most of John Fante, a great deal of Sherwood Anderson, very early Hemingway, all of Carson McCullers, the longer poems of Jeffers; Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; the style of Saroyan without the content...” Ezra Pound is missing here. Bukowski looked up to him, and liked to quote Pound’s “do your work” in interviews. He wasn’t very much into the Cantos, and he affectionately mocked them in several poems, but he did like the Imagist Pound, the Vorticist Pound, the Ernest Fenollosa influenced Pound who translated Chinese poetry. Some of Bukowski’s early poems are genuinely Imagist: he records reality and conveys it without comment, like a long haiku of sorts. Which takes us to Li Po, another major influence on Bukowski which is missing in the list above. His tribute poems to Li Po are quite heartfelt and candid—an oddity given Bukowski’s inclination to openly disparage most writers. Q: What was your criteria for Essential Bukowski? A: Like most anthologies, Essential Bukowski could be seen as a crowdpleaser. First, I came up with my own selection, and then I asked editors, fans, and literati for their top 10 list. Most of their picks were in my list, but a few firstrate poems had slipped under my radar: in August 2015, I went to Hamburg to give a talk on my new Bukowski projects, and shortly before my talk, David Calonne discussed very movingly “an almost madeup poem,” which was not in my initial list. What an oversight! I made sure that it made it to the final selection. Once I had Bukowski’s “greatest hits” on file—”the laughing heart,” “the bluebird,” “the crunch,” “the genius of the crowd,” “if we take,” and so on—there was room for some relatively obscure gems such as “hell is a lonely place,” “the loser,” and the previously uncollected “swastika star buttoned to my ass,” which I was very happy to include, not only because it’s a strong, apparently obscene poem but also because it turned Bukowski’s German agent and friend Carl Weissner into a lifelong fan. I feel it’s a comprehensive collection that covers all Bukowski’s voices and styles. I could have made an entirely different selection and I think it would have been equally valid. That’s what happens when you try to put together a short Bukowski anthology: he wrote some 5,000 poems and many of them—hundreds—are truly essential. Potentially, there are several
Essential Bukowski collections. Q: Like most fans, I’ve always enjoyed Bukowski and his poetry and prose as being ver y readable, unpretentious, resonant, honest and beautiful. But I was completely shocked by the power of some of the poems you selected to include in your most recent book, Storm for the Living and the Dead. What has the response been to this collection? A : As good as it gets, at least in my view. Some people love it, some people hate it. Reviewers have said that it “might be remembered as the single work that best represents the full range—the unmasking, as it were—of Charles Bukowski’s oeuvre.” At the other end of the spectrum, they have said that it “may represent the nadir of Bukowski’s posthumous publications,” partly because it features experimental poems such as “kuv stuff mox out,” which the same reviewer calls “drunken drivel.” For the most part, the reception has been pretty good, although some readers have voiced their objection to poems they find too shocking, obscene, and politically incorrect. Perhaps my only regret is that I included too many experimental poems in Storm. Bukowski didn’t experiment that much, and most experimental poems were left in the editing room over the years. Using half-a-dozen or so experimental poems in the same collection might be a tad too much when you’re talking about Bukowski. Still, I believe Storm is my best editing effort to date, however flawed it might be. Now, you have to take into account that I was working with the leftovers, so to speak. For the most part, Bukowski’s best poems were published in his lifetime. Coming up with a collection as strong as Mockingbird Wish Me Luck, Dangling in the Tournefortia, and The Last Night of the Earth Poems is next to impossible. Luckily, many first-rate poems were unused or they had been sitting in on library shelves and private collections for years, waiting to be unearthed. Take “song for this softlysweeping sorrow,” “poem for Dante,” “he went for the windmills, yes,” “the glory days,” “in this,” and “29 chilled grapes,” among many others. They all are top-notch Bukowski poems. And in “I was sh-t” he says, “animals love me as if I were a child crayoning / the edges of the world.” I think Crayoning the Edges of the World would be a brilliant title to sum up this collection and, quite possibly, Bukowski’s entire opus. Q: Any more old poems, short stories or previously unpublished Bukowski material
due out or has the vault been completely emptied? A: There’s a lot of unpublished material, especially poetry. I’d say there are some 1,500-2,000 unpublished/uncollected poems on file. While gathering material for Storm for the Living and the Dead, I re-read everything available and I put together a long list with all the poems I found strong enough to be published. There were some 400 poems in that list, and I do hope they are published over the next few years.
[All excerpts and poems are reprinted courtesy of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins] (c) Adam Kluger & Abel Debritto, 2018
Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie scholar, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of “Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground,” and the editor of the Bukowski collections “On Writing,” “On Cats,” and “On Love” as well as the poetry collection “Essential Bukowski.” Adam Kluger, is a former television writer and producer. He is the author of a collection of short stories entitled “Desperate Times” https:// readingnook84.wordpress.com/2018/04/01/ author-interview-desperate-times-short-storiesby-adam-kluger/ … via @saz246
25AMagazine.com | MetMagNy.com | 91