Public readings: only poetry? (1 Viewer)

The title pretty much sums up my question.
I have some cds of Bukowski's public readings, and in those recordings he only read poems.

Might sound like a silly question, but I was wondering if he ever read anything else apart from poetry. When you think of it, many of his poems sounded like short stories anyway, and some stories from "Notes of a dirty old man" would have been fit for public readings too.

I don't think he ever used the name "Chinaski" in his poems (correct me if I'm wrong), so my point eventually is to know if he ever read any Chinaski pieces during his public readings.

Thanks very much in advance for your help!
 
i don't think he read any stories at readings but he did on some home recordings.

"the little tailor" is the only one i can recall.
 
I'd think, the attention-span of his general audience at those readings wouldn't work for a longer piece. But as dgray said, on some home-recordings, he did some prose. On the 'Uncensored'-CDs you have it.
 
black sparrow released a tape reel of bukowski reading poetry that's pretty cool. i bring it up here, because a few people have discovered that if you play it backwards, it contains bukowski reading the entire text of ham on rye twenty years before he ever wrote ham on rye.
 
Waaaaaaaiiiiiit - are you making that up?

Because I thought if you played it backwards it said, "I bury Paul."
 
I feel about 99.9% sure I've heard Bukowski read the short story "Less Delicate Than the Locust" somewhere...but maybe it was a studio production not a live reading?
 
Thanks guys for your responses!

I double-checked and Bukowski did use the name "Chinaski" in his poems, but only in the late ones. This pseudonym thing seems more complicated than I thought :/
 
Don't assume that the later books are later poems, that is not always the case. The later books contain a lot of early and mid-period poems. More poetry collections have been published after his death than were published during his lifetime. He didn't write all those poems at the end of his life.
 
I feel about 99.9% sure I've heard Bukowski read the short story "Less Delicate Than the Locust" somewhere...but maybe it was a studio production not a live reading?
Yes, he reads "Less Delicate than the Locust" on "CB Uncensored"
 
Mjp, thanks for the precision you gave. I can well imagine earlier unpublished poems being published after Bukowski died. But did he also published earlier poems during his liftetime, except for "Roominghouse madrigals"?

I thought the publishing and the writing time for each poem more or less coincided, although I guess the only way to know when a poem was published is to find the corresponding manuscript.
 
Date of writing and date of publication are completely unconnected, largely due to the sloppy editing of John Martin.
 
So you mean even during Bukowski's lifetime? I thought Bukowski had his word to say about what got published in which collection (I can't remember in what letter I read that).
 
No, even with his previous editors during the early Sixties he allowed them to select the poems.
Later, Martin also had pretty much carte blanche to put the books together as he wished. Some of the posthumous books for example are subtitled "New Poems" and they are no such thing. Some of the poems were actually written in the Fifties.
 
I don't think Martin's editing (of the poetry collections, anyway) was sloppy during Bukowski's lifetime. He may not have provided dates or context for most of the collections, but then he was publishing poetry collections, not textbooks. I don't really care if they are chronological or properly grouped - that doesn't matter to me. I can see that the vast majority of the work is virtually untouched between manuscript and publication, and that's enough for me.

Too bad that doesn't hold true for the posthumous books. You could call those sloppy. You could call them a lot of things. One of the things I don't call them anymore is 'Bukowski poetry.'
 
Indeed, I had always disliked the so-called "new poems", but only since Roni's conference in Andernach have I understood why. I ended up with mixed feelings of both relief and sadness. Relief that those poems were not Bukowski's after all. And sadness at the thought of so many lost poems.

In any case, thanks very much for all of your answers, you guys are the best!
 
[...] did he also publish earlier poems during his liftetime, except for "Roominghouse madrigals"?

'Burning in Water' is a compilation of earlier books ('It catches', 'Crucifix', 'Terror Street') and recent poems. 'The days run away' has some VERY old poems inside. 'Play the piano drunk' has poems that date back to 1970. These are just the few that come to mind.
 
Not very often, but he did read stories and chapters from Post Office in 1970. From a February 1970 letter to Weissner:
think you'll like POST OFFICE, maybe even better than NOTES. There's plenty of sex in there for laughs and enough horror and madness to float the typescript to you across the Atlantic. I try to photograph rather than preach. Read a chapter, at L.A. State College where I got fucked by a madwoman while I was a mailman. It went over good. One bottle of beer before noon. I walked into the men's crapper, heaved, then came back and read. I got away with it. But I had to drink from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. in order to forget.
 

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