religion itself could well be summoned by that of
the shaman pantocrator. The poem sets up the
shamanic theme of defiance against "death and
indestructible existence". Kaufman's mystical
hymn of metaphysical jazz is sung by him the
original bee-bop man, Ginsberg's "bum and angel
beat" (Beckett, 2012). To Kaufman, Jazz is
something intuited through faculty of sense,
something in the body itself, like Whitman’s
body-politic. It embraces the bardic tradition of
orality and the associated qualities of
“improvisation, muscular musicality and direct
transmission”. As he combined “spontaneous
invention “with “poetic euphony and meter” he
became a prophet or jazz mystic. His poetry of the
body is quintessentially shamanic.
Kaufman greatly admired the poet Garcia
Lorca. Neeli Cherkovski states that Lorca
possessed duende “a mysterious essence that
radiates from within having little to do with a
preconceived idea of craft and more to do with an
embodied spirit that somehow captures the purest
essence of what it means to be human….” Duende
is like the indivisible or immaterial essence which
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