Manuscripts (1 Viewer)

Thanks mjp, Thanks!
You're kickin' goddam fuckin' ass!

and thanks to Dora, who I guess has been one main-contributor to this last extension.
 
Dora's contribution is the "another batch" I mentioned. I'm still working on the Harrison eBay manuscripts if you can believe it.

It would be a lot faster to just throw them onto the site without any cross-referencing, but the cross-referencing is important, and it helps to show how many poems were re-named and altered.
 
You're definitely right:
having the material in a reliable order with cross-references etc is what makes the whole thing of buknet a Heaven of a Nirvana (while without that it would've been "only" a Total Miracle).

There's a reason, why You are our Maximo Lider, (even tho your hair started to get grey).
And that reason is: You just Do a Most Decent Job here like No One else could do. I said that and I mean it.
 
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I'm not sure what impresses me the most: the immense productivity of Buk himself or the productivity of you guys here on the forum keeping our old man's spirit alive. Thanks for this!
 
1990 is finished, manuscript pages updated.

- 42 manuscripts added
- 16 titles new to the database

Kind of interesting that near the end of the year Bukowski wrote some cynical, biting poems, none of which Martin collected.

Also added genius by the shore, yet another dig at Richmond. Bukowski dated it 1990, but it's a computer printout, so it had to be 1991 (or later).
 
Well, yes.

If we assume Martin was putting a spin on Bukowski with his "editing" of the posthumous books, then it's no surprise that he would exclude the darker, angrier poems. Though it's worth noting that when Bukowski was alive about the only thing Martin didn't use were some of the more nonsensical poems. Which was probably smart, because most of those are pretty stupid.

So far in the stuff from the 90s I don't see this decline that some people talk about. Certainly if the end of 1990 is any indication Bukowski was still full of piss and vinegar, and there are some great poems there. I think getting the rest of the 90s manuscripts up there will go a long way toward dispelling that particular myth.
 
So far in the stuff from the 90s I don't see this decline that some people talk about.
The Last Night of the Earth Poems is among his best collections; probably his most strong since Love is a Dog from Hell. This alone should help to dispel the myth. The Last Night is strong not just because of the content, but how that content represented a coming full-circle for him. Many of the 50s and early/mid 60s poems are full of long, convoluted lines of imagery, which I love, but they aren't his peak. The Days Run Away is a stand-alone watermark, but Mockingbird, Burning in Water, and Dog from Hell are a high point of refined poetry in contrast to the earlier works. Play the Piano, Dangling, and War/1981-1984 are very good, but not great. You Get So Alone is the epitome of terse. Good, even very good, but not great. The Last Night distilled down all the styles to one concise and clear form - his true voice, if you will.

What was I saying?
 
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So far in the stuff from the 90s I don't see this decline that some people talk about. Certainly if the end of 1990 is any indication Bukowski was still full of piss and vinegar, and there are some great poems there. I think getting the rest of the 90s manuscripts up there will go a long way toward dispelling that particular myth.

I think a poem like fat boy from the database is a good example for that. It kicks ass in the best Bukowski way ever, imho, and is very funny too.

Yet at the same time the late Bukowski (about mid 80's till his death) used to insert some strange sounding adjectives and other stuff into his poems and prose which the early Bukowski never did. Like in this poem (fat boy) the sentence:

"it was true, I found them attractive, especially later in the night when I got ghoulishly sentimental"

Ghoulishly sentimental? Now that sounds like a fucked up Martinization alright, doesn't it? Yet it's an original manuscript. First I thought that Martin did those things. But now I think that Bukowski liked to play around with stuff like this in his later life.
 
Yet at the same time the late Bukowski (about mid 80's till his death) used to insert some strange sounding adjectives and other stuff into his poems and prose which the early Bukowski never did.
Well, in a letter to Eugene Donders (Reach for the Sun, page 237) he wrote:
On writing... the simple word usually gets it better, it seems to carve it deeper into the paper...
Still, there are odd times when I like to throw in an almost awkward word that somehow becomes not awkward when it gets worked into a sentence.
 
