Bari Lewis Kennedy

Bari Louis Kennedy died October 21, 2024, 10 days shy of his favorite holiday/71st birthday, and the 55th anniversary of the passing of the biggest influence on his early writing, Beat poet Jack Kerouac. Growing up in the Bronx, in the hospital frequently for asthma and its complications, Kennedy developed interest in calligraphy & early poets like Keats, Shelley, Coleridge. As his beloved Bronx deteriorated, he lost friends to drugs & other forms of violence. One friend years ago described the need to step carefully over nodding junkies strewn up & down his block. On a fateful subway ride Kennedy saw newspaper headlines of the death of rock star, poet & personal hero Jim Morrison. When he later learned Californians got free higher education opportunities, he hitchhiked across the country and landed in Sacramento. He earned a GED, an AA from Sacramento City College, a BA and a double masters from CSUS & an MFA degree at Naropa University. In 1981 he created "The NeuroRomantic Inphasion," an outre event featuring Fritz Leiber, Kenneth Anger, Robert Anton Wilson, Arthur Byron Cover, & many whose work skimmed dark and edgy areas of fiction and poetry, among other arts. 

A random conversation with a prominent local painter resulted in donations of works by Sacramento's finest visual artists, auctioned to create Landing Signals, an early mullti-media anthology of Sacramento poetry. An impressive amount was raised and immediately stolen. Although later paid back, it was in increments so small it took several years to recover and tanked the self-funding critical poetry magazine Kennedy envisioned. A one-time anthology was published. 

At Naropa University, Alan Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Kathy Acker, & other artist/scholars taught, performed, researched, and collaborated as Bari studied and continued to arrange readings and interviews. He got Mirriam Patchen (widow of Kenneth) to visit Boulder for an event highlighting her husband's & others' renegade works. Back in Sacramento Bari hosted many series in coffee houses, bars & on street corners for 3 separate poetry marathons. At the time he discovered d.a. levy, Kennedy had already for years been working on building an uncannily similar poetry scene in Sacramento. He eventually interviewed nearly everyone in Cleveland who knew levy or remembered those days. He collected publications, ephemera, recordings, interviews & stories of the poet's family and friends. Kennedy wanted to put out a definitive book and archive everything about levy, but health and financial concerns, and the many unexpected gifts of the covid era got in his way.

In Patchen, Morrison and other performers, the Beats, levy & Kerouac's long breath of nascent American Buddhism, Bari sought unfiltered spontaneous connection to something larger. He authored a really decent collection of poetry & visual work that was noticed far outside our city limits. He offended, delighted and challenged us to do better, to do it more.

It was only as Bari persuaded Java City coffee house to stay open after 5:00 p.m. that a more exciting poetry scene blossomed here. Java City is gone now, as is the 100-year-old Camphor tree that shaded coffee house denizens. So too, B. L. Kennedy. But his impact and humanity and work remain.