Speaking to a crowd at the Festival of California Poets in 2007, poet and scholar Harryette Mullen introduced Bob Kaufman’s woefully under-celebrated but critically acclaimed work by saying: “He often seems to be overlooked when people discuss African American poets, partly because he’s a Beat writer. And he often seems to be left out of a lot of Beat history because he was a Black writer.” She concluded her brief introduction to the poet by adding, “He dedicated himself to the antithesis of a literary career.”…
