Teducation: Selected Poems (First edition-first printing)

Joans, Ted

ISBN 10: 1566890918 / ISBN 13: 9781566890915

Published by Coffee House Press, 1999

About this Item

VGC. Coffee House Press, 1999. First paperback edition-first printing (10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1). Paperback (a couple of creases and small nicks on the edges of the cover and spine) in VGC. Illustrated with b/w plates. Nice and clean pages with small ink marks and nick on the outer edges, small creases on the edges of the pages, previous owner's writing with red pen on the edges of some pages. The book is in VGC with light shelf wear. 242pp. A collectable and scarce first edition-first printing. This is another paragraph Book Description: 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.

Seller Inventory # 11975

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Teducation: Selected Poems (First edition-first printing)
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566890918
• ISBN 13: 9781566890915
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: First paperback edition-first printing.
• Condition: Very good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry, Drama & Criticism
  • Rare & Collectable Books

About this title

Synopsis

A much-awaited collection of poems by one of the greatest African American Beat poets.

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 one-time roommate of Charlie Parker and a contemporary of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman.

About the Author

Ted Joans, a painter, trumpet player, jazz poet, and travel writer, is the author of more than thirty-five books, including The Hipsters and Black Pow Wow Jazz Poems.

Joans earned a BFA from Indiana University in 1951 and then moved to Greenwich Village, where he was associated with Jack Kerouac and other members of the Beat generation of the 1950s. Joanss discontent with the treatment of blacks in America led him to move abroad, and he spent the next twenty years living summers in Europe and winters in Africa. Despite his absence from the u.s. Literary scene, his work was rediscovered during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.