Terrance Hayes discusses Bob Kaufman’s poetry, followed by a Q&A, as part of the Poetry Society’s semiannual storefront lecture series.

Beat poet Bob Kaufman (1925–1986) was born in New Orleans and lived in San Francisco. There, he associated with the bohemian North Beach scene and edited the magazine Beatitude. A writer whose work is infused with the countercultural vernacular of his time, Kaufman performed his jazz-inflected, lyrical, surrealistic poems in San Francisco’s coffee shops and city streets. His first poetry collection, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, was published in 1965. In 2019, City Lights published The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, edited by Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, and Tate Swindell.

Terrance Hayes is the author of seven poetry collections: So to Speak; American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series, and Wind in a Box. His prose collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Whiting Foundation, and is a professor of English at New York University.