One exception to my suspicion of full on surrealism is Bob Kaufman. Postwar atomic automaton America could not be viewed straight on like the industrial films of 1960s early morning television. It required hallucinatory ViewMaster snapshots to portray its twisted Twilight Zone reality. Imagine this was the only possible approach. Unlike Ginsburg’s angelic screeds like the second coming of Walt Whitman for an apocalyptic judgement day, Kaufman was closer to pure human art: not Pollock and Rothko of his time but rather the ghostly, sometimes tormented figures of Bay Area Figuration pinned like butterflies against a flat landscape unworthy of representation. Ginsburg was prophetic; Kaufman was revolutionary with his manifestos of disassociation from the modernist brutality of concrete America, its deep vein of racism and war mined for unholy dollars. Of all the casual claims of angelic figures by Ginsburg, Kerouac, et. al., Kaufman was the real Ezekiel deal. Would you wear his thousand eyes?
Bob Kaufman
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 
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