Description
The Maverick Poets is exactly what the title promises: Steve Kowit’s gathering of poets who operated outside—or at least at an angle to—the polite literary establishment. Published by the wonderfully named Gorilla Press in 1988, the anthology brings together an extraordinary cross-section of postwar American poetry: Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder, Raymond Carver, Wanda Coleman, Harold Norse, Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Gerald Locklin, Joanne Kyger and many more. The publisher described them not as another literary “school,” but as writers sharing a resistance to poetry that had become mannered, opaque and bloodless. Even Czesław Miłosz apparently got a kick out of this book—years later he enthusiastically quoted one of Kowit’s poems from it.
For the Bukowski collector, though, there’s considerably more here than another anthology appearance. Bukowski contributes seven poems—“Beans with Garlic,” “The Insane Always Loved Me,” “The Drill,” “The History of a Tough Motherfucker,” “The Proud Thin Dying,” “Take It,” and “Clean Old Man”—and his drawings appear throughout the book. The art credits specifically identify Bukowski drawings on numerous pages as well as the front and back covers. In other words, Buk is all over the damn thing. It’s a terrific little intersection of Bukowski, the Beats, the San Francisco poets and the broader American literary underground of the period.
A hell of an anthology—and an especially fun one for the Bukowski shelf.
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