Black Surrealist. Poet. Collage artist. Jazz trumpeter. Painter. Member of the Beat Generation. Life-long wanderer. Pan-Africanist. Black Power agitator. Author of his own “poem-life.” Ted Joans (1928-2003) was all of these things, and yet none of these labels adequately capture the beauty and complexity of his life and work. The proportions of Ted Joans’s life are legendary. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 1928, as a young man he distinguished himself as a Surrealist painter. In the early 1950s, he moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, where he opened the first Black-owned art gallery in the city, developed new styles of painting, and began reading his poetry in coffeehouses just as the Beat Generation was coalescing. A well-known raconteur and bon vivant on the Village scene, he threw elaborate parties (art events that prefigured the Happenings of the later 1950s), exhibited his “jazz action” paintings, and published poetry and collage books to acclaim. But at the height of his success,