The senseless, tragic rape of Charles Bukowski’s ghost by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press (2 Viewers)

So is there a movement or action committee to correct all the Martin-molested poems and post them in their original form here at this website? Or is that gonna be a violation of copyright?
It would be a violation of copyright.

Having said that, you may notice that Martin no longer edits the new collections from Ecco, Abel Debritto does. That is due to Linda Bukowski being made aware of the changes that we're talking about. She was unhappy to learn about it, and you won't ever see another collection edited by Martin.

Also, someone has taken it upon themselves to do collections based on the manuscripts. You can find links to those in the timeline. They're actually quite well done and they're also inexpensive, so you might want to check those out.
 
Right on, MJP!

That is great news about Linda finding out and actually giving a damn and putting a stop to Martin's mentally ill bullshit actions. You were no doubt instrumental in sounding the alarm and hopefully it will lead eventually to new editions restored to their unmolested original contents. Thank you for making a stink about it. Rape was an appropriate word for what Martin did---I mean, really, if you think about it, he did the equivalent of a Cosby-Rape, y'know? Waiting until Buk was physically incapable of defending his body of work against Martin's heinous assaults...whatta fucken dick.

I will check out that link. Cheers.
 
From Howard Sounes, Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (pages 223-224):

The method of editing The Last Night of the Earth Poems was the same as with all the other books published by Black Sparrow. He gave John Martin carte blanche to choose what he wanted to publish. “He didn’t even know what I was going to put in and then he never went back to look at his early work so he didn’t what I left out. He didn’t care,” says John Martin…
 
you may notice that Martin no longer edits the new collections from Ecco, Abel Debritto does. That is due to Linda Bukowski being made aware of the changes that we're talking about. She was unhappy to learn about it, and you won't ever see another collection edited by Martin.

Also, someone has taken it upon themselves to do collections based on the manuscripts. You can find links to those in the timeline. They're actually quite well done and they're also inexpensive, so you might want to check those out.

I step out for a smoke that lasts three months like that guy in Summer School who's zipper got stuck, I come back and holy cow! Real Change has happened when I was gone. Just when I thought good things only happen in fairy tales and Knut Hamsun novels.

You all are indeed fucking awesome.
 
So I finally finished an article on John Martin’s unforgivably sloppy editing of Bukowski’s posthumous poetry collections. One national paper showed interest in the article, but didn’t take it in the end. So it finally ended up in the student mag for the department of literature at the University of Bergen. (http://prosopopeia.no/index.html) That’s actually a good thing. Many of Norway’s university teachers will read it and many of the students at that department as well, students that will end up working in the major publishing houses and high schools here in Norway. So anyway, I hope the article will make Bukowski readers in Norway wary of the butchered books.

In the article, I concentrate on being as objective as possible. I use the poem “Escape” as an example of JM’s sloppy editing. This poem was chosen because it appeared in Prism International, a mag that some readers in Norway may know and that is easy to check up.

Funny thing: One of the editors commenting on the article was named Jon Martin. That’s his first name. But still, kind of spooky. He also is a former student of mine (in high school). So now he got his revenge getting to correct/edit my writing. So it goes. ;-)

There are a lot of references to BUKOWSKI.NET in the article, so hopefully you might be getting some look ups from Norway in the weeks to come MJP.
I also give a cryptic hint to the bootlegs in the article. Those are beautiful books!

If anyone wants to read the article in Norwegian just say the word and I’ll e-mail it to you or something like that…

PS: I can translate the title for you. It goes something like this: "Bukowski's posthumous poetry collections are not what you think they are."
 
I step out for a smoke that lasts three months like that guy in Summer School who's zipper got stuck, I come back and holy cow! Real Change has happened when I was gone. Just when I thought good things only happen in fairy tales and Knut Hamsun novels.

You all are indeed fucking awesome.
I'd
It would be a violation of copyright.

Having said that, you may notice that Martin no longer edits the new collections from Ecco, Abel Debritto does. That is due to Linda Bukowski being made aware of the changes that we're talking about. She was unhappy to learn about it, and you won't ever see another collection edited by Martin.

Also, someone has taken it upon themselves to do collections based on the manuscripts. You can find links to those in the timeline. They're actually quite well done and they're also inexpensive, so you might want to check those out.

Buk mentioned a magazine that used to publish his poems as he sent them (ie. with hash marks included where he had made mistakes). I wish poetry books written by him did this, as well as whatever the magazine was that did it.
 
I get quite a few views on my website pages about the Martin "editing". Most from Germany and the rest mainly from N. America and Europe. I think the word is getting out there, slowly. Abel's new books are also - delicately - suggesting the posthumous editions are not what they should be and as these enter libraries and circulation that will make clear what the problems have been.
 
Most from Germany and the rest mainly from N. America and Europe.
That's where the Bukowski interest lies in general, so it's not surprising. Sometimes it seems like half of the Google+ and Twitter followers are from Spain or Turkey...
 
