Nothing to Fear From the Poet but the Truth

Ted Joans refused to separate the poem on the page from the poem that was his life. “Jazz is my religion, and Surrealism is my point of view,” he proclaimed. As Steven Belletto illustrates in his new biography Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans (Bloomsbury, 2025), Surrealism was not only an art movement for Joans. Facing “the abject vicissitudes and acts of racist violence that the white man in the United States has constantly imposed on me,” Joans wrote to André Breton, “Surrealism became the weapon that I chose to defend myself, and it has been and always will be my way of life.” From Surrealism, Belletto writes, Joans inherited a “non-literal orientation to the self,” characterized by “dreams, irrationality, pugnacious metaphor, [and] outré juxtaposition.” Joans viewed his life itself as a poem, and, as Belletto notes, we don’t “ask whether a poem is ‘fiction’ or ‘non-fiction’: the answer is yes.”

Joans’s friends, the Chicago Surrealists Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, called him “a wandering international instigator of surrealist chance encounters.” Joans himself extended the Surrealist principle of object chance to praise “the chance encounter of beautiful people or a beautiful situation, or a beautiful image.” He interacted with everyone from Langston Hughes to Jayne Cortez to Joyce Mansour. He produced the world’s longest cadavre exquis; had 10 children with four different women on three continents; opened the first Black-owned art gallery in New York; and crossed the Sahara Desert eighteen times.

Writing a biography of Joans poses a number of challenges. Biography reveals the breadth of his activities while often contradicting his own self-account. As a framing device, Belletto borrows Joans’s phrase “poem-life” as a way to encompass all of Joans’s activities without creating a hierarchy between them. His approach, he explains, is to “treat Joans’s autobiographical statements as Surrealized representations of his poem-life . . . I rely on them for his impressions and judgments but do my best to verify his historical facts before repeating them as such.” Drawing on detailed research into Joans’s archives at Berkeley and in the personal collection of Laura Corsiglia, Joans’s final partner, Belletto carefully traces the poet’s early activities in Louisville, Kentucky, through coverage in the local Black press and offers a detailed account of Joans’s subsequent years in New York. In the latter parts of the book, he offers a useful thread through the sometimes-bewildering array of encounters and locations that featured in Joans’s peripatetic life, along with useful glosses on and from Joans’s writings both published and unpublished. Joans’s legend can sometimes overshadow his writing. Belletto draws attention to Joans as a poet and artist while demonstrating that the two identities cannot be disentangled.

***

Joans’s poetic re-inscription of his life began with the most basic of facts. Born Theodore Jones, Jr. on July 20, 1928—the year of Breton’s Nadja and Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues”—he later changed his birth date to Independence Day, signaling both his commitment to liberation and the distance between the promise and the reality of American freedom. In 1909, his hometown of Cairo, Illinois, saw the lynching of William James, a Black man accused of murder—a public execution witnessed by 10,000 citizens. The Joans family moved to Chicago and, after his parents split up, Joans and his mother decamped to Louisville. Joans later claimed that a white mob murdered his father in Detroit in 1943. Horrific race riots had indeed occurred in Detroit, including one that was the subject of a photographic report in Life magazine that year. But Belletto unearths an obituary for Theodore Jones, Sr., in a 1975 issue of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. This is not simply to debunk the story, however. Joans’s poetic myth draws his father’s absence into the wider reality of anti-Black violence to create, in Belletto’s words, “a mythic tale replete with symbolism and appalling truths about endemic American racism.”

Joans wrote his first poem—about how he was barred from Kentucky’s segregated public libraries as a teenager—after hearing a recording of Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues.” In 1949, his satirical play Don’t Fucketh With Me, featuring “Mr and Mrs Blackass” and “Mr and Mrs Whiteass,” was staged at the University of Louisville’s Belknap Playhouse. Initially, however, Joans was known as a musician and a visual artist.

