Yuko Otomo
June 2015

“So, in my rather sorrowful impecunious state, I find myself filled to the beautiful brim
with love and with this shared love I continue to live my poem-life.”

– Ted Joans
(July 4 1928 – April ?? 2003)

How & where can I start talking of Ted, who taught me that a poet’s job was not just to write good poems out of life but to “live a poem-life?” You never stop thinking of certain people, even if they are gone, & Ted is one of them. He keeps living inside me. There is a Buddhist tradition in Japan called “Jyu-San-Kai-Ki.” It literally means a memorial tribute of the 13^th cycle. You count the year of passing as the 1^st year & then go around a 12 year cycle. Ted departed sometime in the end of April 2003 because of complications caused by diabetes. Nobody knows the exact date since he was living alone then. April in Paris, April is the cruelest (poetry) month… whatever the date was, April was a perfect month for his departure. This year, we commemorate Ted’s “Jyu-San-Kai-Ki.” Although he was considered one of the 3 black Beats along with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) & Bob Kaufman, he is the least known. Even amongst ardent poetry lovers, he is almost non-existent because of the invisibility caused by his absence from the scene. Steve & I were blessed to have known him very closely & personally. He was such a fascinating, wide ranging & deep scoped human. So, naturally I have many stories to share.

***

the first encounter

As I moved to NYC in 1979, I met 3 patron saints of the creative free spirit, one after another, in the same year. First, Tuli Kupferberg, then Ted Joans & then Jack Micheline. It was a magnificent beginning of my NYC life.

On a July afternoon, Steve was out selling his LPs, some unwanted doubles or the ones that could not pass his audiophile “clean sounds” test, on W. Broadway. Those were the days when Soho had loading docks (some defunct; some still in use) & cobblestones. I was home. Suddenly he rushed in with a crazy frenzy, shouting “Where are my Ted Joans books?!?!!! He is here! I have to find them NOW, so he can sign them!!!” I’d never heard the name. So, I said, “Who is Ted Joans??” “I’ll tell you later!” After grabbing Ted’s first edition books, Steve rushed out.

Soon, he came back home & said “Ted & his girlfriend are coming for shrimp tempura dinner tomorrow. He is allergic to chicken, but loves shrimp!” I said, “Who is Ted Joans? Who is cooking for whom for what reason?” Showing me the books Ted had just signed, he told me who Ted Joans was. “Look! Great! But, look, he ruined my book!!!” pointing at a sexual caricature drawing of Ted’s self-portrait on one of his books, Afrodisia (Hill & Wang, American Century Series, 1970). The book had a front cover with a photo of a wooden door carved by the Yoruba of Nigeria & the back cover of Ted’s frontal nude portrait in a triangular form; a photo taken by a photographer friend in Mali. Ted did a dedication to Steve that said “To hipster Steve from Tedjoans* (* with his signature style: his first & last names as one word). “Hipster” was not a dirty word then. On the contrary, it was a highly honorable title for the ones with genuine intellectual/cultural knowledge, philosophy, passion, coolness & attitude.

I was already involved in Jazz. So, I connected “Bird Lives!” with its originator, who’d coined the phrase smoothly. Next evening, Ted & Alicia Fritchle, his then wonderful painter “femmoiselle,” came to our small bathtub in the kitchen tenement apartment. I was nervous having guests for dinner with no proper table or table setting. But with Ted & Alicia’s impeccably graceful bohemian manner, my precautions flew away instantaneously. We ate, talked & became friends. Ted & Alicia lived in Rue. St. Genevieve, Paris then. We all fell in love with each other because of the shared love for jazz, art, poetry (“poesy” he preferred to call it…) & anything marvelous.

When Steve was young, he frequented bookstores in Greenwich Village. In one of them, Ghost Bookstore on 8^th St., he saw a LeRoi Jones’s title, lifted it & walked away. Those were the days with no electronic devices. Outside the store, feeling “safe,” he took it out from his jacket to check out LeRoi Jones’ book, “Ted Joans?!? Who is Ted Joans?” He thought he’d picked out a book by LeRoi Jones, but instead he’d taken the one by Ted Joans accidentally & mistakenly. They were next to each other on the alphabetically arranged shelf. Jones & Joans. It was All of Ted Joans and No More (Excelsior Press, 1961). Steve read the book & loved it & started to collect Ted’s books along with other books to add to his library collection. That was the beginning of his long relationship with Ted Joans. It took a while for him to meet Ted in person, till the summer of 1979. When we asked Ted why he’d changed his last name from “Jones” to “Joans,” he said, “This way, nobody has to keep up with me!”

What a lovely way to begin this tribute memoir for my (our) beloved Ted Joans whom we miss constantly & continuously with the above image; one of Ted’s thank you notes written on his event info/invite for another Shrimp Tempura dinner we enjoyed together! 

“jazz is my religion; surrealism is my point of view.”

Ted was born on July 4^th, Independence Day, in 1928 in Cairo, Illinois. He shares the same birthday with one of his heroes, Louis Armstrong. Theodore Jones. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in fine art. He painted, played trumpet & wrote poems. He moved to NYC in 1951, becoming part of the Greenwich Village creative scene known as the Beat Generation. Read Bird & The Beats (Coda Magazine, 1981). In this writing, he tells us what happened & whom he met & became friends with. It’s one of the best literary materials that describe the Beat scene, especially in its relationship to Jazz. Langston Hughes was his mentor & his friend. Read the poem Passed on Blues: Homage to a Poet, you can share Ted’s utmost love & respect for his mentor.

