Ted Joans
b. 1928, Cairo, IL d. 2003, Vancouver, Canada
Poet, visual artist, trumpet player, traveler - Ted Joans’s work and life are summarized by his motto: "Jazz is my religion, Surrealism is my point of view”. His concept of poemlife recognizes a creative continuity through all lived experience and interpretation. Works of art are crystallized traces of the poemlife. Born to parents working on riverboats on the Ohio and Mississippi, raised in Ft Wayne and Louisville, he was reputedly fired as a DJ for broadcasting Little Willie Leaps 18 times in a row. He absorbed theaters and midnight rambles, played trumpet in a small combo. Alerted early to Surrealism he devoured rare journals with a French dictionary. He studied painting at Indiana U and changed his spelling to Joans for love, before lighting out for New York in 1951. Co-inventing the Beat Generation he blew his poems in coffeehouses: The Gaslight, the Bizarre, Café Wha?, the Seven Arts. He shared a small room with Bird. Wore a path from his Astor Place studio to the Five Spot and back with Kerouac, was active in 10th Street and The Club. His books fused poetry and collage, pleasure, knowledge and Black Power: Funky Beat Jazz Poems, All of Ted Joans and No More, The Hipsters. When Charlie Parker died Ted Joans covered the city in Bird Lives! In self imposed exile from the US he traveled to Timbuktu and throughout Africa, exploring Europe as well. His friendships with André Breton and Langston Hughes whom he called his spiritual fathers were deep and lasting. He lived in Tangier, turning Paul Bowles on to Albert Ayler, then used Paris as a base for decades, while remaining in motion. He read his poems with Tuareg musicians and Archie Shepp live at the Panafrican cultural festival in Algiers and participated in FESTAC. His Jazz Drawings on wood were exhibited at the Jazz Gallery in NY. He collaborated on books with poets Jayne Cortez Le Merveilleux Coup de Foudre, and Joyce Mansour, Flying Piranha. He relocated during the mid 90s to Seattle and Vancouver, collaborating on books Wow and Our Thang with his partner Laura Corsiglia. Teducation, selected poems was published in 1999. His work in all media invokes the imagination as spiritual self defense. His visual practice includes paintings, collages, drawings, assemblages and the surrealist exquisite corpse drawing, including the 132-person Long Distance, presented by David Hammons in Lisbon in 2019 and shown in the exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Met, New York (October 11, 2021 - January 30, 2022) and Tate Modern, London (February 24, 2022 - August 29, 2022). Bird Lives!, 1958, is part of the permanent collection of the de Young Museum, San Francisco.