As a teenager, he appeared in Louisville newspapers for his activities as a bebop trumpeter who adopted the sartorial style of Dizzy Gillespie. He was soon known as a theatre manager, a painter, and a host of elaborate surrealist costume parties, acquiring the nickname “Louisville’s Salvador Dalí.” At a local Surrealist show in 1951, his works included portraits of Dalí, the Mona Lisa, and “local notables,” as well as a subversive image of Abraham Lincoln. Belletto notes that “Joans painted a whole series of portraits from the Lincoln statue in the park outside the Louisville Public Library, which at the time did not serve Black people.” Seeking to demolish the idea that Lincoln entered the Civil War to free the slaves, arguing instead that the sixteenth president acted primarily to keep the Union together, Joans depicted the Great Emancipator shitting.

***

In 1953, Joans left Kentucky for New York “to live as a bohemian,” splitting from his first wife, Joan Locke, and their child—a recurring pattern which took him away from what he saw as the confining pressures of domesticity and leaving women to do the work of child-rearing. “Enroll[ing] in th[e] university of Harlem streets to learn how to survive” and to “pay some Harlem dues,” he went every day to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on what is now Malcolm X Boulevard and visited the Savoy Ballroom, Lewis Michaux’s African National Memorial Bookstore, the Apollo Theater, and Small’s Paradise—all Harlem institutions dating back to the 1920s and ’30s. He also befriended the prototypical hipster Babs Gonzales, one of the “foremost hip professors of the streets.” But rather than Harlem, Joans’s base was Greenwich Village. Soon quitting his job as a UNESCO file clerk making clippings concerning African politics—“the last ‘good job’ that I would ever have,” he recalled—he resolved to make his living from art alone. He painted Surrealist canvases and “jazz action” paintings reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism, co-organized surrealist costume parties that paralleled the emergence of Happenings, and hustled. “No bread, no Ted,” went the familiar refrain.

Joans both capitalized on and satirized sensationalist newspaper coverage of the Beat Generation. He led “Greenwich Village Safaris” while dressed in a pith helmet, took Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher to the Cedar Tavern, and participated in the “Rent-a-Beatnik” scheme in which, for a fee, Joans and company entertained party guests with poems and bongo drumming. He also began to embrace the identity of poet. Realizing that Greenwich Village coffee shops offered a lucrative audience for poetry, he “divorced” painting for “my lucrative natural ‘mistress’ poetry,” and began to recite his work to largely white audiences, making as much as $400 a night. Joans’s classic poem “Jazz is My Religion,” which appeared in his first pamphlet, Funky Jazz Poems (1959), ironically signifies on the genre’s simultaneous Blackness and Americanness:

                                                                   Jazz is 
my religion its all American all the way like good 
God Almighty coca cola and the cowboy Jazz is here to 
Stay . . . 
Jazz is my religion it wasn’t for me to choose, 
’cause they created it for a damn good reason 
as a weapon to battle our blues

Through a Beat persona, Joans sought to educate—or, in his coinage, “Teducate”—white audiences on their own racial hang-ups. A poem such as “The Sermon” offers another ironic lecture on racism, insisting that whites “must help free our people behind the Cotton / curtain.” Joans was particularly influenced by what he called Langston Hughes’s “hand grenade poems” of the 1920s and ’30s: “deceptively simple poem[s] that could be read aloud to audiences and that make a clear . . . point.” Attending a Joans reading, Hughes remarked to him, “you gotta lotta nerve telling all these White folks how square they are, ain’t you scared?’ and gave Joans “that certain look that Black folks can convey to each other when in the midst of Whites,” as they “both exploded with laughter.”

Informed by the African knowledge obtained at UNESCO, Joans was also signifyin(g) on the political issues of the day. Responding to racist depictions of the Kenyan Mau Mau as murderous savages, Joans hosted a costume party called “Manhattan Mau Mau,” reading poetry while he and the great saxophonist Charlie Parker stripped to the waist, wearing face paint that anticipates that of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. In the unpublished “Mau Mau Manifesto,” he wrote: “Mau Mauism is completely opposed to nationalism in any form, thus the Mau Mau poets can write or speak in any tongues . . . Dig! The subconscious is the truth.”

