Teducation: Selected Poems

by Ted Joans

Black Dues! Black Blues! Black News! , Ted Joans trumpets in his tribute to Langston Hughes. What Library Journal wrote in 1969 holds true today: "This collection of his work clearly reveals the influence of Langston Hughes, his mentor and friend. Joans, however, has the harsher and more strident tone necessary to accurately reflect today's society. As he says in one poem: 'We must fall in love and glorify our beautiful black nation / We must create black images / give the world / a black education.'"One of the first black poets to become involved in surrealism and a first generation Beat, Joans is an expatriate poet whose work is enjoying renewed interest. This major collection of poems written during the past forty years is a significant contribution to American letters. Teducation is the first single-volume collection representing the life's work of Joans, a once roommate of Charlie Parker and a contemporary of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman.

Energetic African American Beat poet, surrealist painter, longtime Paris-based expatriate, African traveler, jazz expert and jazz musician, the versatile 71-year old Joans (Black Pow Wow Jazz Poems) has published 35 books, but never, till now, a selected. Joans's rakish, unsatisfiable sensibility can make his work in Beat modes as technically innovative as Burroughs, as polemically exhuberant as Ginsberg and as comic as Corso. His early work, like theirs, depends heavily on surrealist modes; "The rhino roam in the bedroom/ where the lovely virgin wait/ the owl eats a Baptist bat/ adn God almighty is too late." The masterful longer "Timbuktu Tit Tat Toe" packs a few hundred years of Black America's relationship to aftica into four pages of giddy declamation. Likke Amiri Baraka (who lauds Joans's verse), Joans came to enbrace an aesthetic of people's poetry, creating exhuberant forms to meet his needs, stirring the pot with neologism and slogan, and calling on an arsenal of heroes from Malcom X to Jean-Michael Basquiat. "And Then There Were None" locates political rage in Louis Armstrong's famous grin: "you tried to turn him into your 'musical golliwog doll'/ you wanted his trumpet to blow what you said so/ you misinterpreted his wide smile." Repudiatin

Genres: Poetry

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Theodore "Ted" Joans was an American trumpeter, jazz poet and painter.

Joans was born in Cairo, Illinois, but not on a riverboat as had been claimed. He earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University. He later associated with writers of the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village and San Francisco. He was a contemporary and friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In the 1960s, Joans had a house in Timbuktu. He claimed to be a brother of Leroi Jones, despite the spelling difference, but this appears to be apocryphal.

Joans' painting Bird Lives hangs in the De Young Museum in San Francisco. He was also the originator of the "Bird Lives" legend and graffiti in New York City after the death of Charlie Parker in March 1955. Joans invented the technique of outagraphy, in which the subject of a photograph is cut out of the image.

Joans died in Vancouver, British Columbia due to complications of diabetes.

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased this book for the poem on Langston Hughes. I am not a big poetry fan but like Joans' beat style.

[Johari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ted Joans is cool. I'm not a huge fan of beat poets but this book got me.

[Amy Yue-Yin Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ted Joans is pretty raunchy, which is sure to offend some people, but personally, I found his raunchiness so hyperbolic and in such good humor that it won me over. Lines like "Call the police I don't give a damn they'll give us some rubbers!" made me laugh so hard I was crying.

[Pachyderm Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first, second, third, or fourth glance as. you perse this book, Ted Jeans very heavily appears to be influenced by Imamu Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones; no familial relation) in terms of social justice. and radial equality.
Joan's societal musings, along with his misgivings as presented here, read like both Langston Hughes and Claude McKay on sterioids, both of them being equal rights advocates from a somewhat equally turbulent and "culturally comatose. and corrosive" period of identical economic ditscontent coupled with American citizens both at war within hemselves at home as continuing contenders of cultural change, along with being enemies of both Communist and socialist ideas and the collective ideologies behind them a few decades earlier.