Steven Belletto, Professor of English at Lafayette College, has emerged as one of the top Beat Studies scholars in the world. His The Beats: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is the contemporary go-to book for an understanding of the Beat Movement. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017) and The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (2024), remarkable contributions to Beat scholarship. The latter won the 2025 BSA Award for Best Edited Scholarly Collection. His most recent publication, Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), is the most significant biography of a Beat-related figure to be published in the twenty-first century. I recently had the privilege of discussing Black Surrealist with Professor Belletto via email. What follows is an edited version of that discussion.
Kurt Hemmer: Your biography of Ted Joans is one of the most fascinating stories I have ever read, covering multiple continents and encounters with a virtual who’s who of significant artists and political figures of the time. What inspired you to attempt the daunting task of examining Joans’s peripatetic and often mysterious life?
Steven Belletto: When I first thought of doing a book about Ted Joans, my plan was to focus on his writing, a conventional book of literary criticism. I knew about Joans through his connections to the Beat Generation, and a little bit about his connections to the Black Arts Movement. When I started digging around for existing scholarship, I found that there were only a handful of essays and book chapters here and there. This really surprised me because his writing always fascinated me and seemed ripe for discussion. When I began looking into this writing more deeply, I realized that it would be impossible to write about it while bracketing his life, and then the more I learned about his life, the more intriguing it became, and the book transformed into more of a biographical study focalized through his writing. I didn’t really know what I was getting into, and the project just got bigger and bigger.
KH: What did you find to be the most difficult thing for you to do while writing this book?
SB: There was some stuff out there on Joans, so while I wasn’t starting from scratch, I almost was, especially because I noticed that often people—even scholars—would repeat the same stories about Joans without checking the sources, and very often those stories turn out to be not 100% true. As Joans said, “getting the facts straight is difficult for friendly biographers,” and straightening out facts was indeed a challenging aspect of the process. But the more I worked on Joans and his life, the more I realized that his sense of “facts” was elastic, and so a difficult thing, for me, was learning to take Joans on his own terms, rather than trying to fit him into someone else’s box.
Relatedly, Joans’s life and work are informed by a really astounding array of sources and influences and cultural references—and a lot (but not all) of them are deliberately outside of mainstream literary or cultural histories. Part of his Surrealist point of view is to attend to these histories, to look outside Western literary culture in particular, to various kinds of “Third World” or indigenous aesthetic practices, and so studying his work and life meant diving into those histories as well and trying to understand what Joans was doing with them.
KH: Did writing this biography change or enlighten you about the concept of race as it relates to the Beat Generation?
SB: Joans always insisted that the Beat Generation was inspired by Black culture (in his less generous moments, he figured it as appropriation). He told André Breton, for instance: “The white poets of the Beat Generation have borrowed the hipster attitude from black Americans. They have adopted their argot, comportment, and jazz music—all of which embody a surrealist point of view.” He wasn’t alone in pointing out white Beats “borrowed” from Black culture, he was just especially vocal about it. And let me just throw out a caveat here that when we’re talking about the “Beat Generation,” we’re talking about, in my view, a multiplicity of writers and artists and approaches and sensibilities, as I tried to elaborate in my book, The Beats: A Literary History. So, to be “Beat” looks very different depending on whether you’re talking about Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs or Tuli Kupferberg or Lenore Kandel. Joans often rightly took On the Road as an exemplar of a certain kind of widely-understood Beat writing. He appreciated Kerouac’s writing, and liked him personally, but was also sensitive to the fact that Black artists—mainly blues artists or jazz artists—were creating this magnificent, original, and homegrown American art form, but then not getting as much credit or remuneration for it as white musicians like, say, Dave Brubeck or Benny Goodman. And Joans could be vicious when writing about Brubeck or Goodman—or, for that matter, Elvis or Janis Joplin—because he thought they were unjustly reaping rewards of Black artistic labor. Meanwhile, someone like his buddy Charlie Parker was, famously, constitutionally impoverished. Joans was always quick to point out these kinds of material realities.