“Jazz is my religion & Surrealism is my point of view” was Ted’s credo. His involvement with Jazz was extremely deep, knowledge-wise & passion-wise. It was his religion. He knew every Jazz musician throughout the history mostly on a personal level. Just imagine that Charlie Parker was his roommate & one of his best friends. He used to organize a famous rent party to gather the rent money for the whole year. In one of his rent party photos, you can see Charlie Parker wearing a mask among the crowd. He wrote a wonderful poem about sharing the cold night bed with Bird. He knew everybody! as Steve once wrote in his poem Ted Joans. Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Randy Weston, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, John Hendricks, Milt Jackson… He was on first name terms with everybody. Receiving the news of Charlie Parker’s death in 1955, Ted wrote “Bird Lives!” (*one of the first creative graffiti on the streets) all over downtown NYC while everybody was sleeping. As the day broke, the legendary “Bird Lives!” spread like wildfire in the city with his graffiti. He told me he only used charcoal chalk so it wouldn’t damage walls permanently.

From Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington to Bebop to Avant-garde Jazz, his love, knowledge & involvement with Jazz was intense & never lazy, always moving ahead. He was totally open to every available possibility this music held. Ted was one of the first to hear Albert Ayler & acknowledged his genius. Read AA! AA? Yeah, AA! (International Times, UK, 1966).  In it, he describes his first encounter with Ayler & his report of the first Copenhagen & Paris concerts. He collaborated with Archie Shepp in the first Pan-African Festival in Algeria in 1969. He was a long time friend of Cecil Taylor. He left some of his favorite African masks at CT’s place, asking him to keep them hung on his wall since he could not travel with them. There is a beautiful photo of Ted & Cecil standing next to each other taken in CT’s house by photographer Chris Felver. Ted is wearing an African mask he’d left to CT.

Ted moved to Paris in 1961. He told me of the incident of his being assaulted by a beer bottle thrown as he was walking with a white girlfriend on Bleecker St. The bottle missed hitting him, but he decided it was time to graduate from NYC and move to Paris, following the tradition of African American writers who’d paved their own ways to voluntary exile there such as James Baldwin & Richard Wright. Mostly he was known as a part of the Beat Generation, but he had been a self-proclaimed Surrealist since the age of 15 before he was a Beat. He always emphasized this fact. Ted got involved in Surrealism through the magazines his grandmother used to bring home from the white people’s house where she worked.

Ted had a list of people to visit as he arrived in Paris. Breton was still alive when he moved there. Instantaneously, they became close friends & Breton acknowledged Ted as the first Afro-American Surrealist. (*He told us that Langston Hughes & Breton had once lived in Paris at the same time, but they never met each other.) He became a conduit to connect African Surrealists with other American Surrealists, especially Chicago Surrealists. Charles Henri Ford was one of his closest friends all through his life. Later in his life, he moved back to the US & then to Canada. His last trip to Paris was to see the auction of Breton’s personal collection in December 2002. He stopped by to see us in NYC on the way to Vancouver. He told us how devastatingly brokenhearted he was to have witnessed with his own eyes Breton’s collection being dispersed into pieces to be bought & sold. He was intolerably disturbed to see the painting he had done for Breton as a gift auctioned off at an unthinkable price he could never have dreamed of! He passed away soon after. Steve & I always think he died of a broken heartedness caused by this auction.

wandelust

Ted never stayed in one place. He had a genuine wanderlust, like Rimbaud, like Micheline. He kept traveling to every possible place on earth all through his life. With his hat & a jacket or a vest with many pockets; with a bag; with cloves of garlic; with black bread; with a jar of peanut butter; with nuts from Economy Candy; with notebooks to write & draw; books to read & a few pens. From his birthplace, Cairo, Illinois to NYC & then to Paris to Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany & to Africa… Read his poem: Directions. It tells all the directions of the places in the continent of Africa where his feet had touched. One place he’d never been was Asia, where he longed to visit… He kept moving & traveling through various methods; walking, trains, buses, airplanes, even on a Concord once… He never stopped following his wanderlust until he passed away in Vancouver. He’d send us postcards with exotic stamps attached from various locations in the world, from Oaxaca, from Prague & from some places we’d never heard of. Choosing the beautiful stamps on a card was part of his art: his poem.

He was once offered a great position, a professorship in one of the major prestigious academic institutions on the West Coast (*a job people will kill each other for!), but he rejected the offer, simply saying, “Thank you, but, no thank you. I can’t stay indoors during the day & I can’t stay in one place too long…” I love this episode that tells so much about his nature.

no smoking

There is a beautiful photo of Jack Kerouac at the Artist’s Studio taken by Fred McDarrah sometime in the Beats’ heyday. Jack stands in the center, opening his arms, making a cross like Jesus, and reciting with fellow poets listening to him ardently. Ted is in the right corner, looking up to Jack with such pure admiration. Right above his head, there is a handwritten sign that says “NO SMOKING.” He carried the sign everywhere he went. He had a strong belief that smoking in public spaces was a violation of the human rights of those who did not smoke.  He made a handmade multi-lingual cardboard sign to carry with him all over the world from a Paris Café or NYC gathering places to make a self-proclaimed smoke-free zone. This was way before the concept of banning smoking in public spaces came to the attention of society. He’d been advocating non-smokers’ rights since the 50s, when smoking was promoted & considered a cool social act! How ironic it is that he passed away right before the ban on smoking in public spaces was set in France. Once I asked him if he knew Joan Mitchell. He said, “Yes. But I did not care for her too much since she was a heavy chain-smoker! I couldn’t stay too close to her too long…”

