searching for 2 of buks older short stories (a thread hijacked by Al Purdy & co.)

i was reading in "screams from the balcony" about hank trying to find a story he wrote about some hippies being captured and eaten by cannibals(one of his favorite storys,he says),does anyone know the name of the story and where i can find it?

theres also another story he mentions about two highjackers raping the stewardesses in midair and blowing the plane up afterwards(to everybodys surprise)-anyone got the name of this one?

maybe they appeared in hustler...have all the hustlerStories been published in bookForm someplace?

thx and greets.
 
Those sound like stories from the "men's magazines" he wrote for in the 70's. It wasn't just Hustler, he wrote for a lot of lesser known adult mags as well. Oui, Adam, etc. I don't think all of them have been collected. Most of them were intentionally raunchy, to appeal to the target audience of those mags.

cirerita would probably have an idea of how much of that genre of his work was collected. I'm wrong more than I'm right lately, so maybe they have all been collected. ;)
 
... sorry to interrupt... But I have one memory failure... who's that canadian poet that influenced Hank on the format of his poems?
 
exactly... thanx a lot... anyway... I foound it at the same time... on a long list of candian poets... AL PURDY is the poet that influenced the way Buko arranged his poems
 
henri, could you tell me where it says that Purdy influenced his style?
I don't doubt it, but would like to read it.Was it in one of the collections of letters?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hi,
I'm not sure that there is anything to Bukowski copying the line from Purdy. They had a short lived friendship, but by that time, they were both somewhat established in their styles.

Best,Bill
 
...hmmm..anything is possible... the friendship... anything can help to fashion a style.. probably mutually... xcept Buko exploited to the limit that vertical prose so cllose to colloquial american, as a mirror and expression of his life in america...of all american life
 
To me?doubtful. Bukowski was writing in "colloquial american" in his short stories way back in the 1940s, and he wasn't writing about American life as a whole, if that's what you're suggesting; he was writing about his pitiful experience of American life?and that's considerably different if one thinks about it.

Nor to me was Bukowski known "to fashion a style" or talk in terms of "vertical prose... as a mirror and expression of his life in america." I don't recall him ever talking in that artificial way that many poets do.

There's a poem B. wrote called A Northern Acquaintance. If this is about Purdy, it's not what I would call complementary. There may be some exceptions, but Bukowski generally talks freely about those he admires, whether it's Fante, Thurber, Dostoevsky, or others, and I've never read or heard Purdy's name mentioned likewise on such an important area as how B arranges the words on the page. I think his way of laying out the words was instinctive (through practice) and depended upon the mood of the poem. Of course, Walt Whitman was laying down the words on the page like this 100 years before both of them.

So as much as it would be nice to think that one of Canada's own has influenced the B., I would consider this influence miniscule at the very least. According to what I've read about Purdy on-line, he wrote "bad poetry" (not my words) for the first 40 years of his life. Unless Purdy and Bukowski had a correspondence before 1960, Bukowski's way of laying down his words was already well established, imo. Others here have brought up the same point and I agree with them.

Poptop
 
..oups.. I dont quite agree... and I might even say that at the extreme, B was antiamerican... the proof lies in many of his poems where he recalls his fame not on american readers but mostly on FRENCH readers

come on, reading Buko it is on the verge of condemnation of america

reading Buko it is like reading about dirt

I remember this poem in You get so alone at times

this guy in a red mercedes with a gun
 
..well, being a newcomer, I didn't want to open a new special thread... but since, the discussion seems interesting...

the quotes from B at the bottom of the last two posts are perfect examples that america is not such a nice place...

sometimes I wonder if american way of life is really worth the life of the young dudes in Irak and afghanistan!

most of Buko's work is a long tale of misery, whores, drunks, junkies...suicides and murders

sorry Owen Roberts doesn't appear on this list
 
the quotes from B at the bottom of the last two posts are perfect examples that america is not such a nice place...

cirerita's sig is from a Neil Young song (he's Canadian by the way), not Bukowski.

most of Buko's work is a long tale of misery, whores, drunks, junkies...suicides and murders

I don't think that you are reading deeply enough. If this is all you get from Bukowski then I think that you're sort of missing the point. If I can use a cliché here... the subtext of much of his writing is about facets of "the human condition" and his opinion of it from a highly personal point of view. I don't see him as being any more anti-american than he is anti-australian or anti-chinese.
 
Not a hit, not by a longshot, but from his second best (IMO), and probably least appreciated album "On the Beach."
 
i was reading in "screams from the balcony" about hank trying to find a story he wrote about some hippies being captured and eaten by cannibals(one of his favorite storys,he says),does anyone know the name of the story and where i can find it?

theres also another story he mentions about two highjackers raping the stewardesses in midair and blowing the plane up afterwards(to everybodys surprise)-anyone got the name of this one?
"Christ With Barbecue Sauce" is the first, collected in Absence of the Hero. The second is not yet collected.
 
Reading the last words from Al Burdy's "Listening to Myself",

"a foolish old man with brain on fire
stumbling through the snow"

I cannot help but to come think of Bukowski's last words in "I Made a Mistake",

"a confused old man driving in the rain
wondering where the good luck
went."

Now, I am not trying to say that Burdy and Buk somehow are cosmically entwined, but don't these two last lines resemble each other a lot?
 
Now, I am not trying to say that Burdy and Buk somehow are cosmically entwined, but don't these two last lines resemble each other a lot?

I would´nt say a lot, but some, yes. Both are about an old man, so there's a similarity. One stumbles through the snow while the other drives in the rain. The weather is mentioned in both cases, so that's one more similarity. That's the only two similarities I can find. True, one is foolish with a brain on fire and the other one is confused, but that's two different states of mind. I guess you could stretch it and say both men are in a particular state of mind and that counts for a third similarity.
 
Whoops, Purdy I mean of course and not Burdy. I guess him and Bukowski must have blended together in my head.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top