When it comes to the Beat writers or a Beat ethos, Joans was canny about presenting himself as an “authentic” Beat insofar as he was Black and therefore a part of that original hipster culture he thought the white Beats were appropriating. With LeRoi Jones and Bob Kaufman, he was one of the very few Black Beats, but Joans inhabited this position, and used it to “preach” to those largely white, middle-class audiences who would come into New York from the suburbs to hear real-life Beat poets. I’m talking here about the late 1950s. Joans spoke about his performances in missionary terms, and he was serious about this: he felt that this was one of the few times in these people’s lives that they might be captive to a Black speaker, and so he took the opportunity to speak real truths to them about not only racism, but about the hypocrisy of consumerist American culture, the harm of retrograde and Puritanical ideas about sexuality, and so on. In this way, I do see Joans as creating his own kind of Beat aesthetic—a Black Beat aesthetic. He said he accepted the label of “Beat,” but of course it only fit him at certain times in his life, and only applied to a portion of his work. I don’t know that Joans so much as “changed” my sense of race as it relates to the Beats as he did confirm the notion that there was such a thing as a “Black Beat” sensibility in the first place, something which some people would probably deny.
KH: I think you make a persuasive argument about viewing Joans’s “false” autobiographical statements as being properly understood through his “surrealized” creation of his existence as a “poem-life.” For example, you establish that previously held “truths” about Joans are factually inaccurate: Theodore Jones, Jr. was born on July 20, 1928, not July 4; he never attended Indiana University Bloomington; his father died in Gary, Indiana in 1975, not in the Detroit race riot of 1943. How would you respond to someone who viewed these factual discrepancies made by Joans as potentially sociopathic, rather than surrealistic gestures?
SB: I don’t think Joans was sociopathic in any way, so that is the first thing I would say. There’s that old saying that some people don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. To a person who might think that Joans was simply lying about his life, or embellishing episodes from his life to make them more interesting, I would say that such a person isn’t really grasping what Joans was trying to do with his life, which, as you say, he called his “poem-life.” This term signals that he saw very blurred lines between life as he lived it and art as he created it—whether poems or paintings or films. As I write in Black Surrealist, I think most of us understand that there are different kinds of “truth” in life—poetic or literary truths may be different from factual, encyclopedic truths. This is why we don’t ask if a poem is fiction or non-fiction—a poem may be autobiographical, but we don’t expect it to hew exactly to real, historical facts of the poet’s life. In this sense, Joans created his poem-life along Surreal lines, adjusting factual truths to poetic truths.
So, his birth certificate tells us he was born on July 20, even though he always insisted his birthday was July 4. As I explain in Black Surrealist, July 4 has all kinds of symbolic and figurative resonances, principally having to do with liberation, and liberation is a main thread in Joans’s life. A favorite maxim of his was from Breton: “The only cause worth serving is the emancipation of mankind.” He quoted this in his poetry collection Afrodisia, and in that book went on to reflect: “I feel that Black people in these United States must have a total revolution to liberate themselves.” To “change” his birthday to July 4 is part of this “total revolution,” to declare liberation and independence even from the calendar. I suppose someone could find that psychopathic or just straightforwardly dishonest, but as I mentioned earlier, I chose to take Joans on his own terms and tried in Black Surrealist to understand why he was leaning into poetic truths at certain moments in his life. What I discovered was that he was always deliberate and thoughtful about such poetic truths, and I began to explore how one could understand them as part of what he called his “poem-life.”
KH: Considering how much information about Joans’s life that you have factually corrected, will it be possible to get the record straight considering the proliferation of misinformation about Joans presently in books and on the internet?
SB: Of course, as I scholar, I do care about encyclopedic kinds of truth, and with the caveats about “truth” and “facts” as Joans understood these things, I do want Black Surrealist to be a foundation for further work on him, and I did my best to get the facts as straight as I could. I avoided repeating stories Joans told about his life as historical, encyclopedic truth unless I could verify them, but there will always be open questions. I included detailed notes so interested readers can understand all my sources, and where I found a divergence between what Joans said and what I could find in the historical record, I tried to analyze and interpret that divergence, to understand why Joans would have told those stories. I found this approach more productive than just trying to catch Joans in lies. That said, you’re right that there is a lot of misinformation about Joans floating around, and I tried not to replicate that misinformation uncritically. Is it possible to get the record about Joans totally “straight”? Probably not.
KH: Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), like Ted Joans, had a “Beat period.” Unlike Baraka, Joans seems to have embraced his “Beat” identity at the end of his life by performing his “Beat” poems at readings and even highlighting his association with certain Beats, such as Kerouac. What do you make of this embrace by Joans of his “Beat period”?