femmoiselles

Ted loved women. He not only loved them, but also respected & admired them for their wisdom & their power. For a dedication to the book Afrodisia, he wrote “To THE BLACK SISTERS, YELLOW, RED, AND BROWN, AND TOO THE WHITE ONES THAT AFRODISIA FOUND, and to my MOTHER, do I dedicate this volume of poems” (* uppercases are his). He was an ardent feminist who believed in women’s ability to shift the world into the right mode & direction. He claimed that all the wars & any assaulting violence were the results of (alpha) male power competition. He showed me how all weapons have underlining “designs” modeled & based on male genitalia. He believed that world peace would only be possible when men learn how to listen to women & their ideas. He hated competitions in general. That was one of the reasons he did not approve of “Slam Poetry.” As a matter of fact, he was frightened of the idea of poetry being competed in like a boxing match to beat opponents. He believed in L’Amour Fou, the marvelous & feminine wisdom. Also, as a magician of words, Ted invented a new word “Femmoiselle” for a woman whom he spent his life with since he hated the word “girlfriend” or “wife” as much as he hated the euphemistic usage of “bathroom” for “toilet.”

We met 3 amazing women/humans through Ted. 3 femmoiselles. Alicia Fletchl in the early days; Laura Crosiglia, one half of the “Laurated,” a painter, a poet (*now she is a serious environmentalist, a birds rescuer, as well) in the latter days. Laura shared the marvels of life with him for the last decade or more, traveling all over the world. She accompanied him on his last trip to Timbuktu & they did much creative collaboration together. More recently, after Ted’s passing, we met Sofie Van Lier, a vocalist & a musician/composer. She was his femmoiselle in Amsterdam in the 60s. Sharing many mutual friends in common already with her, we naturally became good friends.

politicality

Naturally, Ted was clearly aware of various forms of injustice & prejudice in our society. Racism; Sexism & Ageism… Being his friend, I learned so much of my own unresolved problems that I didn’t know I had. Once Ted, Steve, Hy Shorr & I were at sculptor Marisol’s opening in the early 90s. A great show. I was excited to see her version of the Emperor & Empress of Japan in Hina-Matsuri (Doll’s Festival) traditional style. I asked Hy to take a photo of me with the work. I suggested that Ted join me in the photo session. He said, “No, no, not me. I don’t cater or kneel down to dictators of any kind…” His words gave me such an unexpected shock. I was just being nostalgic for my childhood memory’s sake. He never told me to stop my action because pushing his ideas on others was not his style. But, what he said opened my mind up, broadening my scope on humanity & taught me something very deeply valuable.

Another lesson from Ted. This one is about how not to write/address evil & unworthy politicians’ names in poems even for protesting purposes. He knew well how corrupt the world of politics was & of its effects on us & on the world. But he said he never used his “sacred” pen (tip) to write their names down. “They are not worthy of my pen!” Even in our protests, we should not filth up our pen: a sacred tool of our soul & spirit. “Do not sacrifice the pureness of our poetic spirits for a protest for a protest’s sake.” He said. So different from the militant attitude of Amiri Baraka. Ted shared the spirit of Malcolm X, by calling Christmas “Malcolm X-mass.” But he took a totally different route regarding how to deal with society’s ills. In his A Few Blue Words to the Wise, he explains why he refuses to be militant in expression & in action. He preferred not to shout, to fight & to be assaulting. He was never an advocate of any political “ism.” Instead he wanted to deal with the problems by living, showing the examples of life-affirmative spirit through the shared love of a poem-life. He wanted to offer something inspiring & creative, rather than falling into the negative & destructive energy caused by anger, even if it was justifiable.

A Few Blue Words to the Wise

To    SHOUT / RAVE / RANT/ and RAGE         is being militant as

            Hell but not very brave

       (Especially when you’re before an all-Black audience)

to     SCREAM / SNEER / BELLOW / and even fart        is being

              excited / worked-up but

      all that won’t stop a Honky heart

to curse /  and call him names (all true) is not really bad      Yet it

             makes our black

        poetry look sad  (You know, like we ain’t got nothing better to

              poet about)

Then:      or thus:

We must write poems black brothers about our own black relations

We must fall in love and glorify our beautiful black nation

We must create black images      give the world

         A black education     

fuck

As his non-militant attitude toward social reforms proved, Ted rarely cursed. He had a stern & clear philosophy, especially over the usage of the word “fuck.” He consciously avoided using it in the derogatory sense, unlike how most of the English speaking world does. He thought using “fuck” as a curse word is an insult & a crime to the word as much as to the sacred act of lovemaking.  He used it only in the original sense of the word: “to copulate; to have sex with.” He was an advocate of diminishing any curse words & expressions that offended life’s marvels.

no bread; no ted

He was one of the least capitalistic human beings we’d ever met. He was deeply aware of the evils of the “Money Cult” & the society that was seeped with them. He hated the idea of money. But, he had a motto: “No Bread; no Ted” & never did a reading without getting paid. He was extremely stern about being paid for what he gave. He did not want to accept society’s abuse & ignorance toward artists in general, especially toward poets. He demanded some sort of compensation or exchange, money, dinner or accommodations in return for whenever he gave a reading or a lecture. He believed that we poets had a right to demand to get paid & to defend ourselves from abuse. He told us to do so as a responsibility to our side.

