The senseless, tragic rape of Charles Bukowski’s ghost by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press (3 Viewers)

I guess Martin's tinkering really annoys me because I waited for each new posthumous edition to come out and paid full retail for it, only later to learn that Martin had seriously messed with Bukowski's work and had done it so poorly. I can read those books and get a general idea that Buk wrote a poem about such and such, but I wouldn't take any one line seriously, and certainly wouldn't quote it, because it may be Martin speaking and not Buk. Publishing is a business, and Bukowski sells. Martin likely never approved of Bukowski's lifestyle and may have been eager all along to sanitize the work so that it met his (Martin's) standards of what was acceptable to say in literature. This is merely my personal opinion. I don't know why Martin did what he did. You're right: the posthumous Martinized works contradict the previously published writings and make no sense, but that didn't stop the guy from doing it. Ecco doesn't seem to give a damn about the integrity of the posthumous editions. To those of us who love Bukowski's writing, it's a terrible sacrilege. MJP/Hannah did us all a great service discovering and documenting this travesty. I just hope nobody is quoting any Martinized lines in their tattoos.
 
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And the censors are always awake: look what happened to Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming.

In Live and Let Die, Bond’s comment that would-be African criminals in the gold and diamond trades are “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much” has been changed to “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought”.
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A perfect example of "martinizing," isn't it?
 
Yes, and this shit is rampant. Here, for the record, are my wishes as an author after I'm dead: allow editors to fix typos and factual errors. Fix punctuation when clarity is improved. Leave everything else alone, or let it go out of print. If I wrote something someone can't deal with, politely tell them to piss off.
 
My thought on the "sensitivity reader" revisions to popular authors is that it will create a strong market for older editions that were published with the original wording.
 
My ears were ringing. Did someone say my name? ?

I don't care what anyone believes about Bukowski, John Martin, or mjp anymore. They're all fictional characters, anyway.

The Martinizing thing was a Don Quixote crusade, but it felt right at the time. The truth is, there was never any point in trying to convince anyone of anything. People understand what they can and believe what they wish.

I'm just trying to survive the impending transgenocide and breathe another day. Peace and love to all. ?
 
the first 3 to 4 posthumous collections are strong works--around SLOUCHING TOWARD NIRVANA, 2005,more skeleton than flesh begins to show. COME ON IN, 2006, is a disaster. It was an unconscionable act for John Martin to have made Bukowski sound like Rod McCuen, and a crime for him to make Buk sound like a bad writer. I discuss, I my book, what I consider Martin's editorial duplicity: BUKOWSKI the Ubermensch, Cyberwit. net., Wayne F. Burke

Bukowski struggled against Martin's editing jobs as early as POST OFFICE, 1967. The German edition of that novel was published as Bukowski wrote the thing--without Martin's making it, as he claimed, "more literate." The two got into an argument over WOMEN as well, Buk feeling Martin went too far with his editing and made a big great book into a smaller and far less great work. "Can you imagine Martin touching up a Van Gogh?" Buk asked a correspondent. The early posthumous collections do not suffer any diminution until SLOUCHING TOWARD NIRVANA, 2005, when more skeleton begins to show than flesh. COME ON IN, 2006, is badly written--a disaster. It was unconscionable for Martin to have made Buk sound like Rod McKuen, but it was a crime to have made Buk sound like a bad writer. I discuss this issue, by the way, in my recently published (4-23) Bukowski study, BUKOWSKI the Ubermensch, Cyberwit.net., publisher
 
I believe your scholarly and rare insight will herald a new dawn of thought regarding Bukowski’s posthumous publications. Into each generation comes its Boswell…well done sir!
 
I haven't read enough of the posthumous collections to have an opinion as to their relative strengths and weaknesses. As soon as I learned of Martin's tampering, I lost interest in all of them, and I was behind in reading them anyway. I had been buying each one as it came out, saving them up to read later. Then Hannah spilled the beans, and I stopped buying the new releases after that. I still have the ones I bought. Kind of as placeholders for the books that should have been and aren't.
 
