Robert Garnell Kaufman (April 18, 1925 – January 12, 1986) was an American Beat poet and surrealist as well as a jazz performance artist and satirist. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the "black American Rimbaud." Early life and education Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Kaufman was the 10th of 13 children. His paternal grandfather was a German Jew, and his mother was from an established Black Roman Catholic New Orleans family. His claims that his maternal grandmother practiced voodoo were later refuted. At the age of 18, Kaufman joined the United States Merchant Marine, which he left in the early 1940s to briefly study literature at New York City's The New School for Social Research. In New York, reportedly he met William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. However, Ginsberg has said he did not meet Kaufman until 1959 (Cherkovski, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, p. xv). He also knew the photographer Robert Frank in New York in the late 1940s. Career During Kaufman's time at The New School and in New York, he found inspiration in the writings of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Federico Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Nicolás Guillén. He also identified with the works of jazz musicians and improvisational artists such as Charlie Parker, whom he named his son after. Kaufman moved to San Francisco's North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life. Kaufman frequently expressed his desire to be forgotten as both a writer and a person. Kaufman, a poet in the oral tradition, usually didn't write down his poems, and much of his published work survives by way of his wife Eileen, who wrote his poems down as he conceived them. City Lights published several books of Kaufman's poems during his lifetime, however, including Abomunist Manifesto, Second April in 1959, and Does the Secret Mind Whisper in 1960. In 1981 Kaufman published The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956 to 1978 with New Directions Publishing. He apparently did write his poems down on empty sacks and odd sheets of paper (Cherkovski, Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, p. xxxii). "Sitting here writing things on paper Instead of sticking the pencil into the air" From "Jail Poems" Although he was baptized at age 35 while in the Merchant Marines (Cherkovski, xxxiii), like