Customer Reviews

Jazz - Jail and God: An Impressionistic Biography of Bob Kaufman

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I met Mel Clay perusing through the infamous Citylights Bookstore on Columbus Ave in San Francisco just last week. He started talking with me and we began discussing William S. Burrough's intense novel "Naked Lunch" and how it changed our lives. He also gave me a signed copy of this book, "Jazz -- Jail and God." I went home and read it, mostly because I was so excited that I had just met a famous author! I didn't know what to expect. But this book literally blew me away. It stirs up something inside you. You envision everything going on so perfectly. I can't describe it any better than that. But everyone who is interested in beat literature, the spoken word, or especially Bob Kaufman should definitely read this book.

Very impressed with the prose of the text, reads very much like poetry, is poetry in fact. Grammar is used with poetic license and various images intersperse throughout. This book is not a standard biography, it does not go through the various facts of Bob Kaufman's life, there is not even that much information picked up about Bob Kaufman from reading it. But you get a sense of what his life was like. You enter Mel Clay's life searching for Bob through nonlinear rotating sections of conversation, tributes and imagery. It's really a beautiful read, and I wish that more poets wrote biographies in as fresh of a manner. If you're into prose poetry and like Kaufman's work who I think is one of the most underrated and greatest poets of all time, this is it. If you prefer more standard biographies, the only I have read is an excellent short one in Neeli Cherkovski's Whitman's Wild Children. Excellent Bibliography including all Kaufman appearances at the end, and nice photographs to accompany.

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Amazon needs to improve their rating system. 4.65 stars.