The senseless, tragic rape of Charles Bukowski’s ghost by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press (1 Viewer)

when you have 3 similar versions of the same poem, how do you pick the best one?
I suppose "best" is always in the eye of the beholder - and what's available. As editor it's your call to make.

In the comments of the article someone who claims to have worked for Black Sparrow in the 70s said, "when we received Bukowski’s mss. in the 70s, John wouldn’t let anyone do more than correct the spelling," so I suppose those 70s and 80s Black Sparrow versions are very close to Bukowski's intentions. But then there are examples of changes during that time that do not seem to be in line with those intentions, so we know Black Sparrow sometimes did more than correct spelling.

But "better" is always going to be subjective. What is "strong" or worthwhile is subjective. Whether "tighter" is better is subjective. It's art, after all, so everyone is going to have a different opinion on every piece. There are plenty of people in the world who believe that Bukowski never wrote a single poem that was strong or worthwhile. Imagine if you had to deal with them and their opinions. ;)

I wouldn't want your job, but it might be a good thing that your audience is nit-picking. It means they care about what you're doing. That what you're doing is important to them. And that's much better than silence and apathy. Look, we're all alive here together! What could be better?

I appreciate what you're doing, for what it's worth.
 
Yeah, beauty lies is the eye of the beholder... when you edit a book, you just can't please everyone. It doesn't take long to realize that.

I love reactions. It's great to see whatever you do is met with both praise and criticism.

I know this is not a place where you come for backslapping, is it? But I can take a compliment when I see one, so thanks for the nice words.
 
Last edited:
...when you edit a book, you just can't please everyone.
My take is that you please yourself in the context of having a strong sense of who the writer was. That way, you get as close to right as you can get. My sense is that Martin certainly did the former but didn't really possess the latter, despite what he may have thought about that. Good to have you driving the bus; looking forward to this one.
 
Pfft, angry isn't really the word. Just looking at these comparisons shows where the bastardised edits kill the spark of the originals. :(

Very informative posts though.
 
Hi.

A few weeks ago, I started reading Bukowski. I love every bit of it, and quite frankly, I'm obsessed with him right now. A few hours ago, I got the information that, John Martin, fucked with a lot of his posthumous work, so, naturally, I'm questioning the fact that I might be reading something not so authentic. I haven't read his posthumous work, yet. All I've read so far has been Pulp and Notes of a Dirty Old Man. Both published by 'Ecco'. I guess my question is : Did they messed with his earlier publications, too ? Or it was just the posthumous works ?
 
Just to throw my hat into the ring, I've only recently started reading Bukowski (after somebody said my poetry is in a similar vein to Bukowski's poem) and the only book I've got so far is 'You Get So Alone..', which appears to be un-Martined. I was debating about 'Pleasures of the Damned', but I'm glad I didn't get if it's been bastardised.

Talking as someone who will eventually publish his poetry (hopefully in the near future), I personally disagree completely with any form of censorship and I'm glad somebody's pointed out that Martin's screwing about with what's essentially a dead man's voice (if you'll pardon the expression) and that somebody's trying to collect together the uncensored versions.
 
Would it be worth starting a thread to form a list of Bukowski's books that should be avoided(badly Martinized) against a list that is of authentic Bukowski work? Or is there a thread as such already? I'm new here
Edit: Just wanna say a big thanks to mjp for putting this all out there. I'll know now to be wary before throwing money at certain versions of Bukowski's works. Glad to have found this forum after being a fan a few years now.
 
Last edited:
I guess I am kinda late to the party on this one. I only have a couple of the "John Martin Fingered" editions, either gifted to me or stolen by me from libraries long gone and I always thought there was something a "bit iffy" about some of the prose, which I put down to dilution of talent or otherwise lazy laurel-resting shennanigans from Mr. B. Which still might be the case to a certain extent.......such a large, voluminous body of work is certain to contain filler; bloated, half-arsed dull could-have-been-betters etc.
But reading your comparisons on your blog actually made me curiously enraged: like diluted whisky, cheapened by water. The JM Fingered concoctions read like a Speak & Spell Ouija board: disjointed, foreign & of dubious validity. So I thank you sir for making this case against artist integrity & the shady, unpalatable stink of censorship masquerading as interpretation: "artistic licence" is a term that springs to mind here.

Good job, Columbo.
 
