Can there be anything more audacious in this day and age than proudly pronouncing oneself a bohemian?
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In fact the vast majority of bohemians–artists, activists, and DIY philosophers who live unconventionally for their times–do not wind up with their brains splattered on a wall like Levy, or shot and dumped in a river like Rosa Luxemburg, or raped and murdered like Teena Brandon, or fill in your own favorite tragic and brutal bohemian death–maybe the one you’ve envisioned for yourself in your most paranoid moments (paranoia being historically endemic to the bohemian state). But to read Powers’s account of her own so-called bohemian life, you’d think rage, fear, and mutual contempt between you and the dominant culture had nothing to do with bohemianism–at least not after high school. Powers, a pop critic for the New York Times, writes like Oprah runs her talk show: she is an expert on one topic–herself–and is convinced that this one subject branches out into everything of interest in the universe. “Our scamming barter circle operated on the potlatch principle,” she writes in “Soul Trash,” a chapter nominally about alternatives to mindless consumerism. “Just like a Kwakiutl chief, I would offer bounty at Planet Records without asking for anything in exchange, and my buddies would return the favor when I wanted food or a new shirt.”
Alan Kaufman, the editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry–a black-clad, tattoo-bearing doorstop of a tome–takes the opposite rhetorical tack. To him every hippie rambler who ever wrote down a ‘shroom vision and every rock star who ever name-checked Rimbaud is an “outlaw,” an edgewalker with a price on his head. “Welcome to the Wild West of American poetry,” he starts his introduction, “a two-fisted saloon of New World dreams.”
By using her life as raw material–which is a perfectly legitimate starting point–she sets up the expectation that she’ll be transforming the clay into something that transcends clay, but she never quite does. Which makes her book dramatically unlike just about every boho bio I’ve ever read. From Rimbaud to Emma Goldman, from Sun Ra to Patti Smith, bohemian heroes and antiheroes have been those who have used the raw material of themselves to try to get beyond themselves. And the conciliatory coziness Powers aspires to falls apart frequently: people who sometimes attain a state of being beyond themselves are quite likely to come off as weird or scary or rude in a true, unnerving, fated sense, with a work ethic that can frighten anybody’s horses! horses! horses! and other ethics more or less out of phase with the perceived mainstream culture of the time. This is probably more or less what Kaufman is trying to get at, though he loses the all-important subtleties in a mudslide of bad-boy rhetoric.
And then she’s off again, into a reminiscence about how the only real punk boy in high school thought she was a sellout because she was new wave and later, a clique of experimental poets didn’t like her because her poems “constantly displayed sellout tendencies like pretty imagery and direct emotional expression.” She sounds like she’s still pretty bitter about it: “I never wrote another line of poetry again.” After that level of painful self-revelation, it seems a little churlish to suggest that maybe she should’ve hung out with some poets whose work was compatible with hers instead of chasing after the in crowd, but it’s relevant: painfully lacking from Powers’s cloying stories is the hint of any real outlaw spirit, of that rebellious core of self that draws strength from defying not just the “mainstream” but also one’s peers.
