The outlaw bible of American poetry

Review by Booklist Review

Editor Kaufman considers the designation "outlaw poet" to be the highest accolade accorded a writer, and he bestows this praise on a long and diverse list of poets that includes the beats, the stars of today's poetry slams, the unrepentant renegades Lenny Bruce and Jim Carroll, rock poets Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, tellers of hard truths such as Thomas McGrath, Luis Rodriguez, and Sapphire, and contemplative Buddhists such as Gary Snyder. This is just a small sampling of the many intense poets represented in Kaufman's explosive collection, which celebrates the archetypal American hero: the outspoken outsider who rages against injustice, mocks the establishment, and attests unabashedly to the pleasures of the flesh and the mystery of the soul. Many of the poems evoke music--the improvisations of jazz, the psychedelic riffs of sixties' rock and roll, and the hard-core staccato of rap--and most of the outlaw poets are as agile on stage as on the page, as intent on bringing real life to poetry as to bringing poetry to life. --Donna Seaman

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Library Journal Review

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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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