Betting on the Muse: Legitimacy (1 Viewer)

G

GDPR 9650

Hello,

anyway, Betting on the Muse is the first poems collection of Bukowski's released after his passing and I don't own anything that came out after his death because I know better (thanks to this forum). However, now, I was wondering if those legitimacy problems with the posthumous began right away, is there any indication that the poems of Betting on the Muse were altered?

The Laughing Heart was my introduction to Bukowski and is one of the few things of him I don't actually own, and I really wanted to. But I also, like many here, loathe the cowardice in which they handled his work and wouldn't want to support those.

Thanks for your time as always!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Betting on the Muse is interesting because it's the transition between very little "editing," and major detrimental editing. It has less detrimental editing than the Martin-edited collections that followed it, but it is not free from it.

We only have manuscripts for 18 of the 117 poems in that book, but 4 of them show detrimental editing. If you extrapolate from that, you can assume that 26 of the poems have been tampered with. The actual number may be more, it may be less, without the manuscripts we don't know (we have a few hundred manuscripts that haven't been added to the database yet, so we may eventually end up with more from Betting).

I guess everyone has to establish their own level of tolerance for Martin's bullshit, and mine is well below the 26 out of 117 in Betting on the Muse. I think that's too many to consider it "clean," so for me, unfortunately, it belongs the list of books to be avoided.

Your mileage may vary.
 
My personal taste: I didn't cling to it from the day it came out.
Be it authentic or not: it sure can't compete with his previous "Last Night of the Earth Poems".
 
Great title for a book, but the poetry itself was grinded into something completely different than the poet intended. All the flavor was stripped away for a dry piece of meat served with powdered mash potatoes. F the "Great Editor"....
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top