posthumous editing issues

Someone wasn't paying attention and put a changed version of a posthumously published poem into another posthumous book eight years later. Caught with your finger in the pie, butcher. "hang the wallpaper," eh?

I wasn't going to post any more of these for a while, but this one is just too painfully ironic to let it slide by. let's hope we can all recover from this. Amen.

Does someone own a copy of New York Quarterly - No. 37 - 1988 and want to look this poem has been martinized in Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way - pg. 181 - 2002 ? Thanks!

I would like to dedicate this one to my close friend and personal inspiration, Mr. John Martin! so you want to be a writer

Funny. Or not. The manuscript and the version in War All The Time are identical. Then... Clumsy, stupid shit like: there is nothing going to release it

More 1920s-style prohibition, more creative writing class. More, more.

Oh my. Well, here we see drinking replaced with something else (again), along with the typical old cut and gut. Can someone explain how, by any stretch of the imagination, THE BUTCHER got "satisfied" out of that poem, and decided to start it off that way? If it isn't the opposite of satisfied...

Funny, it's starting to look like the butcher systematically removed references to madness in addition to his full compliment of other moronic habits. In this one, the madness is gone, two lines about drinking excised, and a couple of repeating give/take lines boiled down to IDIOT NORMALITY...

From Come On In!

More creative writing class brilliance from The Butcher of Santa Barbara.

The faithful wife. Madness becomes depression, and the subject somehow gains 10 pounds in the typical rewrite.

More head-scratchingly pointless changes on display!

Because it's short. I don't have a good enough dictionary to sort out words like "hypocodont" or "caseic" or their replacements. A lot of the humour (okay, humor!) is lost in the Flash of Lightning version. From New York Quarterly #49: prescience I was always charmed and ensnared by...

Speaking of removing drinking, how about imposing political correctness onto Bukowski? Seems ridiculous, I know, but here it is.

What's up with that, by the way? Removing drinking from the poems? I noticed one earlier today in here, and now Darlings of the Word has "drink" removed (I can't make side by side files for all of these - it would take the rest of my life). [Side by side comparison was made after all. -ed.]

Manuscripts weep - 1976-09-23 - carbon http://bukowski.net/vault/displaymanuscript.php?show=poem1976-09-23-weep.jpg Come On In! - pg. 144 - 2006 weep weep for the indifference of flying fish weep for the absence of long-haired blondes weep for the sadness of yourself weep for Bach...

CARLTON WAY OFF OF WESTERN: published in SECOND COMING Vol. 5, No. 1 ©1977. Carlton Way off Western Ave.: published in what matters most is how well you walk through the fire ©2007.

Secret Laughter Shining. "Hmm, this one is only nine lines long...I think I'll completely rewrite it!" - The Butcher

Disgusting. "drunk" turns into "sleeping," etc.

Good Show. Minor but annoying Martinisims, such as adding "I'd think, "she'd say," etc.

Some weird changes in this one. Well, no more weird as any of them I guess. Taking out a blow job and a sexual reference to little boys in one place, but adding a sexual reference to little boys in another (?), making a "black guy" a "skinny guy"... Here's the manuscript.

Fuck the soprano or comfort the soprano? We know what Bukowski wants to do. But apparently Martin can't decide which he wants to do. to weep in her hair --- Thanks to Black Swan for sending me the manuscript for this one!

Supposedly small changes here, but notice the difference in "he was so ashamed that he/left his house in the morning" and the Martinized "he'd be so ashamed that he'd/leave the house in the morning." This mucks it up because originally is has the typically Buk direct and active "he was" and "he...

So it appears that had Marvin Malone been Buk's editor, we might have gotten the poems as he wrote them. It would be interesting to check other MSS against the Wormwood issues.

So what happened to this poem after 12-24-74? The published version in Open All Night changes "it appears in their walk/in their eyes/in their laughter and in their/gentleness". The published version is "in their laughter and in their/gentle hearts."