OBIT ~ beat poet Ted Joans; The Independent
Hyfler/Rosner
Beat poet
14 May 2003
Theodore Jones (Ted Joans), poet and artist: born Cairo, Illinois 4
July 1928; (five sons, five daughters); died Vancouver, British Columbia 25
April 2003.
Ted Joans, beat poet, artist and musician, is perhaps best known for a piece
of graffito. When Charlie "Bird" Parker died, Joans defiantly scrawled "Bird
Lives" on the pavements of New York. A more formal representation of his
feelings for the jazz great - his painting Bird Lives - now hangs in the de
Young Museum in San Francisco.
It was this combination of artistic talents - he played the trumpet too -
that makes Joans one of the more interesting of the beats who clustered
around Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso in Greenwich Village
in the 1950s.
The rhythms in his poetry came from the blues and avant-garde jazz - but
Surrealist painters and writers were just as strong an influence. Further,
as an African-American he was plugged into both a strong oral and written
tradition. An early mentor was Langston Hughes, an important member of the
pre-war Harlem Renaissance of African-American writers. Later, in the
Sixties, Joans's work reflected the impact of Black Power.
He was born Theodore Jones in 1928, on a riverboat in Cairo, Illinois. He
changed his name to Joans in the Fifties. His father was a riverboat
entertainer and Joans had a difficult childhood. At the age of 12, the story
goes, his father gave him a trumpet and put him off the boat in Memphis to
fend for himself. There's also a story that his father was pulled off a
streetcar and killed by white workers during the Detroit race riots.
If he was abandoned by his parents, it is a remarkable testament to Joans's
character - and talent - that some years later he got a place at Indiana
University. He graduated with a degree in Fine Arts in 1951.
He moved to New York and spent time with the beatniks in Greenwich Village.
Allen Ginsberg encouraged his poetry writing. His first book of poetry, Beat
Poems, was published in 1957, to be followed two years later by Funky Jazz
Poems.
In the 1960s, with scant funds, Joans began globetrotting. At various stages
of his life in the ensuing decades he lived in Harlem and Haarlem, Paris,
Tangier and Timbuktu. (He also fathered 10 children along the way.) He would
perform his poetry wherever he travelled. Usually his performances were in
coffee houses but famously he once did a reading in the middle of the Sahara
Desert.
His jazz poems were collected in Black Pow-Wow (1969), his first book from a
major publisher. By then, inspired by the black nationalism of the Black
Power movement, he had already spent time in Africa. One result of his
visits was his 1971 collection Afrodisia. Another was his assembly of a
large collection of African art. The sale of these artworks back in the
United States was his primary means of support for some years.
Yet he remained a prolific writer and artist. His other published work
includes All of Ted Joans and No More (1961, poems and collages), The
Hipsters (1961, more collages), The Truth (1978, postcards), Double Trouble
(1992, poems) and Our Thang (2001, poems and drawings). In 1984 he was
editor for Dies und Das, the first Surrealist magazine to be published in
Germany. He also contributed to jazz magazines.
He eventually settled in Vancouver with his long-time companion, Laura
Corsiglia. Just recently, with the publication of his Teducation: selected
poems, 1949-1999 (1999), his career was enjoying something of a resurgence.
Before then he had found a novel way of making some money in Canada. "He
used to rent himself out to upper-middle-class parties as a beatnik," says
George Bowering, Canada's poet laureate. "He was very comic."
He died in Vancouver. Laura Corsiglia has asked the Vancouver poetry
community to chalk on the streets and pavements of the city: "Ted Joans
Lives".
Peter Guttridge