For Joans, the Village formed an oasis of interracial democracy within a society that was, despite the loud trumpets of Cold War American Freedom, still largely undemocratic and segregated. In 1955, he met his second wife, Joyce Wrobleski, with whom he went on to have five children, and opened a storefront art gallery called the Galerie Fantastique on St. Mark’s Place, the first Black-owned gallery in the city.

Yet the Village was not without its problems. During the last months of Charlie Parker’s life, Joans lived in a freezing cold-water flat with Parker and the “saintly hip philosopher” Ahmed Basheer. For Joans, Parker’s death in the hotel room of the “Jazz Baroness” Nica de Koenigswarter in 1955 signalled the fragility of the Black artist in America, worn down by racism and addiction and rampant commercialism. Parker died in that hotel suite laughing at the TV, and in the memorial poem “Birdeath,” Joans writes, “TV brought death to the bird”: he would later satirize the corrosive effects of mass media in the figure of the “TV Man” during Happenings he staged in Europe.

As “a surrealist operating in beat waters,” Joans was frustrated with the growing commercialization of Beat bohemia—more a lifestyle to be gawped at by middle-class voyeurs than a genuine artistic underground. The Hipsters (1961), a book of ironically captioned collages, ruthlessly satirized this trend with images taken from James W. Buel’s colonial apologia Heroes of the Dark Continent (1890), turning Greenwich Village into a stereotypical African village populated by a cast of characters including “The Cool Hipster, The Jivey Leaguer, The Creepnik, The Folknik, The Hipstressnik, and The Hipper-Than-Thounik.” Meanwhile, the police cracked down on beatniks as part of a battle for real estate. In 1961, Joans attended a mock “funeral for the Beat Generation” in director Robert Cordier’s apartment.

In 1960, Joans left the US for the first time with Joyce, travelling through five different European countries in search of Surrealism. Arriving in Paris, he ran into André Breton on the street, in what he saw as an illustration of Surrealist Objective Chance. When Joyce returned to the US, Joans stayed behind, living at the Beat Hotel in Paris and conducting an affair with the 21-year-old Christine Gondre. Running out of money, he soon returned to the States, but in November 1961, he left again, effectively for good.

***

“This is a self-imposed exile,” Joans told Jet magazine. “I’m disgusted and unhappy with America because of racial discrimination and the general attitude toward artists in this country . . . I plan to stay away until America has its moral revolution.” In a text titled “Last Words,” he wrote: “I’m splitting and letting America perish in its own vicious puke.”

In leaving the States, Joans wrote himself into the broader motion of history: decolonization, free jazz, Pan African Festivals, Paris Surrealism. He spent summers in Europe—often in Paris—and winters in Africa, renting a house in Timbuktu for between $5 and $25 a year. His poem “Afrique Accidentale” was written in Timbuktu in April 1962 and appeared in City Lights Journal the following year. Joans’s narrative of places and destinations throws in the occasional French word and a sly dig at Glenn Miller’s 1941 song “Chattanooga Choo Choo”:

Back on the boat, now bound for Afrique, I float, 
Land in Dakar, destination Timbuctu, not so very far 
Dakar/Niger chemin de fer, Tombouctou, tres long 
   from here 
Thies, Diourbel, Kaffrine and sad Tambacounda 
there’s a sign to remember ViVe Notre Frère Lumumba 
Show ain’t no Chattanooga Choo Choo 
passengers wearing grigris and Western voodoo 
 

The poem ends by marking his distance from New York with a tongue-in-cheek appropriation of an ethnic slur:

As I lay here in a tent and write as I think 
Greenwich Village is long way off, with its coldwater flat 
      and sink 
I have traveled a long long way on the Beat bread I 
      made 
Now I’m deep in the interior of Africay, the only 
      Afro-american spade. 
 

