Black Surrealist

Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own "lifepoem." Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these labels adequately capture the beauty and complexity of his life and work. A painter and musician who ultimately made his name as a writer, Joans defies easy categorization: known to students of Beat lore as bon vivant of the New York bohemian scene of the 1950s, he left this scene in 1961 to connect with his African roots and live in the remotest place he could think of: Timbuktu. For the rest of his life Joans moved between Timbuktu and Paris, Tangier and New York City, earning the moniker "tri-continental poet." In the over 30 books of poetry and prose he published in his lifetime, Joans makes visible links among key artistic and political movements of the 20th century that are seldom discussed together: Surrealism, the Beat movement, Pan-Africanism, and Black Power. Joans''s connection to these movements is best understood through his relationships with a dazzling array of cultural and literary figures, from Beats Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, to Black writers Langston Hughes, Hart Leroy Bibbs, and Ishmael Reed, Surrealists Andre Breton, Charles Henri Ford, and Joyce Mansour, as well as countless other writers, artists, and musicians. Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, this critical literary biography explores Joans''s life and times as told through these relationships and through his remarkable output of creative work, which often explored his life and its connections to wider aesthetic and political experiences of the 20th century. Black Surrealist is the foundational book on Ted Joans, a singularly important 20th-century figure.>

List of contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Part I. Poem-Life
1. Life As Art
2. Born Swinging
3. The Mystery of Theodore Jones, Sr.
4. Famous in Louisville
Part II. Biting the Big Apple
5. The Most Celebrated Actress in the World
6. Inside the Magnetic Fields
7. Home to Harlem
8. The World of Langston Hughes
9. Babs Gonzales and the Origin of “The .38”
10. Greenwich Village, Experiment in Democracy
11. The Mau Mau Take Manhattan
12. Salvador Dalí at the St. Regis
13. Meeting Joyce and the Galerie Fantastique
14. Bird Lives!
15. The Coming of the Beat Generation
16. Coffeehouse Connection
17. Poet-In-Residence at Café Bizarre
18. Funky Jazz Poems
19. All of Ted Joans and No More
20. If You Should See a Man . . .
21. The Notorious Rent-a-Beatnik Business
22. The Hipsters
23. André Breton and the Seeds of Self-Exile
Part III. Africa and Beyond Africa
24. Tangier / Interzone
25. “The Rhinoceros Story”
26. Timbuktu Ted
27. Grete Moljord
28. “Spadework: The Autobiography of a Hipster”
29. Babyshow
30. Happenings in Copenhagen
31. On the Black Arts Movement and Négritude
32. Meeting Malcolm X
33. Black Cultural Guerilla
34. A Black Man’s Guide to Africa
35. Black Pow-Wow to Afrodisia
36. New Doors to Surrealism
37. Spetrophilia and the Dutch Scene
Part IV. Hip Ambassador to the World
38. Le Griot Surrealiste
39. Festac ’77 to USIS
40. “Deeper Are Allyall’s Roots”
41. In Residence in West Berlin
42. Dies und Das: A Magazine of Contemporary Surrealist Interest
43. The Seven Sons of Lautréamont
44. “Razzle Dazzle”
45. Teducation Films
46. Paris, Chance-Filled Paradise
47. Jim Haynes, Handshake Press, and Duck Butter Poems
48. Merveilleux Coup de Foudre at Shakespeare and Company
49. Laurated
Coda: Atmospheric Rivers

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Summary

Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own “poem-life.” Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these labels adequately capture the beauty and complexity of his life and work.

The proportions of Ted Joans’s life are legendary. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 1928, as a young man he distinguished himself as a Surrealist painter. In the early 1950s, he moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, where he opened the first Black-owned art gallery in the city, developed new styles of painting, and began reading his poetry in coffeehouses just as the Beat Generation was coalescing. A well-known raconteur and bon vivant on the Village scene, he threw elaborate parties (art events that prefigured the Happenings of the later 1950s), exhibited his “jazz action” paintings, and published poetry and collage books to acclaim. But at the height of his success, Joans left the States for Europe and Africa, and set up bases of operation in places such as Paris, Copenhagen, Tangier, and Timbuktu. He would spend the subsequent decades in constant movement around the globe, an itinerant poet, interdisciplinary artist, and self-styled “Surrealist griot” who was especially attuned to the magnetic power of chance encounters. He published some 40 books and booklets, and wrote much more that is still unpublished, including novels, autobiographies, and a comprehensive guide to Africa—all the while cultivating what he thought of as his greatest artwork, his own “poem-life."

Drawing on interviews and deep archival research, including discussions of Joans’s vast body of unpublished—and previously-unseen—work, Black Surrealist explores how he swam in streams of literary and artistic thought seldom discussed together: Surrealism, the Beats, Négritude, and Black Power, among them, while always remaining a true original. Ted Joans’s poem-life and body of work are unlike any other in the 20th Century, and Black Surrealist, illustrated with over 70 images, many never before published, is the first book to reckon with this singularly important poet-artist, and to show how and why his creative spirit lives on.

Foreword

The first critical biography of pioneering African-American writer Ted Joans.

Product details

• Authors: Steven Belletto
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 15.05.2025
• EAN: 9781501379550
• ISBN: 978-1-5013-7955-0
• No. of pages: 304
• Subjects: Biography: literary, LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, Beat style, Surrealism, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Poetry by individual poets, Biography: writers, POETRY / American / African American & Black, Black & Asian Studies, Literary studies: poetry and poets, Relating to African American / Black American people, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / African American & Black