Ted was poor monetarily all through his life. But when he got some, he was extremely generous & shared it with others. Ilene Sonnabend was always supportive of Ted & occasionally bought small art works from him. When he sold a piece, he invited us to a dinner accompanied with “Black-Velvet” (*Guinness & cheap champagne equally mixed, being poured into a glass together at the same time) & we had a great celebration.

hipster

I don’t know why & how the word “hipster” has become such a bad word. Interesting to see the coinciding timing of a Brooklyn boom & a wave of post-capitalist decadence exemplified by luxury pre-exhausted pants, pre-wrinkled shirts & expensive vintage clothes that we once called “second-hand.” As “gentrification” has become an un-welcome norm in every neighborhood, the original meaning of the word has shifted to the opposite: a “pretender.” A pretender of being a Bohemian. Hipster in NYC is equivalent to BoBo (Bourgeois Bohemian) in Paris. You can buy a poor & distressed look of being “Bohemian” with money now.

For Ted & his generation, to be “hip” was a serious matter & very essential for the quality of being an “intelligent” human in the most genuine sense. To be “hip” required tremendous efforts in the learning & studying of various subjects: a wider & deeper education on life that was usually not taught in schools or in society. It was about a new awareness of being human in every possible field. In order to be a hipster, you are required to have deep & wide knowledge, understanding & love for music (especially Jazz), literature (especially poetry), art, philosophy, history (written & unwritten), social reform thinking, etc… There is a poem called I the Graduate in which he talks about the gradation of human progress toward becoming a wholesome being. To be hip is to have this wholesomeness & depth in intelligence, compassion & attitude in being fully human. So, to be called “a hipster” was like to be given the highest badge of honor in being a member of the non-capitalistic Bohemian intelligentsia.

Whenever I think of the degraded usage of the word, I think of Ted & other original hipsters who’d cultivated new qualities of being “human” in a world of hypocrisy, injustice & ignorance. To be hip or to be square. Originating in black culture, the word “hip” had a vital meaning. How sad it is to see that the abused usage of the word has become the norm in our current society. Interestingly, Ted used the word “Wanna-Beat” (* as in a “wanna-be”) instead for the one who pretended hip-ness without paying the dues. So, a “hipster” now is more like a “wanna-beat” then. Too bad the sacred word is misused & totally watered down as the spiritual corruption of the world has deepened.

rent-a-beatnik

Kerouac stated clearly & beautifully, “Beat is beatitude…” Beat originally meant the one who’s been “beaten” to the bottom of life in order to know compassion for all beings. But there has always been some confusion over what Beat means. Beats & Beatniks, then & now. Beatnik was a derogatory term invented by journalism to make fun of the Beats. In the midst of the anti-Soviet Cold War period, the Russian space satellite Sputnik was launched & made the already heated space exploration competition between the US & USSR worsen. Some journalist put Beat & Sputnik together & made a new word, “Beatnik,” to put down the new concept of Beat Culture. Since then, the confusion between the two has gotten entangled into the social fabric & most people still make the mistake of calling Beats “Beatniks.”

I’m not sure who invented “Rent-A Beatnik” happenings first, but Ted & his photographer friend Fred MacDarrah organized the events together with other friends to go uptown. They made the bourgeois class pay for them to be invited to their apartments where they read poems & played Jazz, wearing berets & banging bongos (*symbolic costumes of the Beatniks) for their entertainment.  They exported their downtown attitude of “cool & hip” to the rigid uptown white affluent class. They did their “bids” (as Ted said) & “got fed (food & drink)” in return. Mixing the social energy of downtown with uptown on this premise, they had fun making fun of the squares that made fun of them. Amazing to realize that the city then was still more strictly divided geographically according to class. Ted & friends did a reverse mockery of the society’s ignorance about their new consciousness. It was a prototype of social happenings before Happenings in the 60s got more popular as an art form.

books

Ted had over 30 books published, mostly by small independent presses, while he was alive, although there still is plenty of unpublished work. His poems were first published in Birth #1 by Tuli Kupferberg & Sylvia Topp’s Birth Press in 1958. One of his last books was Teducation, published by Coffee House Press in 1999. When Ted handed in the manuscript, the press made an objection to the title: Teducation. They told him that it was too silly & inappropriate to have such a childish title for the book, suggesting to him that he change it to something more respectful. Ted was passionately mad about their claim & said to us “They don’t understand anything, me or the book… If I can’t have the title Teducation, I don’t want to have them publish the book…” He was totally serious. It was a shock to him since the title Teducation summarized everything about Ted. Ted + Education = Teducation. He was a perpetual student/teacher of life/art. He never stopped learning or teaching. To think this title “silly & childish” totally missed the point. He was saddened by the un-hip-ness (senseless-ness) of the press. “They are just too square, not hip…” he almost cried. But at the end, they let have him Teducation as the title, accommodating Ted’s wish since they wanted him & his work.

