Feature

Self-Construction: The Work of Édouard Louis

New Books Reviewed in this Essay:
Collapse, translated by Tash Aw (FSG, $26)
Monique Escapes, translated by John Lambert (FSG, $25)

Also Discussed:
The End of Eddy, translated by Michael Lucey, (Picador, 2017, $18)
Who Killed My Father, translated by Lorin Stein (New Directions, 2019, $15.95)
A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, translated by Tash Aw (Picador, 2022, $16)
Change, translated by John Lambert (Picador, 2024, $18)

by Claude Peck

Books about terrible, horrible, no good, very bad childhoods are not exactly scarce. From Dickens to Genet, Frank McCourt, Dorothy Allison, and Stuart Douglas, we read about orphans and outcasts, the abused, destitute, bullied and neglected. To this robust literature of misery, we can now add the work of a skinny queer provincial French boy with bad teeth who was determined to rise out of poverty, receive the finest education his country had to offer, and seek his revenge through plain yet piercing words. In a remarkable series of books, Édouard Louis recounts growing up in Hallencourt, a working-class village in northern France rife with unemployment, homophobia, racism, and violence.

Louis’s books have been appearing in English translations over the past decade (see list above for details of translators and years of US publication). First was The End of Eddy, originally published in 2014 when the author was just twenty-two; the book quickly sold a whopping 300,000 copies in France. Most critics praised it for baring a side of French life so at odds with the country’s reputation for égalité and liberal sophistication; some raised questions about its accuracy, and whether it should be marketed as fiction or memoir. Regardless of the disputes, it was a finalist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in the debut-novel category and has been translated into twenty languages; Louis has given talks and readings all over the planet in its wake.

Louis went on to devote a book to his father (Who Killed My Father) and one to his mother’s midlife struggle to free herself of abusive, alcoholic men (A Woman’s Battles and Transformations). In the fascinating accretions of Change, published in France in 2021, Eddy leaves his childhood and village behind to attend lycée in Amiens and wins admittance to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Born Eddy Bellegueule, he fancifies his name to Édouard Louis, alters his too-loud laugh, straightens his teeth, attends the theater, and hangs out with a series of wealthy gay men, socialites, writers, and intellectuals—all to “gain worldwide recognition” for his books. The rags-to-riches arc of Change hints at such gradualist classics as Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.

With the English translations of Collapse, which concerns the early death of his older brother, and Monique Escapes, about helping his mother achieve independence after a string of bad relationships, Louis returns us to the squalid village of The End of Eddy. But wait: Do we really want to go there? To experience his dead-end brother’s alcohol-fueled violence against women? To relive the brothers’ woebegone mom, seemingly trapped in a cage with a series of insulting, domineering men? Also, why call these novels, when they are so clearly autobiographical?

Louis dismisses those who find his books repetitive: “I’ve been told that literature should never repeat itself, but I want to write only the same story again and again,” he tells us in A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, “returning to it until it reveals fragments of its truth, digging hole after hole in it until all that is hidden begins to seep out.”

Monique Escapes, however, doesn’t repeat much of the story of his mother told in previous books. As it opens, she is in her mid-fifties. (The writer, twenty-eight, is already a celebrated author, in Greece at a writing residency.) She calls her son from Paris, where she has been living for seven years with a man she met after she gave the boot to her chauvinist husband (Eddy’s father). Old patterns die hard, however; the new guy gets drunk nightly, calls her a whore and fat cow, and insults her “faggot” son. Fed up, she is determined to leave, and when she seeks her estranged son’s help, he throws himself into abetting her escape.

The mother-son dynamic here shifts dramatically from Louis’s long disregard for her, the family, and the town where he grew up. His mother, as young Eddy came to learn, abandoned hopes for a culinary career when she dropped out of school, married in her teens, had children, and embarked on a dreary life of scrimping, cooking, cleaning, and putting up with a verbally abusive, alcoholic husband. She mostly embraces (or fails to object to) the far-right, antigay, anti-immigrant politics of her husband and the town. Cowed, she rarely defends her effeminate young son from insults and attacks by bullies. She is prone to guilt-tripping and self-pity along the lines of “why can’t I have even a small measure of happiness?”

