Public poet, jazz musician, surrealist painter, expatriate wanderer, and cultural revolutionary, Ted Joans was one of the chief creators of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. Joans has been a popular poet since 1958 when, living in New York's Greenwich Village, he first began reading at the Seven Arts Coffee Gallery and in private homes as one of the Rent-A-Beatnik poets. He was originally associated with other well-known Beats: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), and Bob Kaufman. Joans organized the New York City Beats in order to raise money for most of their little magazines, but always the "man alone" he was never published in any of them. Because of his refusal to send his work to magazines and publishing houses, he has not been widely published. Despite the passage of the Beats from popular attention, Joans has, like Ginsberg and Baraka, maintained...