Interesting comment on the original article today:

J.R. Helton
I could tell you some stories about that guy John Martin who basically just lucked into Bukowski and never even really got his writing as your article clearly reveals. I’ve heard from people that know Martin, two friends of his, that he proudly bragged about re writing some of Bukowski’s work. John Martin is the un named publisher in fact in the introduction written by Terry Zwigoff to the second edition of my book Below the Line. Robert Crumb painted the cover for that book just after he’d finished illustrating “The Captain is out to Lunch” in ‘97 for Black Sparrow. Crumb and I are now good friends and he has since then painted three more covers for my other published books and he is my biggest supporter. He knew Bukowski and Martin. Crumb and Zwigoff took Martin out to dinner and pushed him to publish Below the Line in ‘98 and he agreed. Then Martin called Crumb at Terry’s house in SF and chickened out the NEXT day saying he was very afraid Black Sparrow would get sued which Crumb wrote to me saying that was a horse shit cop out in a letter I still have (RC and I have about 400 pages of letters to each other now). Crumb took it to Ron Turner then at Last Gasp who republished it in 2000. Crumb and Terry also gave John Martin the manuscript to my auto bio novel/memoir “Finding the Cure for Cancer”. Martin then wrote to me and then he called me on the phone but we almost immediately got into a huge fight. He basically told me there was “too much drug use in the book” he said “especially cocaine.” I had to laugh and when I mentioned all the times the drug alcohol is in Bukowski’s books (and other drugs) the guy just started yelling at me that alcohol is a different drug (no shit) and flipped out. He also said though I was “great with dialogue, your tone is too harsh. Bukowski had more humor in his writing.” Again, I couldn’t believe the man who published Bukowski was saying these things and I tried to explain that there is actually a lot of humor in my stuff and that that is exactly why Robert Crumb thinks it’s so funny! So then Martin goes into a long tirade putting down Crumb and says “Let me tell you something about your new friend Crumb and what HE thinks is funny. I was driving in a car with Crumb one day…” and told me some long derogatory story about Robert I won’t repeat here. John Martin struck me as a completely phony nut. Martin must have felt guilty though because he then sent me a couple of huge boxes of Black Sparrow books, twice, with letters but I never wrote him back. And that book he rejected? It just got published this year by Liveright/ WW Norton under the new title “Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions.” So, fuck John Martin. Bukowski was always way too loyal to him. J.R. Helton. San Antonio, Texas 2018
 
A very interesting comment indeed! More proof (or circumstantial evidence, if you like) that Martin did rewrite some of Buk's work. Of course, we have already been aware of it for some time, but still.
 
The article gives you a list of what to avoid. In short, you might want to pass on these:

Bone Palace Ballet
What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
Open All Night
The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps
Sifting Through The Madness For The Word, The Line, The Way
The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain
Slouching Toward Nirvana
Come On In!
The People Look Like Flowers At Last
The Continual Condition

Those titles may eventually be repaired and reissued, but for now, they are not so good.
 
The article gives you a list of what to avoid. In short, you might want to pass on these:

Bone Palace Ballet
What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
Open All Night
The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps
Sifting Through The Madness For The Word, The Line, The Way
The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain
Slouching Toward Nirvana
Come On In!
The People Look Like Flowers At Last
The Continual Condition

Those titles may eventually be repaired and reissued, but for now, they are not so good.

I'd add Hot Water Music to that. John Martin's fantasy of no such thing as alcohol, drug or domestic abuse (may impact sales). Someone posted Buk's original of A Couple Of Gigolos from his article in the free press and, what a change! He wrote about needing to watch Martin more closely but, seemingly, the book still went through. Anyone got any more pictures of his original articles from Notes of a Dirty Old Man?
 
Last edited:
Waaaaah no. Thank you, gold.

main body of text exactly as it appeared published, editor obviously not Martin. Wow. Click Save.

City Lights, riiiiight. and Buk shitted all over Ferlinghetti with his type.
 
