If you'd rather place an order by talking to one of our cheerful order desk clerks, please call 1-888-232-4444 (USA and Canada only) or 250-383-6864. From Europe, ring our UK order desk clerk at local rate number 0845 230 9601 (UK only) or 44 (0)1865 722 113.

New American Underground Poetry, Vol 1: the Babarians of San Francisco - Poets From Hell

by Alan Allen; Edited by David Lerner and Julia Vinograd

344 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #05-0165; ISBN 1-4120-5270-x; US$26.49, C$33.00, EUR22.50, £16.00

Flagship poetry anthology defining and presenting the underground Babarian genre and social movement in America.

Read more!

About the Book

Foreword & Introduction

Sample Poems

Catalogue Information

About the Book Cafe Babar (named after the storybook elephant) is a little Cafe on 22nd and Guerrero behind the Mission District in San Francisco. From there on the West Coast from the mid-late '80s up through about 1994, a unique group of poets gathered on Thursday nights for a feature, followed by an open mike. The poets performing or reading their work there became known across the United States and in Central and Eastern Europe as some of the best poets in the U.S. They valued emotional honesty and their poems captured it. They found academic writing boring. Regarded the bohemian beatnik poets of North Beach as 'puffed-up', has-been, even geriactric. Counterparts in New York seemed somehow to make commercialized poetry, won grants, performed for money, and worst of all influenced the Madison Avenue slop shops who with second-rate hearts start caricaturing poetry in tv commercials. The Babarian poets were broke. Won the west-coast slams but couldn't afford the tickets to go East to compete. Lived only to write, to perform, to read. Many were without jobs (with notable exceptions), or disabled, or addicted, or worked in the sex industry. Most struggled to pay the rent, or eat well, wore thriftshop clothes. IQ's were the highest, hearts the biggest, poems what mattered most. Was all about feeling in their voices, their words, their lines, their lives.

---

Foreword & Introduction

Preface by Julia Vinograd
Throughout the early-to-mid '80s the Spaghetti Factory was a central collecting spot for North Beach 'beat' poets. Then it closed. We bounced uneasily from one place to another: Banan Place, On Broadway; Peters' Pub, etc. We were glared at suspiciously by everyone from elderly dart players to rock bands who thought we had no business wasting their warm-up time. Gradually the people changed. The poetry changed - we definitely weren't 'beats'.

The Babar poetry scene started when Joie was scheduled to do a feature one night at a coffee house called the Meat Market. We all got there, there was a fairly big crowd, and there was a 'closed' sign on the place. Joie demanded a reading in the middle of the street right there, she had all her stuff ready, and she was going to have a reading. QR Hand just laughed and said, "Follow me, there's a place we can do a reading that has beer" - that did it. We walked down about two blocks and there was the Cafe Babar. QR talked to Alvin (the owner) and Alvin let us read right then in the Babar.

The next thing we knew we had a weekly reading. It grew into a big event, complete with audiences of non-poets. Over the years it turned hot and cold. A batch of the women, (it was almost a contest thing, a spoof), would turn up in T-shirts and flip them up during the reading (topless). It was one of the high points of San Francisco cafe life.

A genre of new, impatient Babarian voices emerged: personal, vivid, very much in the modern world from tv to mtv to the sex clubs - a voice influenced by the LA slums of Bukowski and the NY slums of Jim Carroll - but undeniably San Francisco, the San Francisco tourists never see. The depth of this voice is surprising, almost dangerous, like a classical statue materializing in the middle of a busy highway; a voice that's sometimes out of order, in a world broken by hunger, madness and AIDS; a voice that is the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.

Introduction by Richard Silberg
Popping Poetry - excerpted from Poetry Flash, #205, 4/90

Babarian poetry swings all the way to the right of the applause meter towards a poetry of presence. As opposed to movements that have centered on magazines, a college, a writers' group, the Babarians have forged their work in a performing space, the backroom of the jazz spot Cafe Babar on Twenty-second and Guerrero in san Francisco. It's a small room, tiny for the crowds that have surged in there, the smoke and the commotion, furnished with wooden chairs, bleachers behind them, mirrors on the ceiling, and corrugated metal on the walls. Readers often use that metal to pound on, a shivered cracking sound, for emphasis or thythm or just to get the crowd's attention. On a good Thursday evening, when Babar is going right, there's a feeling not unlike jazz or rock, the performative lightings, the whiff of meat and blood.

As a movement, Babarians focus on that performing voice. The Babarian voice goes for personhood, somewhat like the voice of Bob Dylan's lyrics, or a comedian's voice, or the voice of a TV newsman. Emphasis is shifted from the page to performance. The poem on the page is more like a script or a score.

And Babar isn't just a singular phenomenon; it networks with other poetries both in time and space. Open readings are heating up all across America. Poetry 'slams', head-to-head poetry competitions, surfaced in Chicago some years ago. For years poets have been 'fighting' in Taos for the "Heavyweight Champions", and there's serious slamming at Bob Holman's Nuyorican Poet's Cafe in New York. In recent years the San Francisco Bay Area has positively bloomed with open readings; New York has two open series, a poetry open and an open featuring 'performance'; Los Angeles has a number of open venues. Perhaps this open, participatory tendency means poetry is starting to be popular, to reach the people in America.

The feeling at many opens, certainly Babar, leans to the shamanistic, not simply 'literary' but a speaking in tongues, communion in a sacred practice. From time to time poetry has tried to purify itself, to cut through ornament, dead wood, and reconnect. Walt Whitman, with his "barbaric yawp", did that in America for some decades after the Civil War. Rimbaud, the adolescent shooting star, in France around 1870. [In the '50s and '60s] in America the Beats hell took on that purifying, recharging task. Some powerful stuff has been written at Babar, poems with an edge, poems that might matter to people besides professors, critics, other poets.

Babar is at least triply interesting. First, for itself, its raucous power and humor, for the talent it attracts and showcases, the movement that's grown up there. Second, Babar commands attention because it's a notable part of something larger that seems to be happening nationwide - the proliferation of open readings, the sense of poetry as participatory, give and take - a sense diametrically opposite to most Americans' brief high school or college experience of poetry as something hundreds of years old and quite dead.

Which brings us to a third Babarian focus of interest: its relation to the question of poetry and audience in America. Poetry has become a distinctly minor art in our time. The audience has grown tiny; poets often seem to be writing for each other, for themselves, more people writing it than reading it, etc. We get the sense, true or not, of an art that's become effete, irrelevant. The last genuinely popular poetry in America was probably written by the Beats. Now here comes Babar, in certain respects, from the same direction. They're angry poets, shake-it-up poets; they want to grab the audience any way that they can, by the gonads, by the throat, to explode their way to relevance.

In fact, there's a certain possibility that they, or similar poets, will succeed, win their way through to a much bigger audience and readership. What would happen then? Would they be able to go on swallowing pop [culture], digesting it, and coming back with genuine art, in the way that Dylan or the Beatles did that? Or would they become popular in the sense of the 'slam'; would they suck up to the applause meter and become just entertainment - impure and simple?

Richard Silberg's latest book of poems is The Fields. He is currently teaching "Writing and Appreciating Contemporary Poetry" at the University of California Berkeley Extension. He is Associate Editor of Poetry Flash.

---

Sample Poems

---

Catalogue Information

---