Notes From Underground - No. 1 - 1964 Murder, The Night They Took Whitey, The Swan, Insomnia, 6 A.M. (1 Viewer)

Pogue Mahone

Officials say drugs may have played a part
I finally found an affordable copy of this one. Now that I did, I'll probably try to hunt down a near fine copy. I love it. Sorry for the not-so-great scans of some pages, but this is a delicate, expensive one.

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Swan and Insomnia were on the same page. I split them on the assumption that Swan was a first appearance.

I can re-scan the page when I'm home next week.
 
It's fine the way it is, but if you want to upload the page again we can rearrange to put everything in order.
 
In Insomnia, collected in The Roominghouse Madrigals, Martin felt the need to explain the second line of the poem by coming up with a whole new line: /on the floors below/

I hope you are not angry with me, John, but I'm going to cross out this line of yours.
 
Good thing I renewed my blood pressure meds. I had been operating under the silly assumption that at least those books released while Buk was still kicking weren't messed with.
 
Well, in all fairness, I think Madrigals was probably the exception to the rule. The poems were written so long before the book was published that Bukowski probably couldn't tell for sure whether he wrote something or not.
 
My copy of Madrigals contains quite a number of notes and deletions. Sometimes it's only a single word that had been changed (by Martin), but it's a word that usually makes a lot of difference, as is the case with On a Night You Don't Sleep (Harlequin 1957), in which 'nigger' had been replaced by 'negro'.
 
The importance of putting together a book like Madrigals should not be understated. It should be recognized as a major contribution. The idea of fucking with a single word in those poems should also not be understated. It should be recognized as a major fuck up.
 
Of course it is a major fuck up, let alone the invention of new lines. Martin knew that Bukowski never looked back, he wrote a poem and forgot about it. The butcher made full use of it und put in his own fucking idiocy. Martin might have done good things, I'm sure he did, but this kind of disrespect for Bukowski's work leaves everything else in the shade.
 

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