Ted Joans was not the most prominent Beat writer nor was he was nearly the best Beat writer.

If he is famous, it is for demanding that one of his poems be removed from the second and future printings of The Beat Reader (he had not been recompensed for its publication in the first edition and flatly demanded that it be removed from all future printings).

But he was one the only Beat poet I ever met.

I have mixed feelings about the Beats. Every good teenage boy should experience a literary crush on the idea of the Beats, but I feel their literary value is something of a mixed bag. Allen Ginsberg, for example, wrote at least one great poem (Howl) and arguably wrote two more (Kaddish and Supermarket in California). Similarly Kerouac wrote one great novel (On the Road) and then followed it up with a series of novels of varying quality, none of which measured up to the archetypal and literary quality of that early work.

Personally, I would suggest that only Gary Snyder and William S. Burroughs got beyond the “one off” curse (one work of enduring quality, followed by a series of works that never measured up to the effect of that early work) and actually produced an oeuvre of real quality.

But… I have no mixed feeling about what Ted Joans meant to me personally.

To a young man in Paris for the first time, he was an enormous and generous figure. I was just one of a several young men who waited patiently for him on Sunday at the Cafe Deux Magots and who drank vin chaud (hot wine, drunk with sugar and lemon) because that was what he drank. We imitated his shabby chic dress (though I never tried to pull off the felt beret he wore to cover a smoothly bald crown).

Ted Joans is gone now – as are his stories of his house in Timbuktu, his good-natured impersonations of Gregory Corso, and all his future poems.

When I became something more financial stable than a poor student and would-be poet, I should have spent more of those ill-gotten gains on the small presses that published his books.

It’s too late for Ted to benefit, but I finally got around to purchasing his last book from Empty Mirror Books. If you have time, you could assuage the guilt of a former young man and send them a little love.

You can also check out Ted Joans Lives for some tribute to the late, great man.