The author’s mother initially resents him for writing about her and his miserable childhood in The End of Eddy: “But paradoxically it’s because I’d written that book, and the ones that followed, that I’d earned the money we could now spend on her.” Even as he praises and reassures her, even as he provides her with money and temporary housing, Louis recalls her failures as a mother, wondering, “Why did I feel such a deep need to help her?” and concluding that it’s “because my hurt and hers are linked.”

In all his books, Louis laces his personal story with philosophy and social theory. Monique Escapes offers a class and feminist critique, especially about poor women in abusive relationships, for whom the possibility of escape is thwarted by financial constraints. “How many women would change their lives if they got a check?” he asks. He traces parallels between his childhood and that of his friend and mentor, the writer and philosopher Didier Eribon, who also grew up gay and poor, and wrote about it in his 2009 memoir Returning to Reims (Semiotext(e), 2013, translated by Michael Lucey).

When encountering “The Guy” his mother was ditching, Louis has a revelation reminiscent of the sort of moral inversion common in the works of his countryman Jean Genet: “I suddenly began to think that maybe this man was neither guilty nor responsible for what he had done,” but was rather “the element through which a violence had passed . . . the violence of male domination.” He and his estranged sister reunite to help their mother find and furnish a suitable place to live; she will also need money for groceries and living expenses. Louis praises Virginia Woolf for postulating a century ago, in A Room of One’s Own, that “freedom is not first and foremost an aesthetic and symbolic issue, but a material and practical one.”

With her children helping her, Monique blossoms into a new life where “no one’s going to walk all over me anymore.” She delights in trying new things, wearing makeup, fixing her hair, walking her dog, cooking for one. When she is featured in a German theater production based on Louis’s writing about her, she is invited to the opening; the journey marks her first time in an airplane and her first trip outside France. The director brings her onstage to applause at the curtain call, concluding on a joyous note for mother and son.

More than an upbeat happy-ending story, Monique Escapes is about rapprochement and metamorphosis. It reflects on Eddy’s own escape from his painful childhood, described in Change, as he sought revenge through education and hoped-for fame. It embraces a feminist ideal for a working-class woman. Near the end of Change, Louis entertains, for the first time, doubts about the values of the bourgeois life he has so doggedly pursued, combined with an ounce or two of nostalgia for the village life he left behind—for his mother’s humor, her pluck, her dreams so long deferred.

Throughout his oeuvre, Louis has argued that violence, homophobia, and racism in the town where he grew up must be seen as socially determined—a result of systems of class, economics, and masculinity that advantage those in power, even progressives, and not just in tiny Hallencourt. “By writing about my small town, I can put light on certain mechanisms that you can find everywhere in the world,” he told Interview Magazine in 2019.

“I write to shame the ruling class,” the self-described “class defector” told the New York Times in an interview. Louis seems thus to occupy a foggy space between revenge (against small-town bigots and gay-baiting bullies) and the thirst for vengeance (for a father and brother buffeted by post-industrial economic decline and systemic misogyny). This becomes overt in Who Killed My Father, where Louis names a series of French leaders whose politics, he argues, were responsible for turning many in his hometown into supporters of the far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.

A brother’s death

Louis’s older (by seven years) half-brother died of alcohol-related illness at the age of thirty-eight. “I received the news as one would receive information on the weather,” writes Louis, who had avoided his brother for the preceding ten years. In Collapse, as he helps his mother and sister with funeral arrangements, he combines his own recollections with stories from interviewing his brother’s friends and lovers.

When not drunk, the brother (never named) could be kind, generous, loving, a good listener. He barely knew his birth father, which gives the boy a lifelong sense of being abandoned. As a teen, he begins doing drugs, drinking, lying, stealing. He drops out of school, which to Louis seems to be a masculinist impulse. His brother, along with his male peers, views school itself as feminine, even faggy, not something that “real males” would consider valuable when they followed their fathers into factory work.

