One for the Shoeshine Man (1 Viewer)

[zobraks]

One for the Shoeshine Man is a well-known poem and H. Sounes used a line from it as (a part of) the title of his book Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. Are those words that Sounes used Bukowski's words or someone else's?


From Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977):

From LA Free Press 568, June 6-12, 1975 (unchanged in On Love and Essential Bukowski: Poetry):

 

[Andreas]

One for the Shoeshine Man is one of the rare cases where I prefer the Black Sparrow version of the poem. It feels tighter and more fluent. The two appearances above differ in a lot of passages, not only in the one Dr. Zobraks pointed out. Maybe Bukowski himself reworked the original.

 

[zobraks]

I haven't compared the whole poems yet, it just struck me that the famous & familiar line "locked in the arms of the crazy life" (which I like very much and kinda prefer to "locked into the afternoon of a crazy life") hadn't been present in the original/first published version, so I (kinda) had to act immediately.

These days I'm reading LA Free Press back issues from the Independent Voices archive, and I just bumped into this famous poem.

Maybe Bukowski himself reworked the original.

I most sincerely hope so.

 

[mjp]

Maybe Bukowski himself reworked the original.

If there was any evidence that he had, I suspect Abel would have used the reworked version in the post-Martin collections.

But he didn't, so...