SB: Joans could be reasonably classed, for a period of a few of years in the late 1950s, as a “Beat poet”—when he wasn’t doing other things during that period that had little to do with the Beats. At one point he said, “I’m a surrealist operating in beat waters with suitcases filled with the marvelous for those of the Beat Generation that dig it!” So, he was a Surrealist first and foremost, and I think this tracks throughout most of his life. And with this avowedly Surrealist point of view, he was “operating”—reading, performing—for a time in “Beat waters,” Greenwich Village and bohemian New York in the late 1950s, writing Surrealist-inflected Beat poems like “The Sermon” that namechecks people like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and reading these poems to audiences who had come out expressly to hear “Beat poetry.” It was a kind of schtick, but also, as I said before, serious insofar as he did want to speak his truth to captive audiences.
When you’re talking about his later “embrace” of the Beats, maybe you’re thinking of his presence—or not—at later, retrospective Beat Generation conferences, or of poems like “I, Too, at the Beginning,” which was included in a long autobiographical sketch he wrote for a contemporary authors encyclopedia series in 1996. In that poem, he writes: “I am the early Black Beat,” and places himself with LeRoi Jones and Bob Kaufman as “three Black Beats” who had no “big publishers” and “little bank accounts.” In those instances, I think a couple of things are going on. First, he really did believe he was “at the beginning” of the Beats, not because he was with Kerouac and Ginsberg and Lucien Carr at Columbia in the 1940s, because obviously he wasn’t, but because he was a part of that Black hipster culture from that time, and from the time he arrived in New York. For instance, in New York he knew Babs Gonzales and considered him an important teacher. In “Beatific: The Origins of the Beat Generation,” Kerouac himself specifies Gonzales (along with Charlie Parker) as among those “hipsters” who in the late 1940s “kept talking about the same things I liked, long outlines of personal experience and vision,” and so on. Joans is saying he was at the beginning of the Beat Generation because he knew and was educated—in the street sense—by people like Gonzales and Parker, was part of that Black hipster culture that so inspired Kerouac. And this was all well before the “Beat Generation” became a known cultural thing with On the Road and “Howl.” Some people who were really committed to the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs idea of the Beat Generation saw Joans as a hanger-on or poser who glommed on to the fame of Kerouac et al., so what you’re seeing in those later years is that he’s trying to push back on this idea, hence “I, Too, at the Beginning.”
And those were the same years he would complain about not being invited to retrospective Beat Generation gatherings—because he wanted recognition and needed money? Sure, these are factors. But on another level, he was interested in redressing what he saw as the “benign neglect” of Black figures in popular conceptions of the Beat Generation, and even in scholarship, which he thought tended to view the Beats as mainly white and male. A lot of his work, both in writing and in the visual arts, is about who gets erased from histories or genealogies, and why. This was an ongoing interest of his.
KH: Speaking of the visual arts, your biography does a wonderful job showing that Joans was much more than just a poet. He was also a musician and a visual artist. Do you feel his work as a visual artist was as important as his work as a poet?
SB: In a recent Artforum review of “Lady Liberty, 1962–1964,” an exhibition of Joans’s visual work at Zürcher Gallery in September 2025, Barry Schwabsky observed that “Joans has posthumously become an emerging artist, and we’re just beginning to discern the nature and scope of his achievement.” I thought this formulation was so interesting because typically we think of an “emerging artist” as someone on the younger side, perhaps just out of school and trying to break into their first solo shows. And yet Joans died more than twenty years ago. I think it is fair enough to say that he is an “emerging artist” simply because we—the artworld—have not known all that much about the incredible breadth of his visual works. As you note, Joans was a practicing visual artist since the late 1940s, and in fact first came to New York City from Louisville with the intention of making it as a painter. He was famous in Louisville for his Dalí-inspired Surrealist works, and in New York he developed what he called “jazzaction” paintings inspired by his friend Franz Kline. And he made countless collages, drawings, and exquisite corpses—and, later in life, these enigmatic short films he called “Silent Poems.” This work he did until he died, but it was generally less well known than his poetry, even as he did exhibit here and there over the years.
As I was working on Black Surrealist, the Zürcher Gallery in New York and Paris became the representative of his visual work, and so more of it has been shown and been purchased for private collections as well as major museums. For example, the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently purchased a really important work of Joans’s, “Long Distance” (1976-2005), which is an exquisite corpse or collaborative drawing that included over 130 artists over the span of about thirty years. In September of 2026, there will be a major show of Joans’s work, “Ted Joans. Black Flower,” at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland. This is all to say that there has certainly been more and more recognition of Joans as a visual artist, and I would not be at all surprised if his stature in the artworld only continues to grow, and in fact I expect it will. The more I learn about his visual art, the more impressed I am by it.
KH: During your research you discovered some remarkable unpublished manuscripts by Joans. Which of these do you feel should see the light of day?