When he does ponder his future, the brother is grandiose. At twenty, he announces to his parents that he would learn the meat trade and become the finest butcher in all of France, or he would work with a crew restoring historic cathedrals for the glory of the republic. His adoptive father laughs in his face to it all and turns back to the ever-on television. “It was the size of his dreams,” Louis writes, “and the mismatch between their dimensions and all the impossibilities that had shaped his life, the misery, the poverty, the north of France, his destiny, I think it was all these contradictions that made him so unhappy.”

The brother is suicidally depressed, fixating on being abandoned by his birth father; he is also cruel, selfish, and violent. He beats women. He gets in bar fights. When he hears about Eddy’s gayness, he sets out to kill him, armed with a baseball bat. Louis, however, begins to find sympathy for his largely unlovable brother. Their father should have been more supportive. There was no vocabulary in the working-class town for mental illness; no one ever talked about depression, trauma or therapy. Psychiatric care was a luxury for those with money and education. His brother self-medicated with alcohol. He grew up around violence and used it himself to feel more powerful.

As Louis gained access to a more privileged world, first in the provincial city of Amiens and later in Paris, he saw that fuckups like his brother might have had better chances to heal and prosper if they were born into wealthier families where missteps were not terminal. “Injustice,” he writes in Change, “is nothing but the difference in access to attempts.”

And consider that if his straight older brother was “of” his village, Louis, being gay, was “apart” from Hallencourt from a young age. This helps explain why Louis, like so many smalltown gays, escaped to the city: In Paris, he was able “to finally live, even more radically and easily than in Amiens, to have what I had desired since my birth, the feeling of bodily freedom and of entering, thanks to sexuality, myriad new universes.” The quintessential pop anthem of this phenom is Bronski Beat’s 1984 single “Smalltown Boy” which asserts “the answers you seek will never be found at home.” But for Louis, unearthing home’s hurt is the key to finding painful truths and paths forward.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Antifascism

by Jeremy Wang-Iverson

This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the onset of the Spanish Civil War, which had a profound effect on the American writer Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). The days she spent in Barcelona when the war began in July 1936 served as a source of inspiration throughout her life, forging her commitment to antifascism and her unwavering belief in writing’s ability to create the conditions for political change.

The unrestrained idealism expressed in Rukeyser’s work inspired succeeding generations of American poets: Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Kate Daniels, Natasha Trethewey, Daniel Borzutzky, and Solmaz Sharif are among her legion of admirers. Many critics found her artistic approach less convincing and her political commitments suspect, but in recent years, with fascism once again on the rise globally, the tide has turned in her favor, and a Rukeyser revival is firmly underway.

This is not to say that Rukeyser was neglected in her lifetime. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, Theories of Flight (Yale University Press, 1935); a few years later, she was called “the most inventive and challenging poet of the generation which has not yet reached thirty” by Louis Untermeyer in The Saturday Review of Literature. Along with winning more prestigious awards and fellowships, she lived to see her collected poems published—a significant capstone—and published fiction, plays, memoirs, biographies, criticism, children’s books, and translations of poets such as Mexico’s Octavio Paz and Sweden’s Gunnar Ekelöf. And not incidentally for a writer committed to political activism, Rukeyser served as president of PEN America and wrote op-eds for the New York Times.

Despite her accomplishments, Rukeyser did not achieve the canonical status that many poets and scholars believe she deserves. Partly this is because so much of her writing has not been given the same consideration as her poetry, but with the recent publication of The Muriel Rukeyser Era (Cornell University Press, 2023), a selection of her prose edited by Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, that can begin to change.

Gathering work from the full span of Rukeyser’s life, The Muriel Rukeyser Era shows the extent to which she experimented with genre and technique in an effort to connect with larger audiences and advocate for social justice. With many of its entries originally written for a general readership, this anthology is an excellent starting point to learn about Rukeyser: Here we meet a writer with genuine concern for those struggling, and we gain a clear understanding of her profound desire to share what she witnessed. The volume is an inspiring reminder of the ways in which an artist can defy a political reality and strive to create something new.