Ted wrote a beautiful sound poem as a dedication for Teducation, emphasizing the alphabet “B.” “for Bird, Babs, Bearden, Basquiat and Brother Bill Traylor do I dedicate this book.” Bird (Charlie Parker), Babs Gonzalez, Romare Bearden, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bill Traylor, he listed the names of artists he loved & admired. Ted knew everybody, but, by some twist of fate, Ted never met Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in 1988. Ted was in love with JMB, relating himself with JMB closely through JMB’s Bird painting & other Jazz remarks in his other works. He understood where JMB was coming from, being a black artist in a white society. Steve & I knew JMB before & after his fame well enough. Ted was eager to listen to us tell any stories about JMB. He said to us, if he had met him he could have saved him since he knew a medicine man in Africa who knew how to fix drug addiction with some natural herbal remedy. For the Teducation book, he wanted to use JMB’s art on the cover & inside the book as well. But since the estate demanded an exorbitant fee for the usage of the images, he had to give up the idea. So, he decided on the 2^nd choice: Wifredo Lam, a close friend & a Surrealist brother of his, for the cover art with drawings by Heriberto Cogollo for the inside of the book. Naturally the book turned out to be quite beautiful. But he never forget to include a long poem he’d written for JMB titled The ladder of Basquiat. It was a lament for SAMO, who died without really knowing Africa: the origin of the shared motherland.

Here is another curious book episode that tells Ted’s personality. Beats got very hot in the early 90s. One of the major publishing houses, Viking, published The Portable Beat Reader anthology in hardcover. It was the first of the kind ever done. Ted’s poem The Sermon was, for a change, included in it, breaking the usual pattern of his being excluded from most anthologies, including anthologies of African-American poets. But, instead of being happy because of it, he was very upset & told us why. “They chopped up my poem & edited it without consulting me!!!! For a poem, every line break is sacred. There is a reason why line breaks happen. You cannot just chop the line up to fit it onto a page to save the space. It’s an assault to the integrity of the poem. It is a crime to do such a thing without consulting the poet who wrote it…” He was seriously mad at the editor, Ann Charter.  Because of the popularity of the hardcover version, she was planning to make its paperback Penguin edition (which is now a standard “Beat Literature” book for college). He confronted her over “the crime,” but could not get a rightful answer from her. So, he decided to sue her & the press for the creative & psychological damage they’d caused. He asked Hy Shorr, a lawyer/photographer, a long time friend of his from the 50s, to take action. Allen Ginsberg got nervous over what was happening. He stepped into the middle of the dispute to calm Ted down & told him not to sue, but just to withdraw the poem from the paperback project. Since Ted didn’t live in the city & didn’t have enough funding to pursue the lawsuit process, he had to give up the idea of suing the press & the editor. He took his rights back & withdrew his poem from the Portable Beat Reader project. Steve & I were there to witness the whole episode from the beginning to end.

drawing center EC show; beat scenes; nyu beat conference; whitney beat show

In 1993, the Drawing Center in NYC had a major Exquisite Corpse show. Ted had a few pieces in it. He pointed at one of them & said, “This is the only Exquisite Corpse done by ‘colored artists’ alone.” Too bad I don’t remember the names of the artists, but I’m sure Wifredo Lam was one of participating artists. Being a Surrealist, he was extremely thrilled to be in this show, naturally.

Interest in the Beats got hotter & hotter in the late 80s & the early 90s. In 1994, NYU organized the first academic Beat Conference. The conference committee invited the original Beats (*most of them were still alive then) & scholars to discuss the Beats & the Beat Generation. Although Ted was a big part of the Beat Scene, he was totally excluded from both the conference & the Beat art exhibition. Not only was he excluded as a participant, but he also never got an invitation as audience either. He happened to be in town when the conference was taking place. So, Ted, Steve & I decided to do a “party-crash,” instead of buying expensive (*totally “un-Beats” highly priced) conference passes. We walked into the space where every surviving original Beat knew Ted. Walking in with Ted was our “free pass” to the event. We went to the performance space where David Amram was doing a jam session on the stage. David recognized Ted right away & asked him to come up to the stage, which he did. The rest is history. One of the most beautiful improvisational scat-duets ever done with a call & a response, trading & cutting, talking, walking, running & everything. Steve & I cheered him, shouting, “Go Ted! Go!” as the duet got hotter & hotter. Ted was never bitter about the exclusion although he felt curious as to why he was totally excluded. At the end, everybody embraced him, welcoming him back to Greenwich Village, where they had all spent the days of their youth. Organized mainly by white academia, the Beat conference took place around Washington Square Park, where he taught me its history of having been a slave market.

Although Ted painted, drew & did collages and majored in Fine Arts in the university, he was never invited to be part of the Beat visual art show, which took place at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, where they showed artwork by the original Beats such as paintings by Kerouac & Burroughs, photographs by Ginsberg & drawings by Corso… either. After the NYU Beat Conference, interest in the Beats accelerated. In 1995, the Whitney Museum organized the show Beat Culture & the New America, 1950-1965. This time, Ted got an official invitation from the museum to exhibit his painting Bird Lives (1958, oil on canvas board). It’s a minimalist black silhouette of Bird, Charlie Parker, playing a horn painted on a white background. He asked us to be the caretaker of the painting since he was traveling somewhere. We kept it in our apt. until the curator came to pick it up. It was like living with the history itself.

David Amram & Ted Joans Scat
NYU Beat Conference, NYU, Greenwich Village, NYC

new york city

Ted usually showed up, unannounced, like a migrating bird when the season changed (* very much like Michelene) & he had his routine. The first thing he would do upon arriving was to go up to Harlem to buy the best sweet potato pie in the city & to visit Charles Henri Ford at the Dakota building. (*Photographer Indra Tamang chronicled their friendship well) Then, he came downtown to see us. I remember hearing him whistle Bird or Monk tunes walking up the stairs to our door. His whistling of Bebop tunes was like a birdcall: when we heard it, we knew he was in town. Those were the pre-intercom system days.

