Re-reading Bukowski (1 Viewer)

Waiting for a Ron Rash book to arrive in the mail so I'm going to re-read another Buk.
Interested to see how many times you've (talking to the entire board as a collective) have re-read Buk's books.
I imagine people such as mjp having read a book such as Post Office something like 113 times. Although I did see in another thread that he's (mjp) only read Pulp twice (that book was awful so not that I can blame him).

For me:
Post Office - 3
Women - 2
Ham on Rye - 2
Hollywood - 2
Factotum - 1
Pulp - 1

I guess it makes sense to give Factotum a second read.


Also. In 3 years, I'm still horrible at using the search function apparently.
 
Interested to see how many times you've (talking to the entire board as a collective) have re-read Buk's books.

For me:
Post Office - 3
Women - 2
Ham on Rye - 2
Hollywood - 2
Factotum - 1
Pulp - 1
Hard to tell. Let's guess; PO 14, HOR 12, W 20, H 11, F 18, P 4.
 
That's a large amount of re-reads!
I wonder how I'll feel about Bukowski after 3 more years, 10 years, 20 years. I wonder if I'll always love his work.
 
It's interesting that when asking about re-reading, you only cite the novels. My take is that Buk was:
  1. A poet, and an absolutely great poet
  2. A novelist, and an excellent novelist
  3. A short story writer, and reasonably adept as a short story writer (don't get me wrong, All the Assholes... is one of my favorite stories ever, along with Life and Death in the Charity Ward)
So, for the most part, I read Buk as a poet. I've re-read Burning in Water... countless times. On the other hand, I generally don't pick up a book of poetry and read it cover to cover. I prefer poetry to be very spontaneous (and Buk usually delivers regardless of whether I'm choosing a random volume or the one on my nightstand). So the books of poems have been partially re-read to various degrees. Love is a Dog..., The Roominghouse Madrigals, Mockingbird... and The Last Night... are among those I've read most or all of at least three times.

For the novels:

Post Office - 4-5x
Women - 3-4x
Ham on Rye - 2x
Hollywood - 2x
Factotum - 5-6x (my personal favorite of the novels)
Pulp - 1x

For stories, South of No North is a drop-dead winner at probably 5-6x.

I'm tired; I re-read Buk often. I don't keep statistics; no doubt I posted in another thread different information. Here's where I'm at today.
 
I think of Bukowski as a poet first and foremost. I mean, there's no denying that he was primarily a poet. I just prefer novels and prose above poetry. I've read all of the novels and prose and I'm about half way through the poetry, which is proving rather difficult to obtain. Some of those collections are expensive. I'm a starving carpenter!!

I do pick up The Days... from time to time and read some in that. My favorite poem that I've read so far is "For Jane". It's in that book, which I'm sure you know, which I why, when I do re-read some poetry, it's from that collection.

This discussion leads to another question. I'm reading Come On In! now. I understand that it was published posthumously but I was wondering if it's not when these poems are from? Year-wise. I'm sort of noticing that I enjoy the older collections more: Mockingbird, Burning in Water, The Days, Love is a Dog. So it appears as if enjoy stuff that was published (and I assume) written in the 70's. Just wondering if those posthumous collections were poems from later life.
 
Ah. Makes sense now. My copies of all of his novels are more than likely edited to death as well as they're all Ecco releases. I guess my next step is to obtain some originals.
 
Ah. So, my War All The Time, which is Black Sparrow, release sometime in the 90's (obviously a re-releases)(might be 96...can't remember/am not home to check), would that be edited?
 
Ah. So, my War All The Time, which is Black Sparrow, release sometime in the 90's (obviously a re-releases)(might be 96...can't remember/am not home to check), would that be edited?
The "edits" really start in Bone Palace Ballet, the first collection that was published without Bukowski's approval of the pre-publication galleys.

Martin certainly "edited" things while Bukowski was alive, and sometimes Bukowski caught the changes (see: Women), sometimes he didn't. But the real destruction of the work started after Bukowski was conveniently out of the picture.
 
Ah. Interesting.

So the question still remains in regards to years of when these were written. If you take Come On In! for example. Are these poems that he was writing in the 90s before his death or a combination of unpublished poems from many years. Is there even any way to tell?
I just find that most of the poetry in the new releases seem to be longer than the poems in earlier collections such as Love is a Dog, The Days..., etc.
 
Generally speaking the poetry collections are not chronological.

Many of the collections published during his lifetime are somewhat more chronological - meaning more poems written in the few years prior to publication - but only somewhat. The posthumous collections are all over the place. The People Look Like Flowers At Last, for example, has a lot of poems from the 1960s.

One of the proposed improvements for the database here was adding "year written" where we have a manuscript, or "year first published," where we have a magazine appearance. So one day in the bright future you may be able to list the contents of a book and see the years for the poems.

But that's sort of a monumental task and even if it was done the information would be incomplete. Though I suspect we could get a year for about 60% of the works in the database.
 
That would help, for sure.

That's interesting how a posthumous release such as The People Look Like Flowers At Last would have poems from as far back as the 60's.

Thanks for the help, everyone. I'm sure you've answered these questions in various capacities for years now, so, apologies.
 

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