Hello everyone! Glad to see so many Bukowski fans around. (1 Viewer)

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Hi there Bukowski fans, I'm new to the forum. This looks like a great place.

I'm from Belgium and I've been reading Bukowski since I was about 16 years old. I'm 33 now.
Besides Bukowski my favorite writers are John Fante, Céline, Knut Hamsun, E. E. Cummings, Robinson Jeffers, Aldous Huxley and some Dutch and Belgian guys.

I just started a blog called "Outsiders and Misfits". Articles on this blog will focus on artists, mainly in literature and music, who can be considered as outsiders or misfits.

The first article on my blog is about Charles Bukowski. If you want to check it out here's the link:

www.outsidersandmisfits.com

You can also follow my blog on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/outsidersandmisfits/

I don't have many followers yet, so if you like my Facebook page that would be great! By following my Facebook page you can see when I post new stuff on my blog.

Looking forward to reading some good stuff on here and meeting some good people!

Thanks.
 
Thanks Johannes. It's a great place indeed. Lots of knowledgeable people around here. Some very interesting threads.
 
Welcome, Wild Swan. One point on your blog about the Top 10 Bukowski books:

Your note about the posthumous books is too broadly applied. Yes, the majority of the posthumous books (published both by Black Sparrow and ecco) suffer from the editing you refer to; however, many other posthumous works are much more faithful to Buk's original words. There are a couple of examples where a BSP edited version is included (and Abel explains his rationale in a thread here somewhere), but my understanding is that this is rare. These include:

Portions of a Wine-Stained Notebook (City Lights)
Absence of the Hero (City Lights)
Sunlight Here I Am (Sun Dog Press)
The Bell Tolls for No One (City Lights) and
The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way (City Lights), all edited by our David Stephen Calonne.

and

On Love
On Writing
On Cats
Essential Bukowski and
Storm of the Living and the Dead (all ecco), all edited by our Abel Debritto.

So, your blanket statement about the posthumous books paints an inaccurate portrait of what's really out there and it's out there thanks to the hard work of David and Abel and their respect for the original word.
 
It's also inaccurate and misleading to say the poems in the Martin-edited posthumous collections were "unfinished." They were not unfinished, and saying they were infers that they required some editorial intervention before they were worthy of publication. When the reality is it was the editorial intervention by Martin that made the posthumous Black Sparrow and Ecco collections read like disappointing, seemingly lesser, or "unfinished" work.

The raw material that those collections were culled from is equal in quality to the rest of Bukowski's output throughout his career. Meaning the mixture of great poems, good poems, and not-so-great poems remained pretty consistent, and Bukowski did not suddenly or mysteriously lose his ability to write as he got older.
 
Thanks for the comments!

I have to admit I have not read most of the books Purple Stickpin is referring to. I stopped reading posthumous Bukowski releases after becoming disappointed by the quality of the ones I did read. Most of the stuff I have read seemed like unfinished poems, edited by someone else (John Martin) to me.

I will edit that section on my blog later. Maybe I'll just delete the whole posthumous part...

I must say I'm impressed with the knowledge of the members on here. This is why I included a link to this forum on my blog.

Do you guys like my other articles on the blog? English is not my first language so it's hard work for me to write in English.
 

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