In this busy city, he knew how to find a place where he could rest, sit, and write, read & draw. He knew how to make one corner of a public space into his private study or a salon. He hated to spend money in the restaurants, so we ate in the cheapest (but good) restaurants possible. We did “exquisite corpus;” did Teducation Super 8 film shooting; went to galleries & art shows, openings & other cultural & music events together.

Ted had several close personal friends who formed his NYC family over the years. Hy Shorr, Steve & myself, Tuli Kupferberg, Arlene Jordan, Harry Nudel, Lorie Reinstein, Ed Clark, Melvin Edwards & Jayne Cortez… & later Robin D. G. Kelley & Diedra Harris-Kelley. Everybody did whatever s/he could to help him. Some gave him accommodations, some stored his possessions such as books, some found materials from the streets for his future art projects & etc. He knew our place was too small to store anything or to give him accommodations (except for some rare emergency situations). So, he gave us the easiest job of keeping his name on our mailbox to receive his mail sent here to NYC. He stayed mostly at Hy Shorr’s 101 MacDougal St. ground floor apartment. Now, it’s gutted out & has become a grilled cheese shop. Whenever I walk by it, I wonder how he would feel seeing the change not only in Greenwich Village, but also in the whole city.

Silent Poems & reading @  Soho Photo Gallery, NYC, 1992
Todd Capp, Hy Shorr, Betty Hamilton, Ted Joans, Yuko Otomo, Steve Dalachinsky

paris

Ted moved to Paris in 1961 & made the city of light his main “nest.” He knew the city so well from every angle, historically & creatively. He was a great guide to the city from a creative & art historical perspective. He took us to the church where the first Surrealist gathering had taken place; to where Gertrude Stein lived & had her salon; to where Beckett lived… & to Man Ray’s studio right before it was demolished. I remember bats flying above us that night. He showed us the original statue of liberty in Jardin du Luxembourg where we did a Teducation super 8 film shooting. He knew the city’s charms. He took us to the rooftop of La Samaritaine department store to see the 360 degree panoramic cityscape. He was a long time, close friend of George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare & Co. He had known the current owner, George’s daughter, Sylvia, since she was born… so, even now, in the back of the bookstore, in the alcove altar, you can see Ted’s image forever preserved.

After moving out of the apartment in Rue St. Genevieve, he lived in a small place near Bois de Vincennes. It was not even an apartment; it was a small square room with a small sink & a cot. Boxes after boxes of his treasures, mostly books, correspondences & other artifacts he’d collected over the years neatly piled up, occupied most of this tiny space with one window looking out to the typically French white beige stonewalls of the next building. This totally organized; totally clean; totally “quiet” soundless space had a feeling of a medieval monk’s habitat. He had an old fashioned toilet outside the apt. Pointing at his humble small bed, or a cot to be more accurate, he said, “I sleep, read, make art, edit Teducation films here.” He had no phone.  So, in order to be in touch with him, we had to go to Shakespeare & Co. to leave him a note or go to Café Le Rocquet on rue La Rocquette on the left bank. The Madam of the café loved Ted. So did people who worked there. Read his poem Chez Café La Roquet in Double Trouble (Edition Bleu Outremier 1992, a joint book with Hart Leroy Bibbs). He held a salon whenever he felt like it causally on the left corner of the terrace with his “no smoking” signs written in multiple languages, usually in the afternoon till whenever. He picked this less fancy, more traditional neighborhood café for his joint, not too far from aux Deux Magots & Café de Flore, avoiding tourists & overpriced coffee. With Paris being his main nest of activity, he expanded his life all over Europe & Africa.

timbuktu

Every winter, Ted moved down to Timbuktu in Mali to avoid the Paris cold. Like a migrating bird, he flew to the warm climate. He had a mud house with the arrangement of care all year long from the villagers there. Making Timbuktu his main nest for his adventures in his motherland, Africa. He traveled all over the continent, sometimes even on foot (like Rimbaud had). He wanted to touch the native soil to study everything it offered; its history; its culture; its language… He was the first one to tell me about the medieval University of Timbuktu & its library. He explained to me that Timbuktu was one of the centers of intellectual life in the Africa before European colonization & exploitation of the continent destroyed the fabrics of rich African culture.

He also taught me that our favorite expression, “WOW,” originated in Africa. Read BLACK POW-WOW (Hill & Wang, 1969). He took a last trip there with Laura Corsiglia a few years before he passed away as if he’d had some unknown premonition. He asked me what I wanted him to bring back from there. I said, “Sand from the Sahara Desert!” & he did. He really brought me back a small portion of sand from the desert. He met all the villagers as if to say a last good bye to them. After Ted passed away, poet Bob Holman visited the village & managed to find the house where Ted had lived. He met & talked to the people who knew him & shot some video documentation. Since then, the political situation in the region has changed & Mali is not the same, as Ted knew. What happened to Ted’s house & his villagers there, I wonder?

honey spoon

One of the most beautiful books of his is in my palms. It’s a perfectly square 4 & 3/4 x 4 & 3/4 inch 75 page book. The front cover has a drawing of 3 spoons with the title “honey spoon” & “by ted joans.”.It was published by Jim Haynes’ Handshake Press, Paris in 1991. Our copy is the 1993 version reprinted in Vilnius, Lithuania. The book was dedicated to Ahmed YaCoubi: Africa’s First Modern Artist 1928 – 1985. In ‘An Acknowledged Forward”, Ted talks of the genesis of the book:

