It's All a Matter of Entertainment - 1975 poem with MANY revisions (1 Viewer)

cirerita

Founding member
Talk about B not revising his poems!

well, it's not the most common thing to see, but in some cases B heavily revised his poems, like this one here.

by the way mjp, you have this manuscript online https://web.archive.org/web/2020/ht...man.php?show=poem1975-11-02-entertainment.jpg , but it's the polished version. maybe you could put them together or link them so people can see B actually revised more than he usually claimed.

hey, I'm dispelling another myth here!

entertainment1.jpg

entertainment2.jpg
 
Yeah, that reminds me that in the new database I wanted to try to come up with a way to link similar/revised works for comparison. In fact, let me go set up that table right now... ;)
 
wow, a different version of this appears in What Matters Most...
now, correct me if I'm wrong but they're just too much alike.

it's Captain Goodwine, page 177
 
Those are the kind of links we'll have to make in the comparison table...for things that are the same or have similar elements but different titles. That's where you guys will come in. ;)

I just found another this morning in my unprocessed manuscripts directory (blood and the mad poet). When I get these manuscripts edited and into the database it will double the number of available manuscripts to 1300+.
 
very good idea mjp. I'm interested in seeing how many actually link and match up because I'm sure there are lots.

do that soon actually...although I know youre busy.
 
When Buk writes at the bottom of the heavily revised version "This has still been changed--a bit--again," is he referring to this text? The clean copy is dated the same day. Perhaps this was discussed in earlier thread...Arkansas then becomes Florida, Captain Winehead becomes Goodwine, etc. etc. So this would be an example of another posthumous Martinization if the poem didn't appear until What Matters Most.
 
It definitely didn't appear until What Matters Most.

You can draw a conclusion about who made the changes based on the fact that Bukowski was consistent with the state of Arkansas and the name of the pilot in both versions. Even if there were a third version, it doesn't stand to reason that he suddenly made those changes himself.

If you look at the database page for What Matters Most, you'll see that changes were made to virtually everything. At least everything we have manuscripts for. Which strongly suggests that if we had manuscripts for everything in there, we would find that it was all tampered with.

But then that goes for almost all of the posthumous poetry collections.
 

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