SWEET & DIRTY
by Linda King
© 1972, 1974, 2013 Linda King
Sweet & Dirty by Linda King is re-issued by Hcolom and Vagabond Press in collaboration with outlawpoetry.com and printed in France. Cover design by Cindy Krieble.
Linda King showed up in the Vagabond Press mailbox, unsolicited, back in 1972, in Redwood City, California. I'd never heard of her before, but the poems she sent had fire and were free of pretension. I wrote asking if she might have enough material for a chapbook, and she sent the manuscript for Sweet & Dirty. It was only then that I realized she was connected to Bukowski.
Vagabond published the book, to the delight of some and the disgust of others. Most of what we published tended to draw these extreme reactions. It was a short press run and was gone in a flash.
True to its name, Vagabond was always on the move --- Munich, D.C., New Orleans, San Francisco, etc., and in 1974, in Ellensburg, Washington, we brought out a second edition of Sweet & Dirty. It too was gone in a flash.
It's now 2013 with lots of water under the bridge. I hadn't thought about Sweet & Dirty in a long time, and then Herr Klaus of Outlaw Poetry, a powerhouse literary web site operating out of France, contacted me with the request to bring out a third edition.
I agreed, Linda agreed, and here it is. The poems in Sweet & Dirty still have their fire, and also, I realize now, their innocence.
What goes around comes around.
John Bennett - Ellensburg, WA, August 10, 2013
LINDA KING
was raised in the small (population, 100) Mormon town of Boulder, Utah, on a cattle ranch. Her father ran cattle on rugged mountain and canyon terrain, using his five daughters as cowboys and hay hands. Her mother owned the only store in town, supplying everything anyone needed: groceries, hardware, cowboy hats and saddle blankets. Linda attended the University of Utah for one year before moving to Los Angeles where she married an Italian/American from Boston whom she'd met when she was sixteen. Two children, a divorce, and then she met Charles Bukowski. This was back in the Seventies.
Linda now lives in San Francisco. Her recent books are Loving and Hating Charles Bukowski, and Mad Ouija, a book about her breakdown in the Sixties, both from Kisskill Press, P.O. Box 320563, S.F., CA 84132. An excerpt from Loving and Hating Charles Bukowski is scheduled for publication in the anthology American Woman on the Edge.
Linda sculpts busts of poets, writers and artists, and her living space is overflowing with her sculptures of nudes. She hopes to be leaving San Francisco soon to find a less-costly place in the world to live. Where, she says, is anyone's guess.
The book is available here: http://outlawpoetry.com/2013/09/23/linda-king-sweet-dirty/
