Poetry has a bad rap. Flowery, deliberately cryptic, irrelevant. As I've noted before, much classic literature--especially the poetry--is a lot more radical than is generally believed. Still, even in this iconoclastic tradition, there are some poets who push the boundaries more than others. Those bards--specifically, the American ones who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century--are collected and canonized in this massive anthology. These are the poets who are on fire. They are the troublemakers, the upstarts who follow in the footsteps of Rimbaud and Whitman. As the publicity material for this book notes: "American poetry has always been a hotbed of radicalism and revolution, fire and passion, faith, hope, and rebellion."

With 643 pages of verse, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry is as physically imposing as the Bible itself. Editor Alan Kaufman sure didn't skimp on content. How many books have you seen with a table of contents fifteen pages long (five times longer than its index)?

Kaufman hits most of the important movements: The Beats are amply represented with Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka (aka Leroi Jones), Gregory Corso, Diane DiPrima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Herbert Hunke, et al. Richard Brautigan, Ted Berk, and John Bennet are part of the hippie contingent. The Spoken Word movement and Slams are covered by Marc Smith, Ken DiMaggio, Sini Anderson, Justin Chin, Reg E. Gains, Lisa Martinovic, and many others. A few queers and sex radicals are here, including Bob Flanagan, Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, and David Wojnarowicz. Other poets are from movements and groups that include the New York School, the Unbearables, the Barbarians, the Meat Poets, and the Carma Bums. Further notables include Jim Carroll, Wanda Coleman, Karen Finley, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, Hunter S. Thompson, David Trinidad, and Anne Waldman.

A lot of those represented are better known for non-poetic endeavors: musicians Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Tupac Shakur; novelists William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Henry Miller, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, Hubert Selby Jr., and Jan Kerouac; comedians Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor; journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal. Others are better known for pursuits that don't focus on wordsmithing at all: Abstract-Expressionist Jackson Pollack, actors Peter Coyote and James Dean, activist Abbie Hoffman, radical publisher Barney Rosset, and political revolutionary Che Guevara. Some are even outlaws in the truest sense: Cal was a Hell's Angel, and several contributors are currently in the clink.

So it's obvious that this gigantic tome has a stellar line-up. The question now turns to quality. Naturally, with a book of this size there are some duds, but poetry is such an incredibly subjective experience--what may be doggerel to me might be the next "On a Grecian Urn" or "Song of Myself" to you--that I hesitate to pass too much judgment here. Suffice it to say that with a range of voices and topics this varied, you're bound to find material you love and material that you think shouldn't have made the cut.

OK, now for my quibbles. Some poets who are utterly deserving didn't make it in. The publisher's note mentions that sometimes permission was impossible to get. This was the case with Charles Bukowski, so that sad omission is forgiven. But no Antler? He just might be the most underrated contemporary outlaw poet, and his absence is even more strange when you consider that his major anthology was published by City Lights--the pioneer of Beat and San Francisco Renaissance poetry--whose many discoveries (and founder, Ferlinghetti) are represented. Maybe he declined inclusion, though it would be strange to refuse to be in such good company. The other poets who were shut out are mostly from the queer and/or erotic traditions: Pat Califia, Dennis Cooper, Hakim Bey, Scott O'Hara, Linda Smukler, Gavin Dillard, Chrystos, Sandra Lee Golvin, Lovechild . . . You get the idea. I can only hope that a second edition of this book will fill in the crucial gaps.