Rukeyser’s resolve to pursue this lofty project crystallized in the days following the start of the Spanish Civil War, an experience into which newly published pieces offer further insight. She was twenty-two years old, and it was an improbable turn of events that led her to Spain. Initially, she went to London, accompanying the activists George and Elizabeth Dublin Marshall, who were researching cooperatives. While in London, she met Robert Herring, the editor of Life and Letters To-Day; Herring asked if she would go to Barcelona to cover the People’s Olympiad, a gathering of athletes protesting the official games held in Nazi Germany that summer. She left London on July 18, and as Herring notes in the header for the article Rukesyer eventually wrote: “She was on the last train to enter Spain after fighting began and arrived back in London on July 27th. This was her first trip to Europe.”

And what a trip it was: The People’s Olympiad never took place. When Rukeyser arrived in Barcelona, as she explained in another journalistic account included in The Muriel Rukeyser Era, the war had begun:

I could never find the man who was managing the publicity for the Olympics because he was always out on the street fighting with the People’s Front. We were taken to dinner that night in an automobile spangled with bullet holes, the upholstery stained with blood; the officials apologized for the condition of the car, explaining there had been fighting that day.

Rukeyser returned to New York later that year and wrote the novel Savage Coast, which fictionalized her experience in Spain, including an account of falling in love with a German athlete named Otto Boch, who was later killed fighting the fascists. The novel, written before George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, was rejected by her publisher and only released in 2013 by The Feminist Press. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, who discovered the believed-to-be-lost manuscript for Savage Coast in Rukeyser’s archive at the Library of Congress, writes in the book’s introduction that it “defies and remakes the artistic, political, and gendered categories of twentieth-century modernism.” Eulàlia Busquets, who has translated Savage Coast into Catalan, describes it as a “documentary, biographical, and experimental” novel, writing in her 2020 essay “Returning to Savage Coast” (published in Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, /2020/05/08/eulalia-busquets-returning-to-savage-coast/):

Savage Coast tells us about the things that could have been possible but that ultimately did not happen . . . We must go on fighting . . . This is the message Rukeyser held on to as she left Spain on the ship Ciudad de Ibiza and accepted the responsibility to tell what she had seen the day she “was born” in Spain.

This moment of epiphany on the ship as she was evacuated from Spain is narrated by Rukeyser in several non-fiction pieces as well. In The Muriel Rukeyser Era, Keenaghan and Kennedy-Epstein include a series of lectures that she gave at Vassar in 1940, when she was twenty-six, that were previously part of the one book of essays published in her lifetime, The Life of Poetry. This is Rukeyser from the original introduction:

We were on a small ship, five times past our capacity in refugees, sailing for the first port at peace. On the deck that night, people talked quietly about what they had just seen and what it might mean to the world . . . Suddenly, throwing his question into talk not at all leading up to it—not seeming to—a man—a printer, several times a refugee—asked, ‘And poetry—among all this—where is there a place for poetry?’
Then I began to say what I believe.

Rukeyser’s attempts to answer the printer’s question can be traced across several lectures, essays, and reviews in pieces included in The Muriel Rukeyser Era. The most direct (and amusing) answer is in a radio script that she prepared in 1949, aired by a San Francisco station that summer. There are moments where Rukeyser sounds like a writer tentatively trying a new technology—think of Joyce Carol Oates’s earliest tweets—before she locks in:

Mrs. Melville said to her mother—and you can hear the misery of her words—“Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.” What is this distaste for poetry? If you ask your friends about it, you will find, as I have, that they will give you the same answers. Your friends may say that they have not the time for poetry. Now this is a curious position to take; for poetry, of all the arts that live in time—music, theater, movies, writing—poetry is the briefest and most compact of these.

She continues: “A poem invites a total response from you . . . A first-rate poem, a fine poem, will reach you intellectually . . . or may I say that when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too . . . but the way is through emotion . . . through what we call feeling.”

