Found some manuscripts (1 Viewer)

mjp

Founding member
Here are a couple of my early mimeo appearances (circa 1966-67), previously considered lost to the unforgiving ravages of time.

As you can see, I was literally deconstructing the English language and entering - blindly perhaps, I must admit - into a skeletal, crude form of...well, it can really only be described as dirty realism.

THE STARS is a hopeful piece, full of barely concealed yearning and the positivity of youth.
THE APPLE ORCHARD is a darker meditation on man being broken on the wheel of dull, repetitive labor.

Enjoy.



stars-apples.jpg
 
Ooh, well too bad we couldn't all afford to have our tonsillectomies at The Mayo Clinic, Mr. I-Had-Ice-Cream-Delivered-To-My-Hospital-Bed.
 
What is that, a grammar zing? You grammar zinging me? Feels like a zing.

And mint chocolate chip?! That hadn't been invented yet. The only ice cream we could get when I was growing up was vanilla or rhubarb, and we had to get it from an Italian family in Wisconsin. Only place within 500 miles that had refrigeration.

So no, I didn't get ice cream, Rockefeller. They gave me a clump of wet gauze and said, "Suck this for a while, then get a move on. We need the bed. Mrs. Wagner's gout is flaring up."
 
Badass typewriter ribbon.

Think about it, you wrote poetry the same time as Bukowski when he was working in the Post Office :oo
 
Bukowski only wished he could tap into the kind of rich poetic vein I was working in the 60s. I mean, sure, he came close, but let's be real.
Badass typewriter ribbon.
Those are mimeographs, so saying "manuscripts" in the thread title was misleading. My fingers were too small and refined to work a mimeograph machine or a typewriter when I was 6 years old, so I dictated all of my work to a typist, and they took it from there. All the publishing stuff -- well, I've never wanted to know how the sausage is made, I just want to eat all the hot dogs.
 
I think those two years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop fucked me up. All that discussion and chai tea and thoughtful feedback vampired my homespun creativity.

I should have never signed my MacArthur Genius Grant check over to them. But hindsight is 20-20. (Cliche! You can do better. Show us how it made you feel.)
 

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