To so many women I owe thanks for their wise companionship while being une femmoiselle which helped toward the success of my many Saharan adventures. This HONEY SPOON began in Tangiers Morocco on December 30 1990 as a birthday poem for my friend the writer PAUL BOWLES. The Poem developed into riffs of prose starting with HE, just as though I was blowing a trumpet solo telling about something through music on the horn and the riff was soon picked up into a swinging statement that still started with HE and the results is the prose because simply a long-winded-short story. It was completed in ten days, but Paul Bowles never heard it, only the title was told to him HONEY SPOON… 

It is an improvisational prose writing of his African adventures. Every line ends without periods with occasional comma inserts.  It is written as if it’s an instrumental solo. Remember, he played a trumpet when he was young. The story moves with such a freedom & natural intuition, you just follow listening to him blow the poetic trumpet. The story is sandwiched with 2 etchings of the travelers in the old days, one of the sea & the another of the land. The story was handwritten in a notebook as he traveled, & it begins with CHAPTER 1:

He was awakened by the baneful moaning of the cruisers and the many freighter boats plying through the thick morning fog He rubbed his eyes yawned and swerved his body out of the bed His cotton pajamas were wet from nightmare sweat of the honey spoon He walked over to the heavily draped French window and pulled back the drapes, looked out into the fog which was now slowly surrendering to the pale silvery early morning sun

He felt a bit chilly so much so that he decided not to take a morning shower thinking that there may not be any hot water anyway H washed up at the sink by the feeble florescent bulb above it that blinked as he brushed his teeth threatening to go off at any moment

He put on his well-worn safari suit it had been used in all his African travels it was still in fair condition no holes no thread bare or other disintegration He went out of his room locked the door strolled down the stairs and left his key at the desk where he was greeted by the cherub faced hotel manager and returned the greeting and left

& the story moves on to CHAPTER 7 & ends with:

He did not err with honey spoon where all possibilities were wisely counseled thus he knew that the cutiful woman followed by the small blond pony would eventually be with He in the l’Oasis Rouge Hotel where the rooms have bas-relief sculptured walls that enhance euphoric feelings resulting ina sexual desire of dizziness at the gem of the sahara aptly called Timmimoun a sister city to Tombouctou – Timbuktu a place very soon to be where He and the cutiful she would have as a reality although she has always said “no bed, I only want to go to Timbuktoo with you”

He dug his tongue inside the dry honey spoon getting another good taste and he heard a long distant femmoiselle’s voice whisper: ‘Au Sahara rein n’est tout a falt certain’

The book ends with the last page of a photo image of a man & Ted’s writing that says:

Who is HE, where is HE now? You can see. HE did not write Honey Spoon but poet Ted Joans did. Ted Joans was 22,300 days old when Honey Spoon was created, but his son was younger. 

The back cover has the mirror image of the title & the drawing of 3 spoons. What a gem!

Ted gave us such a sweet inscription on this book. That was the year I introduced him to the world of William L. Hawkins. Look at the bottom left corner that he wrote *W.L.H! Yes, it was an autumn in New York October.

Nest

Whenever I complained about our small tenement apartment, Ted always corrected me, saying, “No, no, no! It’s great! It’s beautiful! It’s a ‘SUPER’ NEST!” His humble & joyful reaction to my complaints taught me how to appreciate what I had. For him, what we need is not a house, but a nest: a nest to fly away & to come back to sleep, just like birds or animals do. He had no sense of owning property. Owning something such as a house or a car was like having a weight or burden that deprived him of having the freedom to move around. Interestingly, he always related himself with Bird, or, birds.

animals

Ted loved animals & knew well all about them. He had his personal animal to love & to associate with. His was a rhinoceros as Laura’s was a bear. He drew it often as his signature seal & actually had a personal rubber Rhino stamp. I regret that I’d never asked him when & how his love affair with the rhinoceros had started. One of his favorite museums in NYC was the Museum of Natural History. He frequently visited there. He taught me about advar, okapi & other exotic animals. One of his books is titled Okapi Passion that was published by Ishmael Reed in 1994.

picnic/ tree hugging

Since Ted had no space to greet his guests in his place, he used the café corner for his salon & parks for a dinner or a lunch with friends. He called it “a Picnic.” He invited us to join him for a picnic if the weather was agreeable & the season was enjoyable. We did many “le dejeuner sur l’herb,” bringing food & drinks & joyful spirit outdoors in parks in NYC & in Paris. He also loved & respected trees. Occasionally, suddenly, he stopped walking & asked us to wait for a second & hugged a tree, giving his love back to it.

opening doors

Ted introduced me first to Bill Traylor, Adolfo Wolflie, Graciela Iturbide, Chantal Regnault, Kati Horna, Hannah Hoch…  Because of Ted’s advice, Steve & I saw a great Wolflie collection in Kunsthaus while in Bern, Switzerland. I introduced him to William Hawkins in return & he was extremely happy to know his art. He wanted us to meet Francisco Toledo who’d made an art library & a library for the blind in Oaxaca, Mexico. He sent us postcards to persuade us to come down there every year for “the Day of the Dead.” Unfortunately, we never joined him for one of his favorite festivals in one of his favorite countries.

race

“There are 3 basic types of human ‘race’ like 3 threads weaving us all together…” he said to me one day.  “You are a mongoloid. & I am a negroid & Steve is a caucasian.” He said it so straightforwardly that I learned something vital about race. When I told him about “the blue birth mark in every newborn Mongoloid baby’s butt that appears & disappears,” he was extremely enchanted.

the truth

Whenever I see people walking down the street, talking out loud to him/herself, I think of Ted’s signature poem The Truth. He passed away right before the cell phone culture exploded into our society.

