Vallejo question

David

David

Here is "Vallejo" from LAFP, Sept. 13, 1974 and "Vallejo" from "What Matters Most". Does anyone have the "Hearse" and "Harbor Review" versions?

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jordan

jordan

lothario speedwagon
i have to think that bukowski had another version of this poem somewhere, or he went back and changed it. i know that some of his work was martin-ified, but this one is barely recognizable. changing some phrasing here or there is one thing, but adding completely new lines and totally changing the meaning of the poem is very strange.
 
David

David

It looks like the versions are: 1) Hearse No. 15, 1971. 2) LAFP, Sept. 13, 1974. 3) Harbor Review, Spring 1979.
4) What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire, 1999.
 
mjp

mjp

Founding member
jordan said:
adding completely new lines and totally changing the meaning of the poem is very strange.
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Unfortunately we're finding that the practice of wholesale changes in the posthumous work was not strange or unusual at all, and actually seems to be par for the course.

Whether Martin ever admits to the changes or not doesn't really matter. He doesn't have to. They are often painfully obvious. Yes, some of the reworked poems could be alternate versions and some could have been Bukowski editing already published work. But there are just far, far too many clumsy changes and changes that alter the point of the lines or the entire poem to be accidents or Bukowski edits. If you look at Bukowski's duplicate or alternate versions, he very rarely changed what he was trying to say very fundamentally. Some of these changes appear to have been made by someone who had no idea what Bukowski was saying in the first place (see above).

The fact that this is much more obvious in the posthumous collections should make everyone who reads them suspicious.
 
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