Soft and fat like Summer Roses - Matrix 1946 (1 Viewer)

[cirerita]

"Soft and fat like Summer Roses," (Philadelphia & New York City) v. 9 no. 2 (Summer 1946), p. 10.

Collected in Sifting Through the Madness..., p. 269.

a few comments:
-mjp, this poem is not in your database as published by Matrix.
-note the highly colloquial tone for such an early poem. The other poems published in Matrix were more, hmm, lyrical.
-why the "purple gargoyle" (Matrix) became a "purple anemone" (Sifting) is simply beyond me. Were these changes made by B himself or by Martin?

 

[mjp]

-mjp, this poem is not in your database as published by Matrix.
-why the "purple gargoyle" (Matrix) became a "purple anemone" (Sifting) is simply beyond me. Were these changes made by B himself or by Martin?

I've added it to the new database, which is still under development (not online yet).

There are a lot of examples of Martin changing words here and there, really weird changes that seem pointless. Maybe gargoyles are a forbidden subject for Christian Scientists. Who knows.

 

[cirerita]

I'm open to any request... so, fire! I'll scan whatever you want me to, time permitting.

 

[Charlie]

Scan the rarest thing you have. Or something from Firestation. For some reason that title and cover design intrigues me.

 

[cirerita]

those poems from Matrix are VERY rare! I'm not talking about quality, though.

The poems published in Targets are really hard-to-find and I think some people have paid over 10,000$ for some of the issues.

 

[Erik]

"Soft and fat like Summer Roses,"

Wow! "Soft and fat like summer roses" is my favorite poem from Sifting thru the madness. Its a masterpiece of compact storytelling. Love it! (and love this forum...) And to think it had to wait 56 years to get collected! Endurance is the key... How many other gems are out there?

Exactly because of the "spoken" tone Cirerita mentions, I thought it was fairly new. Just imagine, it was one of his first!
I've had this experiance with several of the later collections. Its nice, makes the old poems seem "fresh" - you get the feeling that you're back in 1946 and reading the stuff for the first time... :)
I wonder if any other poet has had old & new stuff jumbled together like this.

As an afterthought I guess the title is a "lyrical" clue to it being an early poem. Cirerita: do you know what other authors were in that edition of Matrix?

 

[cirerita]

nope, I don't have the magazines. I just copied B's poems. But probably someone somewhere knows the answer to that question.

 

[mjp]

Scan the rarest thing you have. Or something from Firestation. For some reason that title and cover design intrigues me.

Everything in Fire Station is also in Play The Piano Drunk....

https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/audio/fire_station.mp3

 

[HenryChinaski]

that's one of my favorite poems. Dedicated to Jane with love.
That's also on the At Terror Street And Agony Way cd
Buk as a pimp ah!

HOW WAS IT MARTY? NOT BAD, SHE'S GOT SOME FINE MOVES!
NICE CLEAN GIRL, I RIDE IT MYSELF!
Any big fires lately? I asked.

LOL

 

[Erik]

"Soft and fat like Summer Roses,"

About this poem: the first line goes: "Rex was a two-fisted man"
Is the phrase "two-fisted" common in English or is this Buk's creation?

 

[mjp]

It was common in the middle of the last century. But if you said it now people would still know what you were talking about.

 

[cirerita]

it's like "moxie" and other old-fashioned terms. I think B. used them on purpose, even in the 70's and 80's. He was proud to be from the "old school", as he called it.

 

[David]

Soft and Fat Like Summer Roses/The Postman Always Rings Twice

The version in "Sifting Through the Madness" of "Soft and Fat Like Summer Roses" is indeed quite different. Was there an intermediary version that can explain the changes? Very weird alterations.
On a different topic, I also wondered suddenly why the plot sounds familiar. In James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (if I remember correctly--I've just seen the Jack Nicholson movie, not read the novel) there is a Greek owner of the restaurant and the Nicholson character has an affair with the waitress. In Bukowski's poem, the man who has the affair with the waitress is Greek. Seems too much of a coincidence for Buk to add this Greek detail, so he must have read the book which also gives us an early example of his interest in American "crime fiction"....