The Truth

if you should see

a man

walking down a crowded street

talking aloud

to himself

don’t run

in the opposite direction but run toward him

for he is a POET!

you have NOTHING to fear

from the poet

but the TRUTH

people he knew

He knew everybody, then & now, everywhere (as Steve wrote in his poem titled Ted Joans). Not to mention his music circle, just in the art & the poetry worlds alone, he knew everybody from Dali (*he named one of his daughters Dalin) to Giacometti to Breton to Charles Henri Ford to Joseph Cornell to Weegee to Roberto Matta to Wifredo Lam to Langston Hughes to Aime Cesaire to Paul Bowles to Jack Kerouac to Gregory Corso to Bob Thompson to Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Tuli Kupferburg to Jack Micheline to Hetti Jones to Diane Di Prima to Allen Ginsburg to Jayne Cortez to Melvin Edwards to David Hammons to Pedro Pietri to Steve Cannon to Franklin Rosemont to Ed Clark to Philip Lamantire to Lamont Steptoe to Ntozake Shange to Gerald Nicosia to Stephen & Gloria Tropp to Ishmael Reed to Quincy Troupe to Amiri & Amina Baraka to Robert Creeley… As a matter of fact, Creeley loved Ted & invited him to Buffalo in his later days & wrote a beautiful obituary when Ted passed away. We also met Bernhard Streit & Norbert Nowotsch, our life long best friends in Switzerland & in Germany & a Mexican visual artist Katya Gardea Brown, directly & indirectly through Ted. He connected us all to each other to form a true human race. He taught me how to have my own belief & value system. More than anything else, as I said in the beginning of this tribute, he taught me how “to live a poem-life,” sharing a marvelous life together not just with other humans but with everything else on this living planet.

Ted had 2 memorials in NYC. One, a super-packed & energetic gathering of his old friends & admirers at the Bowery Poetry Club organized by Steve. The other took place at NYU organized by Robin D.G. Kelley where Cecil Taylor & Randy Weston played for him. Only Ted could have such a special tribute of having 2 giants of Jazz piano on the same stage, although it was not too well attended since nobody knew who Ted was in Academia!

The heartbreaking news of the extinction of his beloved animal, the African black rhinoceros, was officially announced very recently. What would Ted think of the world we now live…?

Africa

Africa I guard your memory

Africa you are in me

My future is your future

Your wounds are my wounds

The funky blues I cook

    are black like you – Africa

Africa my motherland

America my fatherland

Although I did not choose it to be

Africa you alone can make me free

Africa where the rhinos roam

Where I learned to swing

Before America became my home

Not like a monkey but in my soul

Africa you are the rich with natural gold

Africa I live and study for thee

And through you I shall be free

Someday I’ll come back and see

Land of my mothers, where a black god made me

My Africa, your Africa, a free continent to be

                                  

NOW’S THE TIME!
Let’s get TEDucated!

According to Robin D.G. Kelley, Ted completed his memoir Collaged Autobiography before he passed away, & the manuscript is waiting for the right publisher. What a remarkable experience for us it will be to read his words describing his surreally lived marvelous life!  He has many other unpublished works, novels & more poems. His Super 8 Teducation Films were never fully shown in public except for a few small showings. How fantastic it would be to see his “Silent Poems” (* that’s what he called his film work…) in the right circumstances to be shared by us all! Interestingly, more & more materials relating to Ted are surfacing online. We can now read some of his previously inaccessible published work & see him read.

As we were looking for something in our cluttered tenement apt. the other day, we accidentally found some cassette tape recordings of Ted’s various readings. One of the most interesting tapes was “Some Sum of Poems 1967 – 82.” In this, you can hear Ted’s collaborations with great musicians such as Lol Coxhill & Jimmy Garrison.

His archives went to a few places. The major part went to The Bancroft Library in UC Berkeley, some (such as his correspondence with Charles Henri Ford) to the University of Delaware & to a few other universities, including NYU. These archival materials should be fully studied for everyone’s benefit. I am always amazed to acknowledge the fact that Ted was the only black Beat out of 3 black Beats (Ted, Baraka & Kaufman), who actually walked on every available soil of the continent of Africa. He was one of the rare “first-hand” scholars of Africa who studied the motherland from the Afro-American point of view, reversing time & its historical cycle. He explored to learn the language/culture of the continent of his origin tirelessly.

In this time of the ongoing layered complications over race & other socio/political problems we face, Ted will be the perfect person who can offer us some keys to open new doors in order to see things in clearer & creatively different perspectives. He will generously share the wisdom he (l)earned from his adventures if we are willing to open ourselves up to him. As his friend Charlie Parker beautifully spoke through his horn, NOW IS THE TIME for us to study Ted Joans & to get educated by him.

Let’s  get TEDucated!!!!!!!!!!!!!!NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

            Faces 

            I want to see faces

                    of  all races / winning faces / grinning faces / happy

            faces / faces that face East in prayer / faces covered &  uncovered with hair / faces up lifted & proud / faces of joy of being in love / faces of yesterday, today, NOW & tomorrow faces / faces that erased war / faces that destroyed ignorance, disease, & hunger / faces that faced the tasks & won / freedom faces / faces of one nation and that nation is the human being congregation of faces / freedom faces / I

                                    want to see faces / I want to see faces / I want to see faces / I want to face me

Article to come in  Improjazz Magazine d’information musicale