The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
Edited by Alan Kaufman

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 fortunes of generations 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, David Meltzer 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?