assassination of John F. Kennedy, which lasted 10 years. He was believed to return to this silence in the early 1980s, although he was filmed reading his poem "The Poet" at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981. In September of that year, he was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for $12,500. In 1982 he gave a benefit poetry reading for Beatitude at the Savoy Tivoli. In 1984 he appeared in a documentary "West Coast: Beat and Beyond" and in 1985 he gave a benefit poetry reading in North Beach, again for Beatitude. He died in 1986 of pulmonary emphysema (Cherkovski, p. xxxiii).. In an interview, Ken Kesey describes seeing Bob Kaufman on the streets of San Francisco's North Beach during a visit to that city with his family in the 1950s: I can remember driving down to North Beach with my folks and seeing Bob Kaufman out there on the street. I didn't know he was Bob Kaufman at the time. He had little pieces of Band-Aid tape all over his face, about two inches wide, and little smaller ones like two inches long -- and all of them made into crosses. He came up to the cars, and he was babbling poetry into these cars. He came up to the car I was riding in, and my folks, and started jabbering this stuff into the car. I knew that this was exceptional use of the human voice and the human mind. Poetry His poetry made use of jazz syncopation and meter. The critic Raymond Foye wrote about him, "Adapting the harmonic complexities and spontaneous invention of bebop to poetic euphony and meter, he became the quintessential jazz poet." He frequently used jazz and bebop metaphors in his poems. 'One thousand saxophones infiltrate the city Each with a man inside, Hidden in ordinary cases, Labeled FRAGILE.' From "Battle Report" Poet Jack Micheline said about Kaufman, "I found his work to be essentially improvisational, and was at its best when accompanied by a jazz musician. His technique resembled that of the surreal school of poets, ranging from a powerful, visionary lyricism of satirical, near dadaistic leanings, to the more prophetic tone that can be found in his political poems." Kaufman said of his own work, "My head is a bony guitar, strung with tongues, plucked by fingers & nails." After learning of the assassination of