VANCOUVER -- Ted Joans, the Beat Generation poet who late in life chose to settle in Vancouver, has died. A contemporary of writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, his work drew from the African-American oral tradition, and blended black consciousness with avant-garde jazz rhythms. 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 had been in poor health with diabetes.
While he was a friend of Mr. Kerouac and Mr. Ginsberg, Mr. Joans never achieved their level of fame during a career that exceeded 40 years. Yet he was considered an influential figure in American and African-American literature.
"He was a character, a personality in his own right, a very lively person," said Vancouver author Jamie Reid. "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. Joans was born Theodore Jones on July 4, 1928, in Cairo, Ill., to musician parents who made their living playing on riverboats, and who tried to entice their son into music. Instead, Mr. Joans liked to write, and earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University before moving to New York.
There, in bohemian Greenwich Village of the late 1950s and early 1960s, he honed his skills as a poet. Around that time he also changed his name to distinguish it from the common spelling and, according to one source, because of a woman named Joan.
The poet Langston Hughes, whose own output influenced Mr. Joans, read some of the young writer's early work and convinced him that he had something to say. The result was an unusual blend of music and poetry.
In Passed on Blues: Homage to a Poet, which Mr. Joans dedicated to Mr. Hughes, he combined jazz rhythms and words to give the work a musical character: ". . . the sonata of Harlem, the concerto to shoulder bones, pinto beans, ham hocks in the dark. The slow, good bouncing grooves. That was the world of Langston Hughes."
His work is characterized by a black consciousness, and has a musical language closely linked to the blues. As it turned out, his decision to go to New York had been made as much for music as for poetry. In 2001, Mr. Joans told U.S. National Public Radio he made the move to hear one musician: Charlie (Bird) Parker.
"Bird . . . Leaving Fort Wayne, Ind., going straight to New York," he said. "It was one of the reasons -- going to hear Charlie Parker."
They finally met one night after Mr. Parker had finished a set at a jazz club. "I told him, I said, 'I'm a painter and just left Indiana.' And I said, 'I'm painting you.' And he says, 'What are you gonna do here in New York?' I said, 'Paint some more.' He said, 'You have the one of me?' I said, 'No, I left it back there.' He said, 'Well, if you ever bring it here, I'd like to see it.' "
The painting, Bird Lives, hangs in San Francisco's DeYoung Museum. Mr. Joans, who was considered a visual artist in his own right, was also influenced by such surrealist painters as Salvador Dali.
However, it was poetry for which Mr. Joans will be remembered. His work explored the social issues of his time and often explored the experiences of black Americans in a white society. Mr. Joans recited his poems in coffeehouses in New York.
"Thousands of people would converge on Greenwich Village, which was wonderful," he told NPR. "It was very lucrative."
Writer Ishmael Reed considers Mr. Joans to be the United States's best jazz poet. "They all said they were after the rhythms of jazz," Reed said. "I think he succeeded probably better than a lot of the others."
When Mr. Joans performed a poem, he blew them as a musician blew a trumpet.
"I don't sing it," Mr. Joans once said. "The sound changes, but it's the same word. I do not sing the words -- I swing the words, which is different."
Even as a black poet, Mr. Joans received little recognition. Mr. Joans himself once wrote, "At the beginning there were only three darker brothers," meaning Mr. Joans, Bob Coffman and LeRoi Jones. Of the three, only LeRoi Jones found real fame. Now writing as Amiri Baraka, he is regarded as being something of the poet laureate of black urban America.
The explanation lay in the racial politics of the 1950s, said Mr. Reed. "The problem with the Beat Generation was that they could only tolerate one black writer at a time. So they chose their emperor -- their black emperor -- and Ted Joans lost."
For all that, Mr. Joans continued to write and to conduct readings, and once recited his poetry 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."
Mr. Joans lived in Paris for several decades and remained there until the early 1990s but liked to spend winters in Timbuktu, Mali. He travelled widely, often with a pocketful of garlic cloves because, he once said, they were "powerful preventative medicine."
The poet moved to Vancouver several years ago and remained a prolific writer until his death. He was well advanced on his autobiography, and the last entry in his journal was dated April 25, said his daughter, Daline Jones.
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 Charlie Parker died in 1955, Mr. Joans had chalked "Bird Lives" on the streets of New York.
Mr. Joans leaves 10 children. Mr. St. Marie said there will be a cremation but no funeral, as Mr. Joans wished.
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