Compare it to the published version at your own risk.
I'm in the happy position to say that none of those fucked up posthumous poetry collections are on my bookshelf. They've never been there. That's not because I'm so clever, but just because of mjp's explanatory work. It saves me the trouble of choking on the stupid efforts of a pseudo poet.
 
Beef Tongue stuck in my head when I read The People Look Like Flowers At Last
ir
.

I remember thinking: What other poet on the planet could have written about a subject like this? Like many times the answer is: no one.

"BEEF TONGUE! BEEF TONGUE!"

Jesus.


-------------------

It's quite a while that I read The People Look ... but even from memory I can tell you that it's badly chopped up in the published version.
 
What other poet on the planet could have written about a subject like this? Like many times the answer is: no one
Yep.
The titles and covers of the posthumous poetry collections once attracted me, but at that time I neither knew this site nor anything about the heavy editing of his work.
 

=> Shared Sept. 2008!!

Thanks, Digney! for this reminder, that there were early first contributors here, who built this place and shared at a time when it was difficult to find Any of the rare stuff!

Sometimes I get the feeling that members who have joined 3 or 5 years ago aren't really aware of the situation back then and take everything here for granted without the awareness that manymany small contributions, everyone of us had gathered bit by bit and posted [I'm NOT really talking of me here, since my own contributions have been extremely minor compared to others!!], built this archive.
 
77 new letters to Steve Richmond added to the manuscripts section of the main site. Scroll, scroll and keep scrolling. They're at the bottom of the page. No need to scroll anymore, letters are in a separate section.

Some good things in there, including the manuscript for Bukowski's intro to Hitler Painted Roses.

Big up to a certain mysterious Canadian woman for supplying those copies.
 
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November 1966, "John, what's his name?, sold his library for $49,500 to some university. Can you imagine that? He wants to run a book of my poems but I'm already down to Webb on the next set. So to keep him quiet I told him I'd write him a novel."

John what's-his-name - I'm going to have to use that.

$49,500 in 1966 is $364,585 today, in case you were wondering.
 
Some new manuscripts are up. I started going through Dora's massive Huntington contributions, so here are a few. And really only a few. She sent me 1500 images, so there are a lot remaining (along with the 500 I still have to do that didn't come from Dora).

There are multiple versions of a lot of the poems in her batch, so you can see some Bukowski editing, like this one. And I posted one of the manuscripts in the comparisons section, just because it seemed necessary.

Here's what's new today:

https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1311
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1312
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1315
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1326
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1330
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1332
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1334
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1342
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=3156
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=4444
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=4553
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=4908
 
Added today:

https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=294
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1348
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1359
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1380
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1400
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1405
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1425
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1441
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1448
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1455
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=1464
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=3177
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=3190
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=3196
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=4555
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=4556
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=4557
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=4558
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=4559
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=4604
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=4869
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=5211
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=5492
 
At the end of Jack (one of the funniest poems for me) he wrote/typed "beanstock."
Shouldn't that really be "beanstalk?" Am I missing something?
 
yeah, I wondered about that, since he spells it correctly earlier in the poem (and I assume his writing program had spell check) - maybe it was intentional? Only one copy of that one though, so who knows.
 
When I first discovered this site and the horror committed to Buk's original work I printed out manuscripts and stuck them in the Martin-ized editions. Then at some point I realized how ridiculous that idea is. The Martin-ized versions are not worth the effort.

Thanks again to everyone for all your effort with the manuscripts.
 
Can we talk about Martin's idiotic fetish for parentheses?
Nah.

But what I will talk about is how it is fun to read his long poems, esp the manuscripts. It's so great to just go along for the ride and see where it takes you. Although not always expected but often intriguing, his endings leave me wanting more and I love that. I find myself re-reading his poems often but especially the endings. I finish a poem and go over the ending bits again and again.
 

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