Midwest - No. 7 - 1964

[Pogue Mahone]

"Through The Streets Of Anywhere" should be clean, because it first appeared in Fire Station. "Bayonets In Candlelight" remained uncollected until The Continual Condition. Hopefully the Great Editor wasn't too high on himself.

 

[cirerita]

[...] I can’t help but thinking of “bayonets in candlelight,” which runs for 98 strong lines in the original manuscript, and 31 heavily edited lines in the posthumous version printed in The Continual Condition...

The magazine version is 66 lines long, 32 lines shorter than the original mss and 35 lines longer than the book version.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

That's a lot to think about. Is this an example where Buk did some of his own re-writes? (I don't think any of us disagree that this didn't happen, especially back when magazines rejected his poems the first go-around. As opposed to later, when editors published whatever he sent in, regardless of quality.)