Early in his travelling adventures, Joans spent time in the largely white expatriate scene in Tangiers, made famous as the Interzone of William S. Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch (1959). Joans associated with Burroughs and novelist Paul Bowles, but he was perhaps closest to Moroccan painter Ahmed Yacoubi, whom he termed the “North African Babs Gonzales” and who taught him a “smattering of Moroccan Arabic.”

With occasional support from wealthy patrons like Bowles, and, more often, a hand-to-mouth existence based on selling artwork and poems, Joans wrote prolifically, though much of this work remains unpublished. In one such text, The Rhinoceros Story, Joans adapts Burroughs’s and Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique, imbuing them with a sharper sense of racial history and colonial politics. He juxtaposes a history of European colonialism in Morocco with news reports on the Jim Crow South and, as Belletto writes, the “Arab[ic] servant under-class in the orbit of the city’s wealthy expatriate residents.”

In 1962 Joans married for a third time, to the 22-year-old Norwegian model Grete Moljord. He staged Happenings in Copenhagen and frequented Surrealist circles in Paris. He met Malcolm X at a bookstore reading organized by Présence Africaine and enthused over the music of Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor, on whom he wrote some of the earliest free jazz criticism in Europe.

He also observed the emergence of US Black Power. After Martin Luther King’s murder in 1968, he wrote to the Paris Surrealist group to ask for money to return “to the war front . . . where the revolutionary battle is being fought.” Or, as he puts it in the poem “Believe You Me!”:

I am going back 
I am black but I’m going back ... 
I am going back 
I’m going to r e t u r n 
to the land of Burn,Baby,B u r n! 
 

Though he soon left the US once more, Joans took part in two major Black Power conferences, the 3rd National Black Power Conference in Philadelphia and the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal, alongside the likes of Stokely Carmichael, Walter Rodney, and C.L.R. James, reporting on the events for countercultural newspapers and attracting the attention of the FBI.

Joans’s Black Pow-Wow (1969), a collection of jazz poems, adapts a figure from Native American ceremonial practice to refer both to the gathering of poems and to the Black Power gatherings that inspired them. Black Pow-Wow was Joans’s first full-length book since his departure from the States. While collecting some earlier work, it concentrates on the new Black Power poems he was writing. Many of the poems are in all-caps, like urgent telegrams or poems delivered from a podium. They turn on puns and end-rhymes, in a mode pitched between political speech and the kind of caustic routine he used to deliver on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene. “‘No Mo’ Kneegrow,” a poem “composed while flying over Birmingham; can be sung to the tune of ‘Oh! Susannah’”:

I’M     FLYING OVER     ALABAMA     WITH BLACK POWER IN MY 
   LAP 

I’M FLYING OVER     ALABAMA       PREPARING THE GREAT 
   BLACK SLAP 

ALL     YOU     HONEST     RACISTS      GIT THE HELL OFF MY BACK 

’CAUSE I’M     FLYING     OVER     ALABAMA 

’CAUSE   I’M  TIRED     OF      TAKING      CRAP 
 

As with his earlier Beat poems, Joans’s work from the late ’60s served as an education, only this time for a Black audience separated from their own history. “We must fall in love and glorify our beautiful black nation,” Joans writes in “A Few Blue Words to the Wise.” In the title poem of Black Pow-Wow, he calls for Black unity across the diaspora:

Unity is our thing/to swing!! 
Unity is what 
we many colored 
nations must do 
to get our face 
out of the white 
butt And 
start a life a new! THATS WHAT!! 
 

