Empathizing with rule breakers and drawing on personal connections from his bi-coastal participation in the vital American underground poetry scene that flourished in the late 1980s through the 1990s, Alan Kaufman “ingathered” enough poetry for a robust 700-page Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, which appeared in 1999.
The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, co-edited by Kaufman with Neil Ortenberg and Barney Rosset, followed in 2004 and The Outlaw Bible of American Essays was published in 2006. The latest in the series, The Outlaw Bible of American Art, was published in 2016.
What is "outlaw" poetry? To Todd Follett, in the 2015 Switchback interview, Alan Kaufman replied:
It is a scream in the night, or the wild exaltation sometimes felt even in the most hopeless of circumstances and given expressive form. It is a prayer to Freedom.
