“A Silent Beat in Between the Drums”

No writer exemplifies the importance of bebop for African American poetry more than Bob Kaufman. And no writer aside from Hughes has had a greater impact on subsequent jazz poetry than Kaufman. Because Kaufman is identified primarily with the Beat movement, it is easy to overlook the impact of his early affiliation with the Popular Front, manifested in his left internationalist historical consciousness and his hybrid poetic forms, which allude as much to popular culture as to European and American modernisms. This chapter discusses the social and political implications of his most influential jazz poems, especially poems that translate the performance and legendary significance of Charlie Parker into explorations of black internationalism. Kaufman’s rendering of jazz history more generally, from his invocation of earlier musicians such as Duke Ellington through his poetic enactment of bop and hard bop performance, insists on the power of jazz as an internationalist discourse of radical resistance.