If this work was inspired by Black Power in the US, its primary focus remained Africa itself. In “Spare the Flies But Kill The Lies,” Joans writes of his chosen home:

Timbuctu? they snigger in London 
“Father told me there is no such place” 
Timbuctoo had universities and commerce 
“Mother said, Africans are the uncivilised race” 
Timbuktu is older than Paris or London ... 
It’s just bloody imperialist lies 
that they continue telling you 
 

In “This Poem Is,” Joans writes: 
 

this poem is 
                  black as magic in Africa 
this poem is 
                  read across counties, interstates plus international 
                                                                                         lines ... 
this poem is 
                   promoting pride of Africa’s future and great past 
this poem is 
                   inciting us to self defense ... 
together we are 
                   the poem        Forever    BLACK     POWER! 
 

Two different poems titled “Africa” feature in Black Pow-Wow and its follow-up, Afrodisia (1970). The first is dedicated to Abu Ansar, the editor of Black Newark who’d been imprisoned for refusing to serve in Vietnam, and it develops a chant-like refrain around a simple pun:

Africa 
   A free continent 
   A-FRI -CA 
   A free continent 
A free con ti nent ... 
A FREE CONTINENT 
              A   FRI    CA 
                               A    FREE  CO NTINENT 
                                                      A FRI CA 
                               A F R I C A 
A FREE CONTINENT 
                               to-be to-be to-be 
 

In 1969, Joans travelled to the Pan-African Festival in Algiers (PANAF), organized by the Algerian government as a non-aligned alternative to the more colonially oriented festival that Leopold Sédar Senghor organized in Dakar three years earlier. (Joans had refused to attend what he termed the “Senghor merde.”) PANAF, by contrast, featured US Black Power activists, Palestinian revolutionaries, and representatives of decolonizing African governments. (Joans’s papers include flyers from the Palestine National Liberation Movement, likely picked up in Algiers.)

At times, Joans’s observations of PANAF reproduced colonially gendered tropes, as scholar Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik has noted. Nonetheless, he was a key participant. At the festival’s triumphant closing event, he joined Archie Shepp’s band and an ensemble of Touareg musicians onstage, declaring: “We are Black and we have come back! Jazz is a Black Power! Jazz is an African music!”

Joans attended the 1977 follow-up, FESTAC, in Lagos, Nigeria, alongside Stevie Wonder, Miriam Makeba, and the Sun Ra Arkestra. As an outspoken critic of the government, Fela Kuti, Nigeria’s best-known musician, was not invited, and soon after the festival ended, a thousand troops burned his compound to the ground, murdering his mother. Unlike his earlier condemnation of the "Senghor merde," Joans does not seem to have commented on these issues. Yet, though his politics may not always have been consistent, and his hustling tendencies could rustle feathers, the contradictions of his life were, in many ways, the contradictions of his times, and he was always aware of the perils of tokenism, the Americanness still embedded within white and Black Americans alike, and the need for African independence.

***

In the late 1960s, publishers sought to cash in on Black Power as they had with the Beats. Black Pow-Wow and Afrodisia came out from Marion Boyars in London and Hill and Wang in New York, and Joans was paid a substantial advance by Grossman to write a travel guide to Africa. But as momentum waned, he returned to small presses, his books coming out in loving editions made by enthusiasts, friends, or Joans himself. In 1978, Jayne Cortez’s Bola Press put out Flying Piranha, a collaboration with Egyptian-born poet Joyce Mansour. Joans and Cortez shared a volume in French translation, Merveilleux Coup de Foudre, in 1982. And in 1983, Joans spent time in West Berlin on a DAAD scholarship, publishing the trilingual surrealist magazine Dies und Das.

Joans’s work of this period is generally harder to find than that of the Black Power era, printed as it was in smaller editions. His Surrealist side can be illustrated in a poem from Flying Piranha, “Laughter you’ve gone and . . .,” dedicated to fellow Black Surrealist Bob Kaufman and described by A. Robert Lee as a “magical realist surrealist blues poem.” Its title alludes to the jazz standard “After You’ve Gone,” and the poem switches tonal registers between elegy and celebration, with the fugitivity of the underground railroad, Duke Ellington’s and Billy Strayhorn’s A-train, and the plane that takes Joans away from the US uniting in a stream of speed. The poem ends mid-sentence, an open space into the future:

