Vancouver — Ted Joans, a Beat Generation poet whose work drew from the black American oral tradition and blended black consciousness with avant-garde jazz rhythm, has died. He was 74.
Mr. Joans was found dead in his Vancouver apartment May 7, said T. Paul St. Marie, an entertainer and family friend. He reportedly died April 25, and had been in poor health with diabetes.
"He was a true beatnik," said friend and publisher Michael Katz. "He was just a wonderful guy. A wonderful artist. His work will stand the test of time."
The poet was a contemporary and friend of Beat icons Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but never achieved their level of fame during a career that spanned more than 40 years. Yet he was considered an influential figure in U.S. literature.
"He was a character, a personality in his own right, a very lively person," Vancouver author Jamie Reid said. "He wrote poetry that influenced and was influenced by the Beat Generation."
At his death, Mr. Joans's career was enjoying a resurgence with the recent publication of the anthology Teducation.
Mr. St. Marie said that Laura Corsiglia, the longtime companion of Mr. Joans, was asking the poetry community to write in chalk on streets and sidewalks Ted Joans Lives as a tribute.
When jazz great Charlie (Bird) Parker died in 1955, Mr. Joans wrote "Bird Lives" on the streets of New York.
Mr. Joans was born on a riverboat in Cairo, Ill., on July 4, 1928. His given name was Theodore Jones but he later changed his surname to Joans to distinguish it from the more common spelling and, according to one source, because of a woman named Joan.
He earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University before moving to New York and honing his skills as a poet with the bohemian set of Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
While living in New York, Mr. Joans was inspired by the jazz music that surrounded him and he began to write jazz poetry, poems that were accompanied on stage by jazz musicians.
Although he had played the trumpet for several years, Mr. Joans began to focus more on words while he lived in New York.
During that time, he and Leroi Jones (a.k.a. Amiri Baraka) were the only African-American poets on the New York beat scene.
His work is characterized by a black consciousness, and has a musical language closely linked to the blues and the best of avant-garde jazz.
Mr. Joans' style is associated with the oral tradition of black American writing, but he also was influenced by Surrealist painters and writers, and was a considerable visual artist in his own right — his painting Bird Lives hangs in San Francisco's DeYoung Museum.
Mr. Joans recited his poems in coffee houses in New York and, once, in the Sahara Desert.
"He used to rent himself out to upper-middle class parties as a beatnik," recalled George Bowering, Canada's poet laureate. "He was very comic."
After Greenwich Village's heyday, Mr. Joans moved to Paris, where he lived for nearly 30 years, writing and reading poetry, and occasionally painting. While in Paris, he made the transition from jazz poetry to surrealist poetry, after meeting André Breton, a poet and essayist who is often called the father of surrealism.
Mr. Joans travelled widely, often with a pocket full of garlic cloves because, he once said, they were "powerful preventive medicine."
The poet moved to Vancouver several years ago and remained a prolific writer until his death.
In recent years, Mr. Joans published two books of poetry with the accompanying artwork of his Vancouver-based partner of 11 years, Laura Corsiglia.
He leaves 10 children. Mr. St. Marie said he would be cremated with no funeral, as he wished.
Memorial services are expected to be held in Vancouver, San Francisco and New York.
