Jail Poems by Bob Kaufman

As an experimentalist, he fought against literary convention, stole from it and reshaped it to his advantage. 66 years later, Bob Kaufman’s work demands our attention. His poems interrogate what it means to be “Someone who is no one” in a country that boxes him out. His grit and imagination push against the America that (mis)shapes him. His voice is intimate, direct, and often playful. He creates tension in forms where he performs his struggle to exist. In “Jail Poems” he writes from Cell 3 in San Francisco City Prison. He is boxed within a box. I recommend Bob Kaufman’s “Selected Poems: CRANIAL GUITAR” where many of his poems break from the real to the

surreal — where the mind must leave logic in order to make sense.