SB: I think I’m supposed to say: “all of them”? It’s true that, as I explain in the book, there are a decent number of manuscripts that were never published. There are various reasons for this, depending on the specific manuscript. One I found quite fascinating was “Spadework: The Autobiography of a Hipster.” This was a legendary autobiography Joans wrote in the early 1960s about his time in New York in the 1950s. I say it was legendary because Joans touted it as forthcoming in various thumbnail bios, and on the backs of books and places like that, and he talked it up like it would be a major literary event. And he privately hoped that “Spadework” would bring him the attention he saw being lavished on Allen Ginsberg for “Howl” and William Burroughs for Naked Lunch—he thought of “Spadework” along those lines. Anyway, he tried to get the manuscript published with Olympia in Paris, which had published Naked Lunch, and City Lights in San Francisco, but they found the book too experimental, too non-linear and too graphic. That’s more or less what Lawrence Ferlinghetti told him—the rejection from Olympia was less detailed, and those sentiments would be stranger coming from Naked Lunch’s publisher, but it could be that Maurice Girodias, the head of Olympia, simply didn’t like Joans personally. Joans later almost got “Spadework” published in Athens, and there are a few pages in some archives from that attempt, but the full manuscript was presumed lost. Long story short, after much investigation, it turned out there is a surviving typescript, so I was able to study “Spadework” and discuss it at some length in Black Surrealist. It’s not a perfect book, but it is wild and inventive, and a great Surrealist window onto Joans’s time in New York in the 1950s, where he knew a million people and did a lot of crazy things. It would be great to see that published.
Same thing with his travel guide, “A Black Man’s Guide to Africa,” which he completed in 1971. This is a full-fledged travel guide to all the independent countries in Africa aimed at African Americans interested in reconnecting with their ancestral roots. As a political project, it’s very much of a piece with the Black Arts and Black Power Movements of that era, and is written in this in-your-face “black talk” (as Ben Sidran describes it in his book of the same name, a favorite of Joans’s). “A Black Man’s Guide” is an amazing snapshot—from Joans’s perspective—of a continent in the process of transitioning from colonial subjects to independent nations. While it would not be useful as a travel guide now, as a historical document, I definitely think it is worth publishing—in Black Surrealist, I compare it favorably to Michel Leiris’s classic Phantom Africa. “A Black Man’s Guide to Africa” did have a publisher, but the deal fell through for reasons I explain in the book.
KH: Were there any things that you discovered about Joans that you left out of your biography that you would like to go back and explore in more detail in the future, or encourage other scholars to investigate in more depth?
SB: His time in Africa would be a big one. I have many pages on this and did the best I could with the sources and resources I had available. But it was not possible, for example, for me to physically travel to Timbuktu because of the political situation there. Timbuktu was such an important place in Joans’s life, so I would have loved to have been able to travel there, see where he lived, and speak with people who might have remembered him. Timbuktu is just one example, because he traveled to many far-flung places throughout Africa for thirty years. If someone had the financial resources to do so—which I did not—spending time in key places around the continent to see what could be dug up in terms of people who might have known him, or manuscripts or letters that might be floating around, I think would be very rewarding. Looking into archives at USIS centers, seeing if anyone has artworks Joans sold or gifted them—I bet this would be fruitful and would again deepen and probably change how I write about his time in Africa in Black Surrealist.
As you brought up earlier, another huge area for further study is Joans’s visual art. As I mentioned before, Black Surrealist is organized around and focalized mainly through his written work. I do discuss his visual art throughout, including his oil paintings, short films, collages, drawings, and Happenings, but I really only scratched the surface there, especially as more and more work is emerging and coming onto the art market, some of which I hadn’t seen by the time the book was completed.
KH: Ideally, what will readers of your book come away with?
SB: A better appreciation of Ted Joans and his work is my simple answer. My academic answer is that readers will come away asking what it would look to imagine a version of twentieth-century literary and cultural history with Joans at the center, rather perennially on the peripheries. My personal answer is that readers might realize that we so often hold on to the wrong things in life, and Joans shows us alternatives. If he could live his best, most liberated life, then anyone can.
- Kurt Hemmer is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Beat Literature and a professor of American literature at Harper College. With filmmaker Tom Knoff, he produced Wow! Ted Joans Lives! (2010). Several collections of Beat scholarship include his essays. In 2022, he organized The Jack Kerouac Centenary Conference. He is currently the President of the Beat Studies Association and working on The Poem Human: A Biography of Gregory Corso.