Customer Reviews

The Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956-1978

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The Ancient Rain is one of my favorite poems of all-time. It is a relatively long poem, and I have read it at least seven times. I love the way that Bob Kaufman witnesses the ancient rain falling over the history of america and the future that is to come. The entire text, like all of Kaufman's work, is phenomenal. If you have never read Kaufman, you are seriously missing out. He lived the life of a true poet and his perspective on the world is truly unique. His visions are surrealist, ingenious, full of jazz and radical politics. I read a fair amount of poetry, and Bob Kaufman has become my favorite. He is an American Legend that in time will only grow.

"...It shall be brown rain that fell on the day Crispus Attucks died. It shall be the Ancient Rain that fell on July Fourth, 1776, when America became alive. In America, the Ancient Rain is beginning to fall again. The Ancient Rain falls from a distant secret sky. It shall fall here on America, which alone, remains alive, on this earth of death. The Ancient Rain is supreme and is aware of things that have never happened. The Ancient Rain shall be brilliant yellow as it was on the day Custer died. The Ancient Rain is the source of all things, the Ancient Rain knows all secrets, the Ancient Rain illuminates America. The Ancient Rain shall kill genocide..."

It's a long poem, that's just a taste. I have always wanted to read this poem out loud wherever I am at on the 4th of July. Kaufman did not often write about America, but he was struck to the core when JFK died and is rumored to have taken a vow of silence that lasted for many years. The Ancient Rain may have been part of his lifting of the silence as he states in the poem that it "shall be blue rain like the rain that fell when John Fitzgerald Kennedy died," to close his opening stanza.

Bob Kaufman is a great poet. He is one of the beat poets, speaking in coffee houses and on the streets of San Francisco. He strived to be anonymous. Read this book. Once you have done that, read his words out loud, and with passion. Its great.

from San Francisco beat scene into utter poetic beatitude and broken forms of beauty and mongrel utterance. If there is anybody up ahead of Jack Spicer and Allen Ginsberg in the bay area poetics of experimentation and abomunation, it is Bob Kaufman. He comes out of Great Time of literature ahead of us, postmodern and material-real all at once. No wonder Spicer had to (symbolically) kill him off in Tower of Babel, he felt dimininished and threatened by his love and his poetics (but of course Spicer mocked himself as the minor academic poet John Ralston, safe and non-Blakean). Kaufman lives on in the "ancient rains" and imperial formations of queer and language-writing San Francisco, a long long time ahead.