was published by City Lights in its famed Pocket Poets Series, and became an instant cult classic. Collected Poems is a landmark poetic achievement, bringing together all of Kaufman’s known surviving poems, including an extensive section of previously uncollected work, in a long overdue return to City Lights Books.
Praise for Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman:
"Bob Kaufman volcanically en-veined the Beats as a mirage enveloped Surrealist; not as a formal poet, but one, like Rimbaud, who embodied butane. Following the scent of his butane on one anonymous North Beach afternoon led Philip Lamantia to audibly utter to me that Bob Kaufman as per incandescent singularity is 'our poet.'"—Will Alexander, author of Compression &amp; Purity
"Bob Kaufman is one of our most vulnerable, mysterious, and beautiful poets, a nomadic maudit, surrealist saint of the streets, votary of silence, the consummate Outrider with trickster imagination and visionary power.”—Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism
"Uplifting the voice of this under-sung literary master to future’s light is the mission of the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman. This poet’s poet on the cliff edge of no ledge is still continuing to foster new surrealizations. Read this bebopian wordsmith, his pen turned saxophone and ink notes that are black tears."—Kamau Daáood, author of The Language of Saxophones
"To call these poems 'surreal' seems, now, to muffle Kaufman’s prophetic genius. He saw us, our images in pools of blood, milk, and saxophone spittle. Maybe it was ever our shivering made the ripples that distorted the reflections."—Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies
"Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman should finally liberate the kaleidoscopic surrealism of this San Franciscan, and in many respects, secular Franciscan, poet from the shadows of Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats. … Collected Poems is a memoriam of unmitigated joy and abysmal despair."—Tyrone Williams, author of As iZ

Winner, PEN Center USA West 1997 Literary Award. Finalist, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award. "Straight from some astral plane comes the ghost of this great Beat poet. . . . This is not so much a collection as it is a steam-pipe explosion.--Publishers Weekly Includes a complete bibliography.

Cranial Guitar

Coffee House Press

This book is different from all those other books on Italy. You know the ones. It won't tell you the history of the Coliseum; it won't describe every building on the Grand Canal. Neither will it tell you when the Leaning Tower began to fall. It doesn't have those glitzy color pictures. It won't have descriptions of the lobbies of all those five star hotels which you probably can't afford anyway. Let's face it, who wants to pay $600 to sleep for the night! And, it won't weigh three pounds for you to lug around.It's a different kind of book. If you are planning a vacation in Italy you will need two books. First and most important you will need this book. Secondly, you will need one of those books described above. Kaufman's book describes over 360 tips you need to know when planning your trip to Italy. You won't find all those tips in that other book or any other book. If you ever dreamed of a trip to Italy and put it on the back burner because those escorted tours were too expensive or you were afraid of "doing" it yourself, then this is the book for you. Kaufman ran fully escorted tours for over 35 years. To boot, he made his 31st trip to Italy in September of 2019. In his latest book he lays out the basic itinerary of visits to Rome, Florence and Venice (10 days). If you have more time, he provides you with optional extensions to the Amalfi area or in the north to Milan and the Lakes District. Are you afraid of renting a car in a foreign country and driving around or won't be able to speak the language? And, what to see and do each day to maximize your time? Sounds scary doesn't it? Kaufman's book takes all the guess work out of planning a vacation to Italy. And secondly it follows a logical sequence. His tips are not scattered here and there across the book. He starts with Planning and the Basics and then progresses to 35 pages devoted to detailed Itineraries.The Planning and Basics Chapter includes all the tips related to flying the Atlantic and tips related to air tickets and getting the "best deal". He then progresses to detail tips on hotels and reservations. Ever check in to a hotel from that over-night flight and find you just couldn't take a nap? Kaufman tells you how to avoid this and so many other problem areas related to hotels.Other chapters include Driving in Italy, Train Travel through Italy, Restaurants-Meals, Security, Cash and Credit Cards and other tips. There are also chapters outside of the itineraries chapter devoted to Rome, Florence and Venice. Italy is not like Disneyland. You just can't walk in the gate and enjoy all those rides. You have to plan your travel time (whether you are driving or taking the train), and days accordingly. If you don't, you will miss seeing those critical attractions. This book shows you how to do it and avoid all those problems, usually resulting from poor or no planning at all. Buy it now and eliminate all that stress.

ITALY Over 300 Critical Tips You Need to Know Before You Go

Travel

Europe

Independently published

STOP. Before booking a regular hotel room, consider staying at one of 250 hotels which are converted villas, palaces and castles. And, it's the same price as one of those standard European hotels. Ever thought of sleeping in a room at Buckingham Palace or the Palace at Versailles? How about breakfast in a room in Windsor Castle? These palaces, many built over 400 years ago have rooms that were and still are "fit for a king or queen". The bedrooms were large with painted ceilings and four poster beds. The walls were adorned with magnificent works of art. The common rooms and the hallways were lined with tapestries, mosaics, statues suits of armour and other fine pieces of art. While there are few hotels described in this book which possess the grandeur of Versailles and the like, there are in fact hundreds of lesser properties which are referred to as villas, palazzos and historic buildings. Many of them may also be 200-400 years old. Most of them were owned by "Noblemen" and built from 1500-1800AD during the final centuries of the Renaissance and the end of the Medieval Period. I have reviewed 250 of these ancient properties which you can stay at for the same price of staying at an ordinary European style hotel. I include where applicable government star rating, prices for peak and off peak seasons and comments about reviews of the property and their direct website. You can use this book two ways. If you are visiting Italy, select your city, town or province and make a booking at one of these unique properties. Or, better, decide on an area and do what I call "villa or castle hopping".The author includes chapters on the "Best of the Best", booking tips, and all you need to know about making your Italian vacation or holiday a memorable one; something that you will talk about for the rest of your life. Chapters include: Tuscany, Umbria, Cortona, San Gimignano, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, The Lakes District, Sicily, Naples, Amalfi, Rome, Florence, Venice and Milan and others including Matera, The Cinque Terre, The Marches and Emilia-Romagna. So save your time and energy, select the villas and castles you want to stay in, book them and enjoy the experience.

ITALY.. Skip the Hotel and Stay at a Palace!: For the Same Price Live Like Royalty.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by KAUFMAN, BOB. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by KAUFMAN, BOB

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by KAUFMAN, BOB. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New Directions Paperbook)

The Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956-1978

The Ancient Rain, Poems 1956-1978

Cost-Effective Telecommunications Management: Turning Telephone Costs into Profits

Golden Sardine (Pocket Poets Series, No. 21)

Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman

Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman

Cranial Guitar

ITALY Over 300 Critical Tips You Need to Know Before You Go

ITALY.. Skip the Hotel and Stay at a Palace!: For the Same Price Live Like Royalty.