By Brett Sigurdson
The cover of Steven Belletto’s recently published biography, Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans, depicts Joans immersed in a performance, his face and body concealed by the paint of a Mau Mau. The image is a fitting metaphor for Joans himself: a poet, performer, and provocateur whose real life was so often obscured by the identities he wore.
Born in Illinois in 1928, Joans made a name for himself in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s as a Surrealist painter, proprietor of New York’s first Black-owned art gallery, and a dynamic performance poet. At the height of the avant-garde scene he cultivated, Joans left America and spent the next decades globetrotting through Europe and Africa, cultivating an interdisciplinary existence as a poet, artist, and visionary whose life intersected with Surrealism, the Beats, Négritude, and Black Power.
To coincide with the publication, by Bloomsbury, Belletto—author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020) and editor of six books, including The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (2024)—discussed his experience chasing Joans, the poet’s Beat roots, and the difficulty sorting the surreal truth from the surrealist’s fiction.
You’ve published some important work on Kerouac recently through The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (2024). How did you come to write about Ted Joans?
I had been reading Joans’s work for quite some time, but really only knew some of his Beat-era poems and the work in Black Pow-Wow (1969). When I wrote about him in a couple of short chapters in The Beats: A Literary History, I was reminded of how much I like this poetry and his collage book, The Hipsters (1961), which is hilarious satire. But then I also began exploring more of his work, and realized it was more varied than I had known or remembered. For The Beats: A Literary History, I was of course writing about him in the context of the Beat movement, but the deeper I got in his work, the more I realized that the late 1950s Beat stuff was only a small part of his achievement (and life), which led me to want to learn more about him—which eventually led, after many twists and turns, to Black Surrealist.
Ted Joans was, as the saying goes, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. How did you untangle the real Joans from the surrealist legend he created?
That is definitely true, though I’m not sure that I untangled the real Joans from the Surrealist legend, since he really thought of these things together. The first part of the book, titled “Poem-Life,” is about how Joans thought of his life as art, the two fused and inextricable as a “poem-life.” This perspective means Joans had very particular and somewhat unusual ideas about “truth” and even “the real” which informed the way he lived his life and the way he conceived his art.
The act of untangling became a major theme of the book, which is also something I didn’t anticipate at the outset. Here is part of the author bio on the back of the British edition of Afrodisia, which was published in 1976:
Born in Cairo, Illinois, in 1928 of parents who worked on an annual river-boat run on the Mississippi, he survived a precarious childhood (his father was pulled off a streetcar and killed by white workers in 1943 during the Detroit race riots) and went on to earn a B.A. in Fine Arts from Indiana University.
Most of this is not true in the historical, encyclopedic sense. But, for Joans, it was true in the context of his Surrealist poem-life.
How can this be? Well, this is what I try to reckon with in the book.
What is something surprising that you learned about Joans through this research?
Not to sound hyperbolic, but there were surprises around every corner. That was one of the real pleasures of working on this book. The main surprise was just how expansive Joans’s body of work is, not just writing, but also visual art across a range of media. When I started the project, I knew that Joans was a painter and collagist, but I didn’t realize the extent of this work. So, just coming into contact with and studying all this work was very enlightening.
I was also surprised to learn just how deep his involvement with Surrealism ran—this includes his involvement with André Breton—the founder of Surrealism—his collaborations with people like Joyce Mansour, as well as how Surrealist thought lent a certain coherence to his life or art. And his life, the things he did and the people he knew—it’s pretty amazing.
In light of your scholarship on the Beats, did this deep dive into Joans’s life and work expand your sense of Beat art and literature?
There was this autobiography Joans’s wrote in the early 1960s called “Spadework: The Autobiography of a Hipster” that covers his time in New York City (more or less the decade of the 1950s). Joans teased this work in print on a few occasions, as in a short note at the end of his collection All of Ted Joans and No More (1961), which reads in part: “I am still working on SPADEWORK, an autobiography of my life in Greenwich Village and I hope it will not be banned in America.”
This always reminded me of how in the dedication to Howl and Other Poems, Ginsberg teased the work of Kerouac and Burroughs that had not yet been published: Naked Lunch is “an endless novel which will drive everybody mad,” and so on. In Joans’s case, “Spadework” was never published at all, and when I asked around, people were telling me it was never written or completed. But—long story short—it did turn out there is an extant typescript of “Spadework,” which I was thrilled to read, and I discuss it at some length in Black Surrealist.
In terms of Beat art and literature, this is a significant text because it offers Joans’s perspective on those Beat years in New York City, and he discusses many well-known figures, including Kerouac. It also gives some additional—and perhaps surprising perspective—on one of the features of the Beat era that has most stuck to Joans: his involvement in the “Rent-a-Beatnik” business.
You mentioned Joans’s visual art earlier. Where can people see this body of work?
Joans’s paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and other forms of visual and plastic arts have been enjoying some renewed interest, so I would encourage everyone to seek out gallery shows and museum exhibitions involving his work. It’s fascinating to see this work in person. The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently purchased a major piece called “Long Distance,” which had also been prominently featured in a really impressive exhibition, “Surrealism Beyond Borders,” at the Met and Tate Modern.
To find out more about Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans, visit Bloomsbury.
Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College. He is author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020), No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), and editor of six books, including The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (2024), American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (2018) and The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017). He is an Editor of Contemporary Literature.
Brett Sigurdson recently completed his PhD in English Literature at the University of Minnesota. There, he completed a dissertation on Jack Kerouac’s posthumous reputation, We Know Jack: On the Road with the Influencers Shaping the Legacy of America’s Most Iconic Author. His work has appeared in Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals (2024), The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (2024), and Great River Review.