You know, after all these years I still really don't know who most of the people on the forum really are. I just realized the other day that Rekrab was an anagram for Barker. I'm a regular fucking Sherlock Holmes. Anyway, do you have the owner of Third Mind Books on here. Sure seems like it.

IMG_20240120_0127.jpg
 
Indeed, I'm David Barker, "Rekrab" being designed only to foil the laziest of trolls. I'm not sure who most of the members here are in everyday life, only knowing a few of them by their real names. It sounds like Martin did mess around with Bukowski's text in the "Going Away" broadside. His changes were never for the better.
 
They're not coming back, sorry. You can probably find them at archive.org.

As I mentioned, there was never any point in trying to convince anyone of anything. People, generally speaking, don't care, and the internet and the younger generations have taken Bukowski and reinterpreted his work and life to serve their purposes. Their purposes seem to be using Bukowski as a quote machine (regardless of whether the "quotes" originated with him), a bed for their own creative pursuits (videos and music, etc.), and, more importantly, as a lifestyle accessory. I don't fault them for using Bukowski in those ways. Today's societal critics or rebels don't have a lot of options. They've created very little culture of their own. So there's Bukowski. Use him.

A lot of sites linked to those articles, but most of them were skeptical or used the articles to justify their own biases. Which I suppose we all do. But if the point was to expose or convince, I don't know that they were effective. They were like an Occupy Wall Street protest. Very attention-grabbing, with zero tangible effect.

And honestly, I don't like seeing those "rape" titles under my old name anymore. I used that for effect, and it certainly worked, but now I think it was misguided. Along with most other things I did. ?
 
Hello Buk fans. I'm new to this site. Although I've been reading Bukowski's work for about 15 years, I've only just find out, through this website about Martin's messing / tampering around with the originals. It comes as a bit of a shock and disappointment. Does that mean it's impossible to tell how much of any given poem, post Betting on the Muse, is actually from Bukowski's own hand (and great drunken mind)? Is there any chance of 'unmartinized versions' being printed one day? Nice to meet ya all. Cheers.
 
This might get me thrown out of the forum but I’ve yet to join the theory that Martin butchered Buk’s writing after he died. I’ve not seen any solid proof that Buk himself made these edits. That the quality is worse is just a natural fact. If they were great they would have been published earlier.

Further more, the edits often appear more mature. As if Buk was finally developed enough to cast aside the sophomoric references to sex and drinking and get to the marrow.

Case in point for me is “Big Grey Balloon Things, Heavy”.
I’m sure the bit about the elephants asshole made the drunk college students roar with laughter when Buk read it out. This drunk old man saying these “naughty” words. But the essence of the poem IS the final line about the elephants leaning against each other in the sun. That is a poem written by someone who has moved beyond the vulgar and is seeing the simplicity of life.

Buk pandering to the college crowd who wanted someone talking about beer shits might have been surpassed in later life, leading him to dare to speak in a vulnerable tongue about life.
 
At one time, there was ample evidence that Martin made the changes to Bukowski's original manuscripts, and the changes were always badly worded, and never improvements in style, wording, imagery, and meaning. Much of that evidence may no longer be on the Forum, or online elsewhere. The changes are not evidence of a more mature Bukowski; they're evidence of inept editing.
 
On the other hand if (the bulk of) editing was done after someone's death we can be pretty sure that the deceased didn't do the editing.
 
This is my point. The theory is based on the notion «this is not how I want my Bukowski» and «if you don’t agree you are dumb».
Bukowski does this, Bukowski does that.
We already know he pretended to be a brawler in order to have an image. Even pretended to be a Nazi. Who’s to say the constant reference to drinking and assholes and shitting wasn’t also an image albatross he wanted to shed?

What I am asking for is actual proof that Bukowski did not edit his poems later on or tinker with them. Beyond the subjective view it’s not what you originally liked about him.

If all this is true, why hasn’t Linda spoken out about it?
 
