Teducation
Reviews

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." Repudiating chronology, Joans splits his work into two alphabetically ordered sections: "Hand Grenade (Graded Poems to Explode on the Unhip)" includes straightforwardsly public and hortatory work; "Fertileyes and Fertilears" gathers more personal and whimsical poems. In an exciting era of performance poetry, renewed interest in all things Beat and committed probings of ethnicity, many new fans are certain to agree with Joans when he writes, "My poems are / immune to the uncouth/ These poems are only the truth." - Publisher’s Weekly