2 poems submitted to City lights with rejection letter by Ferlinghetti (1 Viewer)

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This is interesting.

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Bill
 
Those are good --

a leaf drops on your white belly
and that's all there
is.

Not sure what Ferlinghetti meant by "his state of mind." His state of mind seems fine. Maybe he means that Bukowski seems angry. We'll see how cheerful Ferlinghetti is five months before he dies.

---

farewell, farewell is in The Flash of Lightning, and of course Martin couldn't just leave it alone.
 
On one hand, I can see why Ferlinghetti didn't want to send those back; perhaps thinking that Buk might toss them since they were rejected. On the other hand, Bukowski may have done some rash things in his life, but not so much with his writing. It does seem rather presumptuous of Ferlinghetti, and also a bit selfish. But we now get to read them, so there's that.
 
Now must have been Buk's favorite title; he used it five times. By the way, the listings for Now in the DB for Burning in Water... and War All the Time list it at the top of the TOC and are missing page numbers. In Burning, it's on page 155; in War it's page 248.
 
Fixed. I must have lost the page numbers when sorting out all the different nows at some point.

He also used yes as a title five times.
 
They're two strong poems about death (especially Now) written at a time when Buk could sense his own death getting nearer. I don't understand why Ferlinghetti rejected them. Did he think they were bad poems? Hmm...
 
Fixed. I must have lost the page numbers when sorting out all the different nows at some point.
Actually, I've got another one. He wrote six poems titled Now. In the DB, the first entry of the five that come up after a search lists both The Last NIght... and the 1992 NYG, but these are two different poems.
 
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Ferlinghetti did not publish much of Bukowski's poetry. Mostly the stories. I tink that he was in a couple of the anthologies with poems...
 
It really never ends, does it?

I think it's interesting that the 1992 NYG is, I believe, the only one that contains a poem that's not collected in a larger BSP volume. I fully expected the version of Now in the '92 NYG to be the same version as in The Last Night...So much so that I didn't bother checking early yesterday when I noted the missing page numbers. For some reason I brought all the books out again last night and found Now #6. Ha, take that Yes.
 
No, it never ends.

And as much as I sometimes wish it would end, it's clear that making the database as good as it can be is a forever thing, so I welcome information like a new now.
 
I'll have to come back to this. I'm prepping the database and main site for a move to a new server at the moment.

Yes, again, and yes, the forum will move too eventually.
 

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