Huffpo's interview with literary outtlaw, Alan Kaufman:

Critically Acclaimed Author Alan Kaufman Discusses What Avant Garde Means in 2013

Poet and author of Drunken Angel, Alan Kaufman is interviewed on the significance of avant garde writing.

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Drunken Angel by Alan Kaufman

[An] addictive memoir of self-destruction, recuperation and a literary coming-of-age.

— Kirkus Reviews

(PRWEB) September 04, 2013

Avant garde is a phrase often-heard but seldom completely understood. What exactly does it mean, and why is it important? Alan Kaufman, avant garde poet and author of Drunken Angel (also available as an audio book, was interviewed on Huffington Post on this important classification of media.

Kaufman defines avant garde art and literature as "anticipations of massive esthetic, social and political changes to come. Today's avant garde, driven by vision, defies convention esthetically, socially, professionally. Its works are prophesies."

He also gives insight into the writing process of his harrowing memoir Drunken Angel:

"The actual writing of Drunken Angel just poured out over a year into a memoiristic blow by blow account, described by others as 'harrowing' -- of what it was like to descend drunk into the gutter and then my journey back from hell. But it's about my ascent as a writer. Of once-dead dreams miraculously revived and realized."

As the founder of the Acker Awards, which recognize excellence in the avant garde, and a groundbreaking author and poet himself, nobody is better poised to speak about the subject than Kaufman.

Find Alan Kaufman in person at these events:
September 12-15, Sprachsalz Festival, Austria
September 6, 2013, Adobe Books, 7-9pm, San Francisco, CA
October 12, 2013, Litquake, "Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write" San Francisco, CA

What people are saying about Drunken Angel:
"[An] addictive memoir of self-destruction, recuperation and a literary coming-of-age."
— Kirkus Reviews

Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Elie Wiesel, Barney Rosset, Isaac Bashevis Singer: these are some of the literary icons who impact the life and times of outlaw writer Alan Kaufman in his intoxicating new memoir Drunken Angel. In this brutal account of his ceaseless battle against his addiction, Kaufman portrays with raw power and naked candor his descent into the hell of alcoholism, while struggling to cope with the fact of being the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor in a world that is only too eager to forget the horrors of WWII. An inspiring story of coming to terms with how the Holocaust impacted his family, Drunken Angel is an important memoir by a Second Generation Holocaust writer to examine of how addiction, Jewishness and The Holocaust intersect.

Excerpt of the Day: "Drunken Angel" by Alan Kaufman

Son of a French Holocaust survivor, Alan Kaufman drank to fill the huge hole in his heart, wrecking himself and everyone in his path.  In Drunken Angel, the poet and critically acclaimed writer recounts with unvarnished honesty the story of the alcoholism that took him to the brink of death, the PTSD that drove him to the edge of madness, and the love that brought him back.  Kaufman minces no words as he looks back on a life pickled in self-pity, self-loathing, and guilt, delivering a lacerating, cautionary tale of a life wasted and reclaimed.

Have a look:

Chapter 82

Why an angel? Because I believe that, in time, that is what we become in sobriety, if we last long enough, to the end. Not the winged kind, no. Not some haloed cupid or sword swinger but a kind of flawed angel, without wings, that belongs to no religion but rather to a species of human heartbreak unlike any other known.

Alcoholics and addicts are unlike any other people I’ve ever met. I am unlike most people. A blazing mutant of some kind. A wondrous freak. In my mind lurks an urge that will be with me to the end, to put a bottle to my lips and drink myself to death. A judge and jury that I wake up to each morning has pronounced a verdict of guilt on me for no crime that I have committed, just for being alive, and has sentenced me to death, not by guillotine or rope but by a single drink.

It is the strangest thing, this sentence of death, this disease I have which tests me to the max and each day holds my existence accountable to the very universe, a god no religion can know as we drunks know it.

A god of drunks who goes with us into our prisons and gutters, bedrooms and businesses, flophouses and alleys, hospitals and mansions, and patiently waits with hand on our shivering shoulders as we groan through yet one more night of near death, waits to see if maybe this time we’ve had pain enough, loss enough, enough hangover, illness, fear, to ask for help.

And yet many cannot ask, and die right before the god of drunks, who I think must weep helplessly when this occurs. So many lose heart and fall. I have seen so many of my brothers and sisters in recovery fall. I have seen so many beautiful people die. The poet found in his room OD’d with a needle in his arm. He was my best friend. The twenty-year-old drummer who killed himself over a romance gone wrong. Nice kid. The young artist who drank and was found murdered in her Tenderloin hotel room. She was so talented. The buddy who drank and wound up facedown in a river in Pennsylvania, drowned. The ones, so many, who jumped off the bridge or the roof or put a gun barrel to their heads and squeezed the trigger, or in private ate painkillers until found on the floor brain-dead, or perished young of a destroyed liver. That young nurse, a mother of three, who had everything, beautiful children, loving husband, looks to die for, a house with two cars in the garage, who also had this little problem that she couldn’t stay sober or stop smoking crack, no matter how many meetings she attended or what advice she tried to follow, and one day returned home to that garage, ran a hose, turned on the ignition, and gassed herself to death.

When you have seen as much of that as I have in my sobriety, in the last twenty years, how can I not regard my own reflection with amazement that I am still here. Why me? How did I get so lucky? Really, I don’t know. I want to think that I’ve done something right, but in truth, I know better. I do believe in a Higher Power and I do work the 12 steps and go to meetings and work with drunks of every kind and description, yet it doesn’t seem like enough, it never does. I never feel that I can repay what has been given to me. The love that has been shown. The patience and straight-shooting counsel that has saved my butt time and again. I have met in recovery men and women who are the greatest human beings I have ever known but don’t want their names advertised. Anonymous, quiet angels, invaded by death, propelled by light, who move among us with quiet grace and private suffering and seek each day to help those around them without fanfare or reward.