I poem my life to poetry . . . 
I mistake no incomprehensibles 
I saxophone reeds along the Nile 
I did take a subtrain to Afrika 
I found your hut vacant as 
laughter you’ve gone and 
 

In the words of reviewer John Olson, Joans’s later work is “quirky and jubilantly oral, keyed to the jingle-jangle jambalaya of speech.” Witness the bilingual punning of “Mammifreres,” for Surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris:

Langage: bagage, lent de l’espirit 
Invisible tongue luggage 
Let loose from the roof of our lungs 
 

Joans also wrote poems “in the tradition.” For instance, “Colored Choruses,” in memory of painter Bob Thompson, spins variants on the blues:

Many mother many mothers 
point toward others other 
and show where the real 
truth lies and cries 
 

Joans remained on the move. He associated with the Chicago Surrealists and made a series of Super 8 films. In 1991, he met his final life partner, the visual artist Laura Corsiglia, with whom he went so far as to move back to the States, relocating to Seattle. But after the acquittal of the four NYPD officers responsible for the 1999 murder of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed student from Guinea, “Laurated,” as the couple dubbed themselves, moved to Vancouver.

Joans’s poem for Diallo, “41 Bullet Lynch,” closes Our Thang, his 2001 collaboration with Corsiglia. Invoking the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, for whom Tasmania is named, along with the extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, and echoing Malcolm X’s famous phrase “by any means necessary,” Joans ends the poem:

Condemn them by 
Any means necessary: 
Stroll before their homes 
Scrawl or stencil forty one 
Near their frequented environs 
Attend their houses of worship 
Prey upon them psychological 
Release forty one means 
To each of the four to die 
Abel Tasman suggest this. 
 

As the ravages of colonialism have rendered species and humans alike extinct or near-extinct, so, Joans suggests, the favor should be returned on the killer cop. The poem’s opening images describe acid corroding innards. The poem itself is sharp and corrosive—flashes of the old “hand grenade poems” filtered through the shifting grammar and images of Surrealism: a poem appropriate to its subject matter and to its times.

In the twenty-five years since, the political situation has hardly improved.

***

Joans died from complications of diabetes in April 2003. Since then, Corsiglia has done much to safeguard his legacy, and Black Surrealist extends this work. As Belletto notes, however, this book is “nothing but a start, a first attempt.” Much of Joans’s work remains out of print. Indeed, it’s as a visual artist that his reputation is currently undergoing a revival, spurred by his inclusion in the big Surrealism Beyond Borders show at the Met and Tate Modern in 2022 and a recent solo show in Virginia. Yet poetry was the frame through which he understood the world.

Throughout the decades, one poem remained his calling card:

THE TRUTH 

If you should see 
a man 
walking down a crowded street 
talking aloud 
to himself 
don’t run 
in the opposite direction 
but run toward him 
for he is a POET! 

You have NOTHING to fear 
from the poet 
but the TRUTH

In 1968, an edition of this poem appeared in Amsterdam, translated into 37 languages. The poem’s final lines echo The Communist Manifesto and “you have nothing to lose but your chains,” while the description of the poet walking along and speaking aloud echoes Mayakovsky’s description of the poet in How are Verses Made?, “walk[ing] along, waving my arms and mumbling almost wordlessly, now shortening my steps so as not to interrupt my mumbling, now mumbling more rapidly in time with my steps.” This is poetry of a revolutionary tradition.

For Joans, poetry serves as a place to keep cultural memory alive and to contest it against forced erasure. In an introduction to Our Thang entitled “Why selected poems as autobiography?” Joans writes of “the point . . . at which the lived experience of poésie becomes transformed into cultural memory. Inevitably, there will be fewer and fewer witnesses to contribute to—or in my case contest—the ideas about the past.” Poetry preserves and maintains a history that runs parallel to—and sometimes against—the course of official and unofficial history. Here, the first-person is not only the assertion of an individual career or place in history, but the self as a portal to the collective—to “Black America / music / folklore . . . Bohemian America / Surrealist american / Europe.”

