The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Paperback)

~ Alan Kaufman (Editor), S.A. Griffin (Editor) "To lives as I have done is surely absurd..." (more)
Key Phrases: philomene long, blasted youth, ruth weiss, New York, Jack Kerouac, Bob Kaufman (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The Beat sensibility is alive and ranting in this bulky, multigenerational anthology of work by those who follow the off-road literary paths of Whitman and Ginsberg. Id-driven, political, and sexually explicit, these poems speak in the vernacular of the street, touting oppositional art as a weapon against poverty, corporate capitalism, discrimination, and violence. The roster of poets has to be among the strangest gathered in one volume; progenitors like Kerouac, Baraka, diPrima, etc., are interleaved with youthful urban slammers and complemented by the likes of Tupac Shakur, Tom Waits, Richard Pryor, Karen Finley, Janis Joplin, Che Guevara, James Dean, and other pop icons. The spirit of the whole affair might best be summarized by Pedro Pietri's "Telephone booth number 542": "the only way/ i know how/ to wash dishes/ is by smashing them/ against the wall!" Though this collection holds some historical and documentary interest and a few harrowing moments courtesy of Sapphire and Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, many poems are by turns obvious, self-important, tedious, and indulgent--just like Open Mic Night down at the local tavern.
-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

paper 1-56025-227-8 Editor and self-proclaimed Outlaw poet Kaufman has gathered into a single volume the voices of more than two hundred ``poets who don't get taught in American poetry 101.'' Here are the expected Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Patchen, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ai, and Lawrence Ferlinghettiall long accepted into the American poetry idiom. Along with them are more recent poets like Luis J. Rodriguez, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Joy Harjo, who have earned significant standing for themselves even inside academia, as well as performance poets Marc Smith and Lisa Martinovic, who've garnered reputations only outside it. Anthologized along with these poets are activists Che Guevara and Abbie Hoffman; painter Jackson Pollock; and singer-songwriters Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. Notorious novelists Henry Miller and Norman Mailer make appearances, as do stand-up comedians Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. But the unknowns outnumber the knowns, and the knowns do not necessarily contribute their best work (Harjo's ``Two Horses'' is a significant exception). Many prose pieces abound, as well as what only looks like poetry, and too much of what is collected here is a series of rants. The anthology is loosely organizedinto sections like Slammers, Barbarians, Meat Poets, and American Renegadesbut without any apparent aesthetic beyond Kaufman's claim that these Outlaw poets share ``an unspoken objective: to get in your face and stay there.'' The value of such a ``bible'' is questionable. And without better organization or at least an index, the collection remains an unwieldy hodgepodge. Navigating through the bulk of nearly a thousand pages is a chore simply not worth the effort. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 720 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (November 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560252278
• ISBN-13: 978-1560252276
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #64,515 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a nice look at the outlaws of poetry, January 9, 2000

By	[e-mail] "[e-mail]" (Beaumont, tx USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This was a pretty good collection of poetry. about a third of it was really bad, about a third of it was okay, good poetry, but there was a third of it that was outstanding poetry. one problem i had was that many of the well-known great poets in this collection contributed work that definately wasn't their best. and i'm sure they left some out. but still, i'd say it definately needs to be in any poet's collection.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry is brilliant!, November 12, 1999

By A Customer

The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry by Alan Kaufman is a brilliant anthology, maybe the greatest anthology of new American poetry I've ever read. Part of its genuis is that"Outlaw" breaks new ground, introducing poets unknown to the mainstream while showing how they belong to the Outlaw lineage begun by WC Williams and later the Beats. And I like the way "Outlaw" mixes up the poetry with mini-histories of poets live's and scenes and has lots of wild pictures of poets and motorcycles and cafes and what not. That's great. This book announces a new canon in Americn poetry, has the depth and insight to be taught in classrooms even, but I bet every dreaming kid too from New York to Wichita to LA is going to read this book as a manifesto of revolt and liberation and to get up and do something with your life, be a poet of life!

42 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Mixed Bag, February 14, 2004

By	M. Hori "Jesse Glass" (Urayasu, Chiba Japan) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have mixed feelings about this collection of "outlaw" poets, because I live outside the U.S. and have lived in countryside China where the government really doesn't care if you live or die or spew green foam from both ends--meaning what? No safety nets like clinics with clean needles and not even a job at Macdonald's, or a flop in a salvation army cot but begging and starving to death and people stepping over your body as it blackens in the street. That's why so much of what these new outlaws say in their street poetry rings slightly hollow to me. (that's not to say that America doesn't mangle and murder its children, but there are--admittedly--a few more ledges to land on in the U.S. before one dives into societal hell.) And of course, among these outlaws is at least one college professor who is as much of an outlaw as my aunt is, and yet another who has a pretty good middle class house and a pension and a wife who indulges his writing the spare, misogynistic exercises he calls poems, and then there are the entertainers and recording artists like Bob Dylan who was never an outlaw to begin with and has made the fortune of record producers and record companies, not to mention his own. So who's kidding whom with this title? Granted, the book is seeded with fine--even great poems like Michael Lally's "My Life"--and legendary names like Bob Kaufman, Jack Hirschman and Woody Guthrie, but for every one of those poems and every one of those names there are a dozen from the posers and the wannabes--and yes, the cry-babies who want to point the finger at everyone but themselves and say a dirty word or two in the bargain to be "shocking" in a world that is now way past shock. That's why a great part of this book is a cookie-cutter yawn, not even as interesting as a midnight Veg-O-Matic commercial. In fact if many of these folks were given a spot on your television you'd probably turn them off--not from shock, not from the gut-wrenching pain they want to share with you, or from the intensity of their vision of the Truth that they've gathered from their lives with their torn and bleeding fingers, but out of sheer boredom. These are the middle-class kids who grew up reading City Lights Pocket Poets and Beat Hagiographies and wanted to find their mugs in the "Left to Right" shots in the middle of those books. This is P.C. territory we're treading in too, so we have to make sure we "respect" (meaning accept uncritically--(and please remember to clap)) everyone and everything here and leave our common sense hanging on the hat rack, thank you.

Even some of the fine poets like Joy Harjo and Simon Ortiz who are represented here contributed not so great poems, and lent their names rather than their talents to this phone-book sized effort. So what? Maybe a book of half the number of pages would have been better. Maybe a more representative selection from the best poets? Who knows?