Trumpets sounding...
I view all of Bukowski's writings, except for Pulp, as being on an equal plane whether in his real time or posthumous editions. Like he said himself in the Schroeder Tapes, he wrote the same thing over and over again, and the only difference was 'range'; he was present in all of it.
In the later editions, one never knows when the reader will come across another gem. In Shifting Through the Madness..., 'so you want to be a writer' is as good as anything else that was released in his lifetime. The copyright is 2002. By the time I was finished with this collection, I'd bookmarked 30 poems. That's a hell of a lot of keepers for anyone. So I'm not one who considers his later writings in any way inferior to his earlier ones, because he's talking about his life as an old man or revisiting his earlier life and restating it better or sometimes more succinctly than before. All writers have favorite themes they like to revisit as they get older and I like the 'autumn of the life' feel to them. They'll come in handy if I live that long myself.
With regard to Pulp, I feel that his writing reflected his weakened and enfeebled condition because of the leukemia toward the end of his life and I would have preferred that he not attempt this feeble satire and be unable to carry it through with the same grace as in his other works -- the only writings of Bukowski where he was not at his full powers. Nevertheless, it took balls for him to go for it anyway and take that kind of creative risk.
So I think readers have a better shot at finding these gems if they stay on the alert for them, no matter in what work, no matter in what edition, and not be overly sweeping in their assessement of his earlier or posthumous publications. If he thought it worth puting down on paper, I want to have the chance of making up my mind myself about it's worth, and I've rarely been disappointed.
Poptop
I view all of Bukowski's writings, except for Pulp, as being on an equal plane whether in his real time or posthumous editions. Like he said himself in the Schroeder Tapes, he wrote the same thing over and over again, and the only difference was 'range'; he was present in all of it.
In the later editions, one never knows when the reader will come across another gem. In Shifting Through the Madness..., 'so you want to be a writer' is as good as anything else that was released in his lifetime. The copyright is 2002. By the time I was finished with this collection, I'd bookmarked 30 poems. That's a hell of a lot of keepers for anyone. So I'm not one who considers his later writings in any way inferior to his earlier ones, because he's talking about his life as an old man or revisiting his earlier life and restating it better or sometimes more succinctly than before. All writers have favorite themes they like to revisit as they get older and I like the 'autumn of the life' feel to them. They'll come in handy if I live that long myself.
With regard to Pulp, I feel that his writing reflected his weakened and enfeebled condition because of the leukemia toward the end of his life and I would have preferred that he not attempt this feeble satire and be unable to carry it through with the same grace as in his other works -- the only writings of Bukowski where he was not at his full powers. Nevertheless, it took balls for him to go for it anyway and take that kind of creative risk.
So I think readers have a better shot at finding these gems if they stay on the alert for them, no matter in what work, no matter in what edition, and not be overly sweeping in their assessement of his earlier or posthumous publications. If he thought it worth puting down on paper, I want to have the chance of making up my mind myself about it's worth, and I've rarely been disappointed.
Poptop