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THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY

Name: THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY
Author: Alan Kaufman
ISBN: 1-56025-236-7

edited by Alan Kaufman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1999

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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 Ferlinghetti—all 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 organized—into sections like —Slammers,— —Barbarians,— —Meat Poets,— and —American Renegades——but 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.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-56025-236-7

Page Count: 912

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
DRUNKEN ANGEL
by Alan Kaufman

- BOOK REVIEW
MATCHES
by Alan Kaufman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
edited by Alan Kaufman & Neil Ortenberg & Barney Rosset

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I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN

by Jacqueline Harpman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1997

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I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 1-888363-43-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ORLANDA
by Jacqueline Harpman & translated by Ros Schwartz

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.