I'm no expert, but Martin's edits aren't solely efforts to clean up Bukowski's image by removing references to booze and sex. There are also many pointless changes of phrasing, in which Martin takes a good line and mangles it with something he thinks sounds better. Those always result in a dumbing down of Buk's unique voice. Martin apparently THOUGHT he was a better writer than Bukowski.
 
We've been talking about this for a very long time.

I would really love Debritto to comment on this, but here's what I have come to believe:

The theory that there was this large cache of poems that Martin had sitting around for after Bukowski died is bullshit.

Truth: Every one of the posthumous books were poems that were previously published in small press magazines. (And yes, they were edited, but that's not the point for this part of the thread).

Either Martin didn't publish the mythical cache of poems. Or it never existed in the first place.

I think this whole idea of a giant folder of Bukowski's Unpublished poems is complete bullshit.
 
Pogue Mahone Athbheoim said:
The theory that there was this large cache of poems that Martin had sitting around for after Bukowski died is bullshit.
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Charles Bukowski, in letter to Stephen Kessler, December 28, 1984 (published in Reach for the Sun, page 62):
Actually the poems 1981-84 are only about one-sixth of the output. I’m not saying that the 5/6th left out are all very good but there’s a chance that a few are. John Martin has quite a buildup of unpublished material from a couple of decades. There’s a very good chance, if the world is still here, that John Martin can publish a new Bukowski book each year for a good 5 or 6 or 7 years, maybe longer depending upon how long I continue to drink this good wine. Of course, that will all be beyond me: I’ll be down in Hades playing the Horses.
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P.S.: Bold is mine.
 
When he refers to unpublished, it's very possible that Bukowski was consciously referring to the poems that were not published in BSP books -- but were published in magazines. I looked up the poems for all those magazines I have listed and a huge amount were published in BSP books after he died.

This makes sense to me now because I have a better understanding of how he worked. He didn't write poems for consideration in BSP books. Right up until he died he was submitting to magazines and sending copies of the poems to Martin. If you think about it, all the BSP books are made up of poems that mostly appeared somewhere else first -- starting with The Days Run Away...

There are still a lot of poems out there that did appear in magazines, but never made it into BSP books. There may have been some mistakes in the database and I certainly could have made some mistakes, but these are what I have listed for uncollected:
thebukshop.com

Search: 167 results found for "uncollected"

Charles Bukowski, Charles Bukowski Signed Books, Charles Bukowski Manuscripts, Charles Bukowski Broadsides, Charles Bukowski Chapbooks, Charles Bukowski Magazines, Charles Bukowski Photographs, LouJon Press, Charles Bukowski Drawings, Charles Bukowski Paintings, Charles Bukowski Poetry, Charles...
thebukshop.com thebukshop.com
 
Rekrab said:
I'm no expert, but Martin's edits aren't solely efforts to clean up Bukowski's image by removing references to booze and sex. There are also many pointless changes of phrasing, in which Martin takes a good line and mangles it with something he thinks sounds better. Those always result in a dumbing down of Buk's unique voice. Martin apparently THOUGHT he was a better writer than Bukowski.
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I only started reading Buk about 1yr 1/2 ago (I am 20). I noticed the poem edits by listening to his readings. I think this is correct, although awful edits were made to 'clean up', such as removing references to masturbating in 'the death of an idiot'.

The worst phrasing change I have found so far is in 'the recess bells of school'. And it's totally counterintuitive, whoever did it is an utter fool.

Original (from live reading) -
"my father's feet stank and his smile was like a
blaze of dog shit"

Edited -
"my father's feet stank and his smile was like a
pile of dog shit."

WHY!? Not only does it simply read worse, but pile stinks compared to blaze when describing a smile.
Makes me sick.
 
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There are so many different threads regarding this that it will take you forever and a day to go through them (but worth it). Two I like to go back to because I find they cover most of the ground concern 'the crunch' (links in the database - 'the crunch - in its many forms' and 'thoughts on editions and editors'). A lot of very knowledgeable people here so I post cautiously. And for what it's worth, to me the alteration of 'the joy of original energy' to 'the original energy of joy' (one for the shoeshine man) says a lot.
 
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