Black Beat: Performing Ted Joans

Abstract

Were a working synopsis—even, however unlikely, an academic-style curriculum vitae—to be sought for Ted Joans as Black Beat, then a number of touchstones immediately enter the reckoning. Foremost has to be his track record as long-published troubadour or strolling player. That embraces over thirty books, pamphlets, and broadsheets, which began with now largely unavailable small-press publications like Beat Poems (1957) and Jazz Poems (1959), had a follow-up in All of Ted Joans And No More: Poems and Collages (1961), Black Pow-Wow: Jazz Poems (1969), Afrodisia: Old and New Poems (1969), and that now looks to a most recent collection in Teducation: Selected Poems 1949-1999 (1999).1 Beat, to one or another extent, they all are—the “open” itinerant sense of life, the “open” poetic measure and wordplay to match, along with each invocation of the hip, the cool, the coun-tercultural. Yet, and at the same time, can it doubted that they also carry their own black particularity and sting, the work of a writer both Beat and, more specifically, Black Beat, Afro-Beat?

The Beat Generation played an important role in my life. I too have known some of the best Beat minds of that generation.

—“Je Me Vois (I See Myself),” Joans, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS), 242

I am the early Black Beat

I read with some of the

Best Beat minds

When the Apple was Beat Generating. …

—“I, Too, At the Beginning,” Joans, CAAS 227