In the poem “All,” Joans addresses the poem itself, punning on the familiar legal oath and the American elision by which “I write you” can mean both “I write to you” and “I compose you”:

Dear poem . . .
I write you
because you
are the
truth
and
nothing but
the truth
dear poem
pure poem
our poem.

Joans’s work in such poems is intensely dialogic, always gesturing beyond itself. In this spirit, what may be his most distinctive project—and certainly the most (literally) extended—is a scroll entitled Long Distance, the world’s longest cadavre exquis, signed by everyone from Malcolm X to Joyce Mansour to Jayne Cortez to Ornette Coleman to David Hammons. The scroll was exhibited at the Met and the Tate Modern. In 2024, it was acquired for MoMA’s permanent collection, fulfilling a prophecy Joans made in 1961 when leaving the States.

But though he would have been flattered, the museum is not where Joans should end. For poetry removed from the process of life and living loses its poetic-ness, like the African objects looted and placed in Western museums, turned into art objects estranged from their original ritual or community function. Joans anticipated today’s debates about repatriating looted objects. “When these Black art creations are collected by non-animists and placed in museums or private collections, they cease to function. The spirits abandon these bits and pieces, thus leaving the new owner with ‘just a highly ‘artistic’ carving’ from Africa.” Something of this applies to Joans’s own work, too. As Belletto contends, “it’s a mistake to see his life, his poem-life, as categorically distinct from his . . . creative objects (poems, paintings, films, sculptures). As his friend Yuko Otomo put it . . . Joans felt that a poet’s ‘cosmic mission’ was to ‘live life as a poem.’”

It was in that spirit that, after Charlie Parker’s death, Joans organized a group of fellow admirers to go around graffitiing the words “Bird Lives!” on the walls of Parker’s former haunts. The phrase went on to become an iconic reference point for the bebop generation, who refused to see Parker as a tragic victim but instead as a living presence, a rebel whose sound lived on.

Bop was the music of “a community in transition,” wrote Langston Hughes, and, following Parker’s death, it was increasingly subject to its own commercial tension as the era of Rock ’n’ roll dawned. In years to come, the music would be caught between its embrace of liveness and improvisation and its status as a threatened artifact within North America’s short-lived cultural memory. Joans would play a role as a living historian of this music. At the same time, this artwork embraces the transient nature that Parker’s lightning-fast runs embodied.

In insisting that the graffiti be written in chalk and charcoal rather than the more persistent medium of paint, Joans ensures, as Belletto paraphrases scholar Amor Kohli, that the work “pays homage to Parker in its very form . . . echoing the intangible, dynamic and ephemeral quality of bop itself . . . as an ongoing project that is never ‘finished’ or ‘final.’” Likewise, the collective, anonymous “Bird Lives”—which we might well call a poem—goes beyond single authorship.

As the Comte de Lautréamont famously put it, poetry must be made by all, not by one. Ultimately, for a Surrealist, poetry must move beyond being a literary object, something separated from what is around it, and become a part of the world itself. Yet it’s also precisely in its autonomy that poetry enacts a realm of freedom that life too often denies. It is a survival tool, a place of fantasy, a report on reality, and a utopia, all in one.

In the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), André Breton writes:

The time is coming when [poetry] decrees the end of money and by itself will break the bread of heaven for the earth! There will still be gatherings on the public squares, and movements you never dared hope participate in. Farewell to absurd choices, the dreams of dark abyss, rivalries, the prolonged patience, the flight of the seasons, the artificial order of ideas, the ramp of danger, time for everything! May you only take the trouble to practice poetry.

Joans embodied these principles—the principles of poetic truth—throughout his peripatetic life. It is poetry which holds together all the myriad, mosaic fragments of Joans’s life and times. And in that life and in his poems, Ted Joans lives!