Are there any others I should avoid that are not on this list?
What about -The Pleasures of the Damned”?

https://mjpbooks.com/blog/the-sense...is-ghost-by-john-martins-black-sparrow-press/

The dirty dozen posthumous Black Sparrow/Ecco books that should be avoided:
Bone Palace Ballet
What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
Open All Night
The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps
Sifting Through The Madness For The Word, The Line, The Way
The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain
Slouching Toward Nirvana
Come On In!
The People Look Like Flowers At Last
The Continual Condition
 
The post-death John Martin edited books are nonsense. Go to the checklist/bibliography. Post death books from & including 2010 to now are a safe bet & Portions from a Wine Stained Notebook. How much you may or may not like them are up to you. The On series is a good but I especially like Essential. It just came out in paperback if I'm not mistaken. Currently reading Mathematics and digging it. Oh right. And Pleasures. Is that tampered at all? IDK. I don't think so. If I'm wrong someone around here will know and clarify for me.
 
Free Thought, Vol 2, Issue 1, Summer 2000.

A a complete lie... It makes zero sense... Much like a response our current President would make... The FUCKING magazines are the truth... Not JM's dirty little lies...

IMG_20181205_0001.jpg
 
Well, he's painted himself into a corner. When someone says Bukowski's later collections are "uneven," they are criticizing what Martin did (whether they realize it or not). So short of admitting that he is the reason the posthumous books can be seen as "uneven," how else could he answer that question?

That interview was done shortly before he asked me to take the page down from smog.net that had some unflattering poem comparisons and links to a few manuscripts. Really just small potatoes compared to what's out there now. But he had to see that the Internet was going to cause problems for him so he formulated his "Hank rewrote the poems for the books" bullshit, and now he's stuck with it.

It would be interesting to look at any interviews that might have been done with Martin during Bukowski's lifetime and see if he ever mentioned the idea that Bukowski rewrote the poems before they were collected. Bukowski certainly never mentioned it, and I'd bet Martin didn't either. Since it isn't true.
 
I must be more ignorant that I thought. I genuinely believed that when I had a book of his poetry that I was reading his words. Apart from buying/reading books, I know very little else about the industry at all.
I have a digital copy of South of No North there now, by Harper Collins Ebooks. It says Copyright 1973, would these be tampered with too?
Please forgive my ignorance on these matters, the situation is all at once illuminating and devastating.
 
Just read this entire thread. I write poetry and prose and have even published a novella with a small press. I don't believe my words are sacrosanct and can accept changes....if they are run by me first. When my novella was published, the editor only changed it by breaking up the manuscript into chapters. I accepted all the chapter breaks. It improved the work to be honest. But again, she ran it by me first.

I wonder how much Buk approved changes or let Martin have some free reign when publishing collections when he was alive. Maybe for some of the posthumous works changes were approved before his death? But then again, I suppose correspondence would exist attesting to whether or not changes made were ok'd or not. Most of the changes I've seen seem unnecessary and not only diminish the work, but mar the authentic "voice" of Bukowski with unnecessary adjectives and incomprehensible changes (Cézanne becoming Dali for example). Why? Cézanne to Dali may seem insignificant, unless you know that the other artist in that line, Picasso, has a historical relationship with Cézanne completely different than to Dali. Part of the thought process, the associations, the implications of the change, what the use of one artist or another can mean, is affected. So yeah, editors can be a good thing, even if an article or plural or preposition is changed without explicit consent. But what Martin has done here is unacceptable and incomprehensible unless the man just wanted to sanitize things for commercial viability or because he needed to feel he could improve his star writer, to stoke his own ego in order to feel BSP made Bukowski as opposed to Bukowski making BSP...

Just curious, though. Are there any examples of changes you all think actually improve the original? I'm kind of queasy seeing a man's work changed when he can no longer agree or contest the changes as a general rule, and would want to see the work as written, warts and all. General outage (merited) aside, are there any instances where the changes in posthumous editions make for better lines? Or does the fact they don't represent what was written preclude such a possibility, a priori?

I've been away from these forums for a while and this thread has been so thoughtful and lively, it's a real pleasure to be back. Great stuff comrades, and much respect for all of your thoughts on the matter.
 
So, shit, I hadn't listened to the podcast before writing this so clearly, my questions about Bukowski's consent is a bit ignorant. Can't think but that these changes were not at all ok'd but stem from some marketing or other concern. Can't really say why Martin changed things but he did, for the worse, and surely without any consultation with Bukowski prior to his death. So sorry for not listening to the podcast before posting. That said, almost perversely and because its 3:52 and I'm already buzzed, knowing the answer in advance (Hint: no!)...can anyone point to a line that Martin improved....not considering that any change without consent is, um, let's say dastardly?
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top