Rukeyser could have been describing her own extraordinary poem sequence The Book of the Dead, first published as part of her second full-length collection, U.S. 1 (Covici Friede, 1938). Remarkably, her trip to Spain was the second reporting trip the poet took in 1936; earlier in the year, with photographer Nancy Naumburg, she went to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where thousands worked in unsafe conditions to build a tunnel for Union Carbide, and reported on the 1931 industrial tragedy known as the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster. (Naumburg’s photos were meant to be published with the poem, which was not realized until an edition published by West Virginia University Press in 2018.)

Rukeyser revealed in The Book of the Dead “how the company cheated these men out of their lives,” as Naumburg put it. She approached her work on the poem not unlike a documentary filmmaker, as Catherine Gander details in her book Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Documentary was an emerging artform at the time; Rukeyser co-wrote with Ben Maddow (a distant cousin of Rachel) the 1941 documentary short “A Place to Live,” which was an Oscar nominee. As late as the 1970s, Gander tells us, Rukeyser was in touch with the producer Paul Rotha about adapting The Book of the Dead into a film.

Along with her interest in film and radio, Rukeyser also worked as a translator, biographer, and literary critic; aspects of this work are also represented in The Muriel Rukeyser Era. The careful selection of pieces, accompanied by insightful and detailed notes, provide a coherent presentation of writings that span Rukeyser’s life, clearly showing how key themes and ideas echoed throughout her work. The editors’ sleuthing, subtle and penetrating, gives us a peek into Rukeyser’s process, even how she grappled with language as she was working. The volume amply makes its case that Rukeyser should be considered a major American writer of the 20th Century.

Over twenty years ago, Adrienne Rich wrote that Rukeyser “created a poetics of historical sensibility—not as nostalgia, but as a resource to express and interpret contemporary experience and imagine a different future.” Now, in another time of crisis, her voice is indispensable once again—and many are listening.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2026 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2026

On Bumblebees

and Other Books by Deborah Meadows

by Kit Robinson

The poet Deborah Meadows has made a career of collaging materials from a wide array of specialized disciplines to create conceptual works with lively, surprisingly personable surfaces. Her work demonstrates what happens when you put together words from disparate vocabularies to achieve a kind of de-specialization suggestive of the fact that postmodern life is, itself, a lesson in hybridity. Her latest book, Bumblebees (Roof Books, $20), is a case in point.

For her earlier book Lecture Notes: A Duration Poem in Twelve Parts (BlazeVOX, 2018), Meadows attended a series of lectures in Humanities and Social Sciences at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Topics included game theory, neuroscience, history of financial capitalism, history of slave trade, comparative judicial politics, planetary science, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of science. In Lecture Notes, Meadows presented her rough notes as poetry.

In a like manner, Bumblebees hybridizes such linguistic domains as suggested by “Mongolian sandstorm,” “disturbed bones, quarried first causes, harp recordings,” “tangerine miniaturization plots,” “pet rocks,” and “mineral pigment flaked by time.”

Many of Meadows’s works are text-based, composed by extracting or commenting on fragments from an existing text arranged to form new combinations and sequences. For example, sections from her long serial poem “The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” were published across multiple books, including Representing Absence (Green Integer, 2004), Thin Gloves (Green Integer, 2006), The 60’s and 70’s (Tinfish Press, 2003), and Itinerant Men (Krupskaya, 2004). This work comprises meditations on Melville’s stupendous novel by embedding key words within a commentary that assumes some of the same high rhetoric Melville deploys. Consider this passage from Chapter 26 of Moby-Dick:

“I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.

From these sentences, Meadows spins a fractal verse in Itinerant Men:

the ordinary irrational struggle
(fear of the whale Starbuck
            requires, never hunting after sun-
down) menace you from the centre
and circumference of flesh
            not as fearful as the dignity of divine
or spiritual terror
            not as tragic as the undoing of goodness
in our Starbuck.

Meadows thus plies a scavenger’s art, picking up gems of knowledge hither and yon. In another telling example, the acknowledgments in her Saccade Patterns (BlazeVOX, 2011) include Wikipedia entries, artwork by sculptor Robert Morris, and books ranging from Engines of Logic: Mathematics and the Origin of the Computer to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism. But how exactly such sources are absorbed and deployed in Meadows’s poetry often remains a mystery. Suffice to say there is a great deal going on in the background, and these deep strata give the work a shape and tone that conveys an urgent quest for knowledge backed by a stringent skepticism of received ideas.