So I finally finished an article on John Martin’s unforgivably sloppy editing of Bukowski’s posthumous poetry collections.
When I first noticed these changes (first brought to my attention while listening to Bukowski reading his own work and following the text of that work in a Black Sparrow book I had) I've got a feeling what John Martin may have been trying to do is to 'tame' down the language in Bukowski's writing, removing the expletives, so that he could get Black Sparrow books onto reading lists for schools, colleges, etc. This is just a feeling of course and he didn't answer my question directly when I asked this of him so many years ago. He sent me some Black Sparrow merchandising instead (which was a kind thing to do but didn't really interest me so much as getting a straight answer to my question).
 
There a couple of Bukowski items in an auction a few months back and this was once of them. (There were also some manuscripts I will send to MJP)

The letter is to Hank Malone (not Marvin).

Big Cred to the original Bukowski "scholars" from this forum who helped prevent what Bukowski feared...

letter2.jpg
 
Oh! He was not happy with the changes.
the additions nullify the flow......
The Scarlet is pretty much left alone but the rest of it is creamed. :mad:
 
A dim glimmer of hope could be the day, if ever, Library of America compiles Buk's poems like they recently did with Kerouac and publishes a 'collected poems' edition. A caring editor would then match the poems, not to a previous publication, but to the corrected typescript from the author.
 
The work has begun. Check the manuscripts section too. Essential Bukowski: Poetry edited by Abel Debritto is out there.
 
I'll do my part. I'm going to take my new copy of Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way and match it to the manuscripts and mark up my copy, make a video for Amazon review and physically show the extent of the changes so that people will be less inclined to buy it. Publishers notice that kind of thing ..
 
I'll do my part. I'm going to take my new copy of Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way and match it to the manuscripts and mark up my copy, make a video for Amazon review and physically show the extent of the changes so that people will be less inclined to buy it. Publishers notice that kind of thing ..
This is something to chew on as well.

 
for fuck's sake, why in the world do they (or he) need to dick with a man's life's work . . . ?
We've been scratching our collective heads about it for a long time...

Philly Dave is a rather good looking specimen.
Just because the pic of that handsome man is my avatar doesn't necessarily mean it's a picture of me. But it may be.
 
When married he did live in Chestnut Hill, the neighborhood next door, for a few years and we've never been seen together. Things that make you go hmmm.
 
someone outta put that guys feet to the coals and demand an explanation.

for the record i do not support violence or torture induced confession.
 
The original article, The senseless, tragic rape of Charles Bukowski’s ghost by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press (which is almost four years old now), is still getting comments. Almost 50 comments on the article so far, which may not seem like a lot, but it is.

The majority of those comments are from people who are shocked to learn of the changes. Only a few from Martin's cadre of apologists (who either don't understand what was done, or choose to minimize the effect of the changes).

I should probably write a follow up talking about the books Abel has edited and left basically unmolested, since they weren't yet published when the original article was posted...
 
"Basically unmolested"...that's damning with faint praise. Another article I think is very necessary, I'm sure you
have plenty of time to write one:eek:
 
"Basically unmolested"...that's damning with faint praise.
I only said that because he used some Black Sparrow versions where I was led to believe (or made up in my imagination) that he would be going back to earlier sources (where they were available).

I don't know what he's up to with the new one coming out in November, but I know that what he's given us so far is an improvement over Martin's posthumous shitshow. In a perfect world all of the new stuff would go back to manuscript versions or first small press appearances, but it's rarely a perfect world.
 
...he used some Black Sparrow versions...
Well, I did that in VERY FEW CASES, and I would do it again. The BSP versions I used were from "early" BSP collections, when Bukowski was alive. I've never used a poem published in the posthumous collections, and I will never do it. Mark my words. When I was putting together OC, there was this poem I wanted to use but I only had the posthumous version, so I discarded it. At the very last minute, I found the mss for that poem in some library, and I was happy to use it in OC.

If in some cases I chose to use an early BSP version instead of an available earlier version --either a ms version or a magazine version-- it was because in those cases --and only in those very few cases-- the early BSP version was superior to the ms/mag version --at least to me: some ms/mag versions are way sloppier than the tighter early BSP versions. You may argue I'm wrong and that the ms/mag version is indeed superior to the early BSP version, and you may be right. It was a tough call sometimes --when you have 3 similar versions of the same poem, how do you pick the best one?-- but I feel I did a decent job with the material at hand.

As to Storm, all the poems are faithful reproductions of the original ms or the mag version. I guess some readers will eventually complain that I used the mag version when I should have used the ms version of a given poem, or that I used a sloppy ms version when I could have used the tighter, much-improved mag version. Hopefully, in a couple of cases, I'll use a facsimile of the ms version followed by the mag version.
 

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