Beat Meetings #7: A. Robert Lee & Ted Joans

Surrealism, jazz and poetry

A. Robert ‘Bob’ Lee has held professorships and visiting chairs in Literature departments around the world, including the UK, the US and Japan. He has particular interests in the fiction of outsider voices – the Beats and outriders and ethnic writers beyond Anglo–America. He published The Beats: Authorship, Legacies in 2019. Ted Joans (1928-2003) has been described as ‘poet, visual artist, trumpet player, traveller’. He brings a compelling African-American inflection to the Beat conversation.

Who did you meet?

Ted Joans.

Where did you meet him?

The grandly named World Affairs Conference, Boulder, Colorado, in 1988.

How did this meeting come about?

A longstanding annual get-together founded in 1948 by the University of Colorado sociology professor Howard Higman. Notables and academics gather to discuss over a week or so the condition of things. In its time it has featured stellar names from Eleanor Roosevelt to Ralph Nader, Henry Kissinger to the Texas wit and journalist Molly Ivins. On the several occasions I took part I always much liked the contributions, among others, of the late film critic, Roger Ebert (he titled his presentations ‘Cinema Interruptus’) and of the poet Howard Nemerov.

It was where Ted Joans and I met. Co-panelists in a session given over to ‘multi-America’.

What did you discuss/talk about?

Conversation and overlaps of interest ensued. But they most turned to his life as poet, painter, jazz trumpeter (he once shared a room with Charlie Parker), surrealist, Dada enthusiast, ‘spoken word’ performance figure and Beat writer. Not to mention father of a considerable number of offspring by different women.

In due course he asked if I’d write an Introduction to his (never actually completed) autobiography. I would have been delighted.

Joans had long taken to re-spelling his birth name (also Jones) so as not to be confused with his fellow African American poet, LeRoi Jones.

When we met he was getting increasingly better known not only for his poetry and artwork but (at least in counterculture circles) for his caché as traveller, fetching up variously in France, Canada, Germany, the Maghreb of Tangiers, over a dozen African countries, and at intervals back in Manhattan, then Seattle and eventually Vancouver.

Between us, accordingly, were letters to and from Paris, Timbuktu and the Pacific Coast.

I’d been writing about his work for some time. A slight synopsis from an essay published in 2004 does duty for his life as author:

Over 30 books, pamphlets and broadsheets beginning with now largely unavailable small-press publications like Beat Poems (1957) and Funky Jazz Poems (1959). Follow-ups in All of Ted Joans and No More: Poems and Collages (1960), Black Pow-Wow: Jazz Poems (1969), Afrodisia: New Poems (1970, 1976) and Wow: Selected Poems of Ted Joans (1991). Selective prospectus in Teducation: Selected Poems 1949-1999 (1999).

You have to add a number of pertinent biographical features. His father, who worked riverboats on the Mississippi, was killed in a Detroit “race riot.” Joans himself gained an MFA from Indiana University before gravitating into Greenwich Village and the Beat ambit of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso. With Ishmael Reed and others he featured in the avant-garde Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. He became known for performing in Fred McDarrah’s Rent-a-Beatnik caper, he and like reading their work as fringe excitement in the homes of rich suburbanites. On Parker’s death in 1955 it was he who had painted the words ‘Bird Lives’ over walls in Manhattan and produced a canvas of the same name now in San Francisco’s De Young Museum.

What were your impressions of the Beat you met?

For all his Beat reputation he remained an inveterate vegetarian and non-drinker, a freest of spirits in sex and travel yet down on drugs.

Across his pages you hear Joans’ ‘open’ wordplay, his jazz echoes and syncopation. It makes for poetry to accord with his ‘open’ sense of life. ‘Hip’ and ‘cool’, the time’s watchwords, very much apply. In ‘Dear America’, written in the Vietnam era, he even assumes a voice of mock politesse (‘I don’t mean to be funny/but you gotta give up/being square and selfish’).

The contour of his writing can be met in every variety of instances.

If ‘Jazz is my religion’ became one of his well-known mantras, then in ‘Him The Bird’ he pays carefully line-spaced tribute to one of its beloved virtuosi (‘Once upon a time a few years ago now/There was a young café-au-lait colored bird/Who blew sax and his earth name was CHARLES PARKER’). ‘Jazz me Surreally Do’ speaks of ‘Count Basie’s sparse piano touch’, ‘Jazz Is’, scored as if to be played, insists that ‘black sound/a black sound/leaps/or glides/intro the ear’. The prose-poem ‘Jazz is My Religion’ leaves nothing to doubt:

because I know and feel the message it brings like Reverend Dizzy

Gillespie/Brother Bird and Basie/Uncle Armstrong/Minister Monk/Deacon Miles Davis/Rector Rollins…and the Great JOHN

COLTRANE and Cecil Taylor They Preach a Sermon That Always

SWINGS!! Yeah jazz is MY religion.

If, likewise, his other well known mantra became ‘Surrealism is my point of view’ then a poem like ‘Nadja Rendezvous’ dedicated to his hero André Breton gives proof. ‘Images left as keys in the mail box’ reads the penultimate line. A surrealist miniature. Joans’ fascination with exotic animals, rhinoceros, aardvark or okapi, threads into many of the poems. Try his surreal love and sex poems ‘Sanctified Rhino’ or ‘Okapi Passion’.

Are there any other thoughts you would like to share? Was he indeed a Beat?

Joans as Beat? For sure. In his essay ‘Je Me Vois’ he writes ‘I too have known some of the best Beat Minds of that generation’. ‘The Sermon’, not without the time’s chauvinism in its address to young white women who would be Beat, lays down prerequisites (‘If you wish to be a sweet child of godlike intelligence, DIG JAZZ…you must own a copy of Howl -- you must have a copy of (on the road) Jack Kerouac’). It is, too, to Kerouac on whose death and looking back to their cross-racial friendship, that he turns in ‘The Wild Spirit of Kicks’ (‘Jack in red and black mac…Running across the country like a razorblade gone made…At rest at last/J.K. says hello to J.C./ John Coltrane that is!’).

In the years since, has that meeting left any particular memories with you?

If there was a ready geniality to the work, in kind with the man, he equally does not hold back in seeking to lance and cauterize racism. In ‘The Nice Colored Man’, a pattern poem which unfazedly gives vent to a whole onslaught of variations on the n-word turns the nursery rhyme inside out in its final lines (‘Eeny Meeny Minee Mo/Catch Whitey by His Throat/If he Says Nigger – CUT IT!!’).

There’s far more, inevitably.

Whether ‘Africa’ (‘I guard your memory’) and ‘Afrique Accidentale’ with its busy continental panorama. Or ‘Happy 78 Hughes Blues’ in celebration of his mentor Langston Hughes. Or ‘My Ace of Spades’ as Black Power tribute to Malcolm X. Or ‘The Ladder of Basquiat’ to recognize the often startling abstract graphics of his young contemporary (‘art history maker/Already a Black Positive Power’).

For a long time Joans got left out of the anthologies, even for all his celebratory riffs on the cultures of blackness, from Black anthologies.

That, shall we say, was inattentive.

Bird Lives?

Then so did, so does, Ted Joans.

See also: ‘Ted talk: Keeping up with Joans’, August 13th, 2022