Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New Directions Paperbook)

Published in 1965, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness assembles ten years' work of Bob Kaufman, celebrated in San Francisco as the original Beat and in France as "the American Rimbaud."

Kaufman promotes a spontaneous, prophetic verse, mixing street talk and jazz with vision. Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness contains odes to Charles Mingus, Hart Crane, Ray Charles, and Albert Camus as well as love lyrics, political rants, "Prison Poems," and the prose meditation "Second April."