The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560252278 ISBN 13: 9781560252276

Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999

Synopsis

The definitive collection of anti-establishment American poetry, from Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac to Sapphire and Tupac Shakur
"Welcome to the Wild West of American Poetry, the Hole-In-The-Wall of Blakean vision, a two-fisted saloon of New World dreams where you'll meet the greatest Outlaw voices from the post-war era to the present day. Here are the inventors of the Beat generation and the heroes of today's Spoken Word movement, poets who don't get taught in American poetry 101, yet hold the literary future in their tattooed hands." So begins The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, a primer for generational revolt and poetic expression, and an enduring document of the visionary tradition of authenticity and nonconformity in literature. From the Beat poetry of the '50s to the spoken word of the 1990s, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry brings readers the words, visions, and extravagant lives of bohemians, beatniks, hippies, punks, and slackers. This exuberant manifesto includes lives of the poets, on-the-scene testimony, seminal underground articles never before collected, photographs of clubs and cafes, interviews, and, above all, the poems.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Kaufman's books include the novel Matches and the memoirs Jew Boy and Drunken Angel. He is the editor of five anthologies, including The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature and The Outlaw Bible of American Art. His books have also appeared in the UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Kaufman has written for numerous publications including The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Salon, Evergreen Review, Partisan Review and The Jerusalem Post.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1560252278
• ISBN 13: 9781560252276
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 736
• Editor: Alan Kaufman, S.A. Griffin