Life of crime

About this book

In the late 1970s a group of San Francisco poets set out self-consciously and methodically in an insurrection of the Yahoos to attack the establishment (academic poets like Robert Lowell, William Stafford, Poetry magazine, the Prairie School, &c.) and promote themselves as a new alternative. They had a Stalinist view of the bourgoisie and wanted to eradicate the personality from poetry...The voice of the counter-insurgency was a quick and dirty mimeo magazine called LIFE OF CRIME. Editors Pat Nolan & Steve Lavoie enlisted the best satirists in the world (including Andrei Codrescu and Dave Morice) to vilify this vain claque. Others (Tom Clark, David Benedetti, Alastair Johnston) quickly joined the fray. This book includes the complete text of Life of Crime, Newsletter of the Black Bart Society -- "for those who think poetry is a crime." It is guaranteed to turn the stomach of the most prurient literary necrophile." -- P. [4] of cover.