Jail Poems by Bob Kaufman

First published: 1965, in Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Jail Poems” is a collection of thirty-four numbered lyric strophes (irregular stanzas) that vary in length from one to fourteen lines and function together to convey a series of related though disparate images for the reader. The title of this poem not only sets the mood but also reveals the setting in which the poem is reported to have been written and serves as a recurrent theme throughout. From his perspective inside the jail, the narrator describes the various sensory and reflective perceptions of an inmate, variously turning his eye toward his surroundings, his fellow inmates, the society that put him in jail, and himself.

The first section of the poem describes the narrator’s immediate surroundings: what he sees, what he hears, and how he interprets the situations of the other occupants of the jail. The second section is more oriented toward the senses, concentrating on visual imagery at first, then moving toward the auditory. The third section takes a philosophical approach, asking “who is not in jail?” and theorizing about the degree to which human beings can “know” things that are outside their own experience. In the fourth section, the narrator speculates about the perceptions of others and questions his own motivations. Thus the poem proceeds, asking difficult questions and then answering them not from the perspective of a “universal truth” but from the unique position of one person in a particular context, the salient feature of which is the jail cell in which the narrator is incarcerated while pondering these issues.

The various sections follow one another as if the reader was following along with the wandering thoughts of the narrator’s stream of consciousness. Thus the narrator’s discomfort at the death of a “wino” in an adjacent cell (section 5) is followed by focused introspection about the turns of his own life (section 6). Questions about the nature of existence (section 7) are answered with the certainty of sensory perception (sections 8 and 9). As the poem proceeds, the narrator’s thoughts become more diffuse and more fragmented until, at the end, they become surreal as the narrator entreats, “Come, help flatten a raindrop.” Taken individually, the sections and the lines within them offer a montage of sensory images interspersed with philosophical questions and angry invective. Together, however, the poem paints not just an image of jail life but also an image of a narrator who is separated from society by more than the iron bars that imprison him.

Like many lyric poets, the narrator draws his power from the vividness of personal description. In “Jail Poems,” however, there is a tension between the personal nature of the experiences and the necessarily public sphere in which they occur. Perhaps it is because of this tension that the poem vacillates between personal observations specifically made by the narrator and more casual observations that might have been made by a passerby. The former are more numerous, but the narrator seems to be reminding readers that part of the reality of being imprisoned is that one is, at all times, exposed to public view. As the poem progresses, the casual commentary decreases and the observations become more personal and more cryptic until, at the end, the narrator seems to have shut out the outside world altogether and retreated into himself.

Forms and Devices

“Jail Poems,” like much of Bob Kaufman’s poetry, exemplifies the oral tradition associated with the Beat poets of the 1950’s and 1960’s, many of whom were influenced by the music of their era, especially jazz. Rhythmic lines such as “ Here—me—now—hear—me—now— always here somehow ” allow the reader to hear—even feel—the cadence that is present when the words are spoken aloud. Additionally, the nonuniformity of the poem’s sections mimics the irregular measures of jazz music, varying between long, drawn-out wailings and short, intense, angry bursts, all of which are held together by the commonality of the unwavering depth of the feelings that inspire them. The Beat poets were reacting against rigid stylistic conventions, eschewing not only regulated rhyme schemes and uniform meter but also formulaic stanzas and consistency of perspective and case. By rejecting the rules of their predecessors, the Beat poets created a style that was fluid and resembled spoken discourse or even thought processes. In fact, Kaufman, who preferred to deliver his poems orally, is said to have resisted their publication, preferring to recite his own poetry (and that of others) from memory whenever the opportunity presented itself.

The Beat poets rejected common formulaic constructions as well, avoiding the binary relationships that are found in other styles of poetry and rejecting simple themes such as male versus female, us versus them, and now versus then in favor of more obscure or complicated depictions that, they asserted, more accurately portray the human condition. Although “Jail Poems” represents the judicial system in a negative way, for instance, it does not portray it as a singular structure, solely responsible for the narrator’s misery, that can be readily identified, confronted, and overcome. Rather, Kaufman implies that there are multiple causes of the wretchedness he describes, ranging from the police who “batten down hatches of human souls” to the Muscatel that contributes to “wine-diluted blood.”

Surrealist imagery is a third characteristic that “Jail Poems” shares with other examples of Beat poetry. Exemplifying this feature are lines such as “One more day to hell, filled with floating glands,” which abuts two or more contrasting, concrete images in such a way that meaning is accentuated by the difficulty of picturing the image itself. Many of the shorter sections (10, 12, 13, and 23, for example) consist entirely of these contrasting images, which heighten the reader’s sense of the absurdity of anyone who would condemn the likes of Socrates or turn the American Dream into something that mocks a group of people rather than empowering them. Surrealist imagery expresses visually the same dissonances that loose structure expresses in terms of form.