Mark Spitzer

 

Rebel Verse Review

The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
edited by Alan Kaufman
Thunder's Mouth Press, New York
paperback, $24.95, 685 pp.

This damn brick of a book took me four months to read, but I'm not disappointed. Ever since I first saw it dressed in sexy black I had to check it out. Because how could anybody who gives a damn about the direction of American poetry ignore an anthology boasting a host of rebel voices - including Wanda Coleman, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Woody Gutherie, Frank O'Hara, Bobs Dylan & Kaufman, Tupac Shakur, Jackson Pollock, Patti Smith, James Dean, Henry Miller, Jack Hirschman, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, both Jan and Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Burroughs, Brautigan, Kathy Acker, Lenny Bruce, Lou Reed, Ken Kesey, Kenneth Patchen, Janice Joplin, Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Carroll, Abbie Hoffman, Ed Dorn, Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Mike Topp, and more?

So I spanned its attitude starting with Walt Whitman, surging on into the Beats, then renegading through the various anti-schools of American verse -- via rockstars, movie icons, and classic voices safe in heaven dead -- before blasting into slammers, prison poets, Carma Bums, Babarians, bearable Unbearables, and an outcast bunch of overlooked poets no one ever heard of.

Which were the moments that mattered the most (ie, Bob Flanagan's no-bullshit cut-to-the-chase, Michael Lally's unrestrained bold-though-tragic self-indulgence, Julia Vinograd's observation that "most of a poet's work comes/in spite of his life, in spite of everything,/even in spite of bookstores," and Rebecca Fransway's soliloquy ending "I am dying with military dishonors,/in ripped underpants./Someone is going to see my underpants").

It was curious, though, that this collection included Che Guevara, an Iranian poet, and some Communist Italian. Granted, these works were translated by Americans, and they seemed to fit in with the theme of the book, but one can't help wondering what these writers are doing in a book in which the words "American Poetry" jumps from the cover.

But here's my biggest criticism: from the second word of the first poem to the second-to-last page of the book, there are stupid blunders all over the place, including more than 60 typos, inconsistencies in italics and quotation marks, and plenty o' problems with hyphenization and capitalization. Which indicates a careless editing job and a black day for the editor.

The saving grace of this project, however, is the fact that it's the hugest and most ambitious collection of American voices vulgaris ever published (ranging from general rants on general oppression to pomo poetry polemics) in the name of the beaten and broken and busted and disgusted, with only an occasional dud. Meaning that there is a spirit in the pickings here that burns burns burns at a culture being slathered by a saccharine nostalgia -- which isn't poetry at all. Because, as the bards of rebellion have always shown us, poetry has balls, and everything else is just bird by bird.

Which is essentially the gist of The Outlaw Bible, which isn't content with a world in which Donald Allen's The Postmoderns and Anne Charter's Beat Anthology are basically the only anthologies to even come close to capturing a stance that demonstrates where our patricide and anger can take us -- and has.

And so I recommend this brick -- especially to teachers of creative writing seeking to inspire arson. Because ultimately, poetry is not for poets, nor is it for the people; it's for the impressionable and delusional crazies of the world who've got enough guts to wanna start a fire.

Anyway, that's what I think and that's what The Outlaw Bible is good for, despite its embarrassing errors.