Interview #39: Steven Belletto

Black Beat biog breaks new ground

STEVEN BELLETTO is Professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the author of a significant new biographical work – Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans – exploring the overlapping worlds of Beat and jazz, art and race, and just published by Bloomsbury.

His publishing record within Beat’s academic universe is impressive. He was the editor of last year’s Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac and served a similar role on the Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017). He is also the author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020).

To support our review of Black Surrealist – our Chief Book Reviewer Jonah Raskin presents his response elsewhere within the digital pages of Rock and the Beat Generation – Simon Warner, Founding Editor of this website, addressed some questions to Steven Belletto himself. His answers are shared below…

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Simon Warner: To what degree was Ted Joans a Beat and to what extent did Surrealism provide his key creative code? Or was jazz his greatest touchstone?

Steven Belletto: Joans’ famous dictum was ‘Jazz is my religion and Surrealism is my point of view’, and he really meant this. Jazz was a transcendent, religious experience for him, and he thought a lot about what it might mean to be a jazz poet – he considered himself a jazz poet, but not people like Kerouac or Ferlinghetti, despite their having read poetry to jazz accompaniment.

This he distinguished from ‘jazzpoetry’, which he defined as ‘not just a poet reading with the musical background, the poet must be able to swing the word (not sing) and creatively read the poem in the same spirit as a jazz musician taking a solo.’ This idea of creative reinvention was also connected to Surrealism for Joans, and Surrealism was certainly a lifelong touchstone.

He began studying Surrealism at a young age, and by his early 20s in Louisville, Kentucky, was locally famous as a Surrealist painter. He only deepened his engagement with Surrealism over the years, learning French, and eventually being welcomed into the French Surrealist circle by André Breton himself.

He was friendly with André and Elisa Breton and a great many other Surrealist figures, and even did dual poetry and collage collections with people like Joyce Mansour. So Surrealist concepts and tropes are key to understanding his work, including his jazz poems, his Beat poems and his Black Power poems.

SW: How did Ted Joans fit into the broadly white Beat community? Who were his closest friends and supporters in that circle?

SB: Joans moved to New York City in the early 1950s and eventually settled in Greenwich Village with the aim of making his name as a painter. This was before the ‘Beat Generation' blew up in national consciousness after Howl and Other Poems in 1956 and On the Road in 1957, which is why Joans often said that he, too, was ‘at the beginning’ of the Beat Generation.

Of course he did not know Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, et al. back in the 1940s when Kerouac coined the term, but he was very much embedded in the hip bohemian scene prior to the ‘mainstreaming’ of the Beat Generation and all the media attention and commercialization we see after On the Road. This is what he meant by being there at the beginning.

He was a known figure in New York City in the 1950s – there’s a quip I love from Bob Reisner, who ran the famed jazz club the Open Door, where he says Joans could be walking down the street with Dwight Eisenhower and the people in the Village would say ‘Who’s that guy with Ted?’

In terms of big Beat names, Joans always said that it was Allen Ginsberg who had encouraged him to first read his poetry aloud at the Seven Arts Coffee Gallery, and that Ginsberg also encouraged him to publish his poetry, which led in turn to his first ‘booklet’ of poems. They remained friendly until Ginsberg’s death.

He also knew and palled around with Jack Kerouac. Joans said that Kerouac was one of the few white people he knew who truly appreciated the genius of Charlie Parker, and Joans said Kerouac knew all these great jazz clubs in Harlem. I don’t know that Joans and Kerouac were close friends, but they certainly did know and respected each other.

Gregory Corso was one of the first poets Joans met in Greenwich Village, and Corso would explain to him which streets were safe for him as a Black man to walk down and which weren’t (due to the mafia). Tuli Kupferberg was the first person to publish Joans’ poetry, in his Birth magazine. When he moved to Tangier in 1961, Joans also hooked into the Beat and Beat-adjacent expat community there, and so knew Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Alan Ansen and others.

SW: What was his take on the US Civil Rights movement? Was poetry for Joans a political act?

SB: Poetry could absolutely be political for Joans. The strain of Surrealism with which he was most deeply engaged was fundamentally revolutionary in character, and committed to ‘liberation’ of various kinds – this included liberation in a more abstract or existential sense, but also in the sense of working to effect the liberation of oppressed peoples around the world.

During the Civil Rights era, Joans developed a kind of poetry that he called ‘hand grenade’ poems. These poems were relatively straightforward – that is, relative to his more baroque Surreal poems – and were about topical issues such as segregation in the American South. These poems were designed, he said, to be lobbed into society and explode in people’s minds, to explode people’s consciousness.

This was a kind of poetry that he learned from Langston Hughes, who was one of his mentors. In terms of the US Civil Rights movement, Joans always thought of the struggle for equal rights in the US as part of a global struggle for equality, so there was always a global context for him, and, after 1961, he was constantly circulating around the globe, mainly throughout Africa and Europe, and so he experienced dozens of newly-independent African nations firsthand, and was very excited about the prospect of a Black-led Africa.

In the mid-1950s, he was hosting Mau Mau costume parties in New York partly as a way to express his solidarity with the Mau Mau, who were then fighting white colonial rule in Kenya. By the later 1960s, as he had moved to Africa and kept up that circulating, he became more and more involved in the Black Power movement, and even wrote a ‘Black Power Manifesto’.

SW: If you take an interest in Beat history, the triumvirate of African American writers – LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman and Joans himself – tend to be grouped together. Is that useful or unhelpful?

SB: Joans rightly saw that what we think of as ‘hip’ and ‘hipsters’ – in the mid-century sense, not in our contemporary sense – originated in Black culture, and so always made the argument that the Beat Generation was coming out of Black culture, even though the most well-known figures are white. If this is the case, then I think it makes sense to see Joans, LeRoi Jones and Bob Kaufman as progenitors of Beatness, and not latter-day hangers on.

In one essay, ‘The Beat Generation and Afro-American Culture’, Joans did note this triumvirate you’re referring to, claiming that ‘there were only three major Black poets involved in the Beat Generation happenings’. But, at other times, he took care to list a wider range of Black poets and artists who he saw as connected to Beat culture. So I do think it makes sense to think about what Black Beat aesthetics would look like –although I’m a person who takes an expansive view of the Beat movement.

SW: Your research into Joans’ life and work has been a huge project producing a remarkable and substantial biographical portrait. What was your main challenge in completing this venture and has your investigation confirmed his lasting value as artist and activist?

SB: Thank you for saying that. Writing this book was much more challenging than I had anticipated at the start because I kept discovering more and more layers to Joans and his work. One of the most obvious challenges was that Joans was an inveterate self-mythologiser, and so I knew I had to tread carefully when sifting out these myths from what’s findable in the historical record.

This in fact became a major theme of the book, and is why I ended up subtitling it ‘The Legend of Ted Joans’, to acknowledge those acts of myth-making, but also to explore them and take them seriously as Surrealist truths, because this is what Joans himself did. It all wound up being deeper than I thought.

In terms of your second question, I definitely think Joans is an artist of lasting value. His body of work is much larger and more varied than I had known when I started the project, and encompasses not only many genres of writing, but also a huge range of work across media, from painting, drawing, frottage, collage, Surrealist ‘object-poems’, film and performance art.

The more I studied this work and came to see what Joans was doing, the more impressed I was by it, and I hope my book will stimulate further interest in Joans and his work. I really do think it is just a beginning.

See also: ‘Correspondence #54: Ryan Mathews’, June 12th, 2025; ‘Book review #50: Black Surrealist’, June 7th, 2025