The Ted Joans Page

Ted Joans Reading 1959
  Ted Joans was born on July 4, 1928 on a riverboat in Cairo, Illinois. His father, a riverboat entertainer, put him off the boat in Memphis at age twelve and gave him a trumpet. He is a painter, a trumpeter, and a jazz poet. His jazz poems are collected in a book called "Black Pow-Wow." He earned a degree in Fine Arts from Indiana University, and in 1951 joined "the Bohemia of Greenwich Village, USA." He has since recited his poems in coffeehouses in New York and in the middle of Saraha Desert to bookstores such as Recollection Used Books in Seattle. He has lived in Harlem, New York, Bloomington, Indiana, Haarlem, the Netherlands, and even Timbuktu. He presently resides in Seattle.
Afrodisia Book Cover
His books include:
 
 

 
This bent metal serpent/
holy horn with lids like beer
mug/ with phallic tail why did they invent you
before Coleman Hawkins was born ?
This curved shiney tune gut/ hanging lynched like/ J
shaped initial of jazz/ wordless without a reed when
Coleman Hawkins first fondled it/kissed it with Black
sound did COngo blood sucking Belges frown ?
This tenor/alto/bass/baritone/soprano/moan/cry &
shout-a-phone ! sex-oh-phone/tell-it-like-damn-
sho-isa-phone !What tremors ran through Adolphe
Saxe the day Bean grabbed his ax ?
This golden mine of a million marvelous sounds/black
notes with myriad shadows/or empty crooked tube of
technical white poor-formance/calculated keys that
never unlock soul doors/white man made machine saved
from zero by Coleman Hawkins !
This saxophone salvation/modern gri gri hanging from
jazzmen's necks placed there by Coleman Hawkins
a full body & soul sorcerer whose spirit dwells eternally
in every saxophone NOW and all those sound-a-phones
to be



 

'The Sax Bit' by Ted Joans

His work is characterized by a strong rhythm, and a musical language and sensibility closely linked to the blues and most importantly to best of the avant-garde jazz.
His style is associated with the oral tradition of African-American writing and to the Beat Generation.
Joans, along with Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones began their poetic careers in the artistic haven of Greenwich Village in the late fifties and early sixties.

Links:  Ted appears in "Jazz is Our Religion".
Read one of his poems, 'The Sax Bit' or herejoansart

Collage by Ted Joans, 1959. Used with his permission 


        Ted Joan Biography

Related sites:

           How to Speak Hip
          The Beat Scene
Alpha Beat Press
Kat Trax Tours
afrodisia 2
  

See Also:

BEATLAND
http://www.spress.de/beatland/homes_of/the_beat/margin/joans/info.htm
Charles Henri Ford's  Letters to Ted Joans
http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/fordjoan.htm
Empty Mirror Books
http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/joans.html

Teducation
http://secure01.win.net/aalbc/teducation.htm

Cordley Coit & his pal Ted Joans
http://free.freespeech.org/mw/Kwame.htm

Beat Generation Photographs, including Ted,  by Fred W. McDarrah
http://www.greatmodernpictures.com/newpage26.htm
 

Be here or be square!Contribute to this page!   If you have materials, please consider passing them on to us.
Thankfully there are many more resources on the Web these days than when we began this page.
Questions, contributions, etc., contact David Brown.


 
Thanks to Mitchell Smith.
Text of this page copped from Literary Kicks, where you can get lots
more Beat-related materials, background, personalities & texts.
Bio contributed by Sean Daniel Singer = ssinger@indiana.edu

 
 

Don't let the minute spoil the hour. -- Ted Joans 
See Jack Foley's Alsop review,
http://www.alsopreview.com/foley/jfjoans.html

"Well, for all intents and purposes Seattle stiffed at the Sunday AG [Allen Ginsberg] remembrance. I wasn't at either the Anne Waldman remembrance on Friday in Auburn nor at the Ted Joans reading in the U District on Saturday at Recollection Used Books ... but the Blue Moon was pretty much a ghost town on Sunday. Just goes to show that no matter how much you can try and do with the wonders of email and the net/web with only a few days notice it doesn't guarantee ANYthing. I tried.

--- REMEMBRANCE BY MALCOLM LAWRENCE, Sunday, April 13, 1997