In her preface to Translation – the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2013), Meadows partially explains her method:

The bass guitar creates patterns that make music into a visceral experience – they are what infect the body. The poems … are in dialog with other authors, and here, experimental poetry engages logician Quine, encyclopedic novelist Melville, philosophers Irigaray and Deleuze, theologian and synthetic philosopher Aquinas, poets Dragomoshchenko, Hejinian, Raworth, Baudelaire, and Celan, Soviet cinematographer Vertov, video artist Bill Viola, and others.

And Meadows doesn’t simply mean that the poetry draws on works by such figures—she often puts texts in dialog with each other. In the book’s selections from involutia (Shearsman Books, 2007), for example, Meadows revisits the Blue Cliff Record, a 12th-century compendium of 100 koans and a foundational text of Soto Zen Buddhism, from the differing perspectives of French philosophers Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze. The resulting lyrics form an imaginary conversation that yoke classical wisdom to postmodern thought:

Irigaray:
Without dwelling on anything, four gates.
Go on through, standing erect like
the free birds we are.
A flow, a percolation
a favored edge.
Deleuze:
myriad forms & dimensions
the little cup afloat
raises a wave.

Another poem, titled “Midnight in Our Motivated,” showcases Meadows’s penchant for metonymic signification, wherein a part stands in for an otherwise unassimilable whole:

Hadn’t you hoped for a change adding fire,
telling-knots addressed to mind by hand, but the music
acquired measure runs its blood circuit, what’s there
after midnight in our motivated glacial moraine. None.

Here the poem’s title is produced by carving out a fragment of text irrespective of its syntactic position within the poem, a gesture that highlights the modularity of language and touts a healthy skepticism concerning the truth value of generalizing statements. Such linguistic flexibility unsurprisingly gives rise to much playfulness and wit in Meadows’s heady verse:

gen: many one and one and one
            depend from
            penned from
rendered pretty
so pretty, we’re blind
            but now eye sea
general forms
in particular
                        stances,
that’s got his own

Here multivalent signification gets a workout with punning references to lyrics from “West Side Story,” “Amazing Grace,” and “God Bless the Child.” Elsewhere, Meadows links semantic domains via sound values, where the aural qualities of words set off echoes that shift their senses:

… speckled show when man doesn’t
show up to sign the lease, off-leash
                        area, three words good-for-you
not for me, green matter grouped apart, fermented
            to another life: gone, boulder on my chest,
                        grieve a friend, gone

In a sense, Meadows’s work is a poet’s solution to the problem of the fractured episteme of the postmodern world: Since each field of knowledge is reflective of the specialized language used to describe it, a holistic picture is hard to come by. Meadows attacks this problem by grafting terms from disparate fields into lines that are feminine, marvelous, and tough—that is, she blends the quest for knowledge with casual expressions of the everyday.

To illustrate the power of poetry to span worldviews, Meadows at times turns epigrammatic, as in the following lines from the prose poem “Another Interview”:

Let’s be precise, no analog, no wooden sanctified tradition.
……………………………………………………………………
Mostly, poetry is against having results.
During the last quarter of a century, poetry in this country differs in who has the bad taste to mention capitalism or not.
Half the people worry about where the poetry of our country is going; the other half worry about the status of their dialog with reality.
I agree: to write is to inscribe the world.
………………………………………………
All our good current writers are reticent to be a party or school.
…………………………………………………………………………
I’m not interested in knowledge about knowledge, or art about art – they are all a trap.

To enjoy Meadows’s poetry, it is not necessary to study all her sources; the surface qualities of her verse are sufficient for an alluring and entertaining reading experience. Yet for the curious reader, the poet’s sources may open doors to further horizons of awareness. Research-based poetries can serve as directories to knowledge in a wide variety of arts and sciences. Along with Meadows’s Bumblebees, Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun (Belladonna Collaborative, 2018), and Tyrone Williams’s Az iZ (Omnidawn, 2018) are examples of contemporary research-based poetics that reward the reader simultaneously at both depth and surface levels.

In Bumblebees, Meadows constructs her poems by linking phrases drawn from diverse semantic domains and separated by commas to form long, twisting sentences that leap across stanzas of variegated measure. Written from and into the chilling winds of the Anthropocene, Bumblebees is a cry in the darkness that bravely assesses the damage caused by so-called civilization while affirming humanity’s talent for riding the sine waves of perception, articulation, and harmony:

We made terrible mistakes, got off the train at the wrong stop, miscalculated how much our earth could take.
Maintenance of vision is marking our minds as we convene a forest of signs and get on.

Meadows has long created a kaleidoscopic display on the screen of the brain, and Bumblebees does so with a vivid urgency. Whether with this volume or with any other in her fine oeuvre, it is time for readers to grapple with the poetry of Deborah Meadows.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

James Schuyler: The Absolute of Feeling

by Claude Peck

“Bliss is such a simple thing,” wrote James Schuyler. Also, “the wires in my head / cross: kaboom.” Navigating these opposite shores in a tumultuous life while leaving behind wondrous, one-of-a-kind poems was Schuyler’s mystery and his miracle.

Schuyler, hailed by critic Helen Vendler as “Whitman’s legitimate heir,” was born in 1923 and died in 1991; the decades since have seen publication of his Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), art writings (good), diary (better), letters (best), and a gem-filled volume of uncollected poems—but no full-length biography until now. Informed by research and interviews dating to the mid-1990s, Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35), is packed with detail.

Long may this remarkable “Life” live, and may it lead hordes to discover what David Lehman has called “the best-kept secret in American poetry.”

A Room of His Own

In September 1986, when he was sixty-three, Schuyler lived at the Hotel Chelsea, on the sixth floor, with French doors opening onto a skinny iron balcony above busy 23rd Street. Schuyler had agreed to let me audio-record him at home reading some of his love poems for a gay radio program I hosted in Minneapolis. (Only later did I learn of Schuyler’s stage fright, a phobia so severe that he had never given a public reading.)

Schuyler lived in conditions that seemed scandalous for a Pulitzer Prize winner and leading light of the New York School of poetry. His room at the fabled, shabby Chelsea had a tiny galley kitchen, a single bed, a few dusty houseplants, and a portable typewriter; books, typescripts, and vinyl records were strewn about; on the walls were paintings and drawings by such friends as Joe Brainard, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Anne Dunn, and Darragh Park.

As he sat in the room’s sole comfy chair, taking sips from a glass of light-brown iced coffee, Schuyler read slowly and clearly, his “esses” sounding a bit like “eshes.” He read eight poems from the “Loving You” section of The Crystal Lithium (Random House, 1972). I asked for a few more. He said no. Then he agreed to read “A Blue Towel” from Hymn to Life (Random House, 1974)—an ode to happiness about a day at the beach with a lover. It ends with “Quiet / ecstasy and sweet content” and wonders “why are not all days like / you?” The “you” is both day and lover, and the rhetorical question, from a man who survived so much chaos and sour misfortune, is supremely touching.

As I was leaving, we hugged and he called me “sweetie.” It surely was not a day like any other. We subsequently traded a couple of letters, but Schuyler and I never met again. In the five years before he died, his stage fright tamed, Schuyler gave nine public readings, starting in 1988 with a legendary SRO appearance at the Dia Foundation in New York City at which, Schuyler later exulted to a friend, “I was a fucking sensation.”

“No Juvenilia”

Aided by candid autobiographical revelations in the poems, Schuyler fans already know the highs and lows of his adult life. His early life is another matter. Schuyler wrote in his Diary in August, 1985, “Anyone who ever wants to write my biography will have his/her work cut out for her/him, since virtually no documentation or juvenilia exist.”

Given our tendency to sift an artist’s youth for the point where the weather shifted and they diverged from mere mortals on their path to greatness, it is gratifying to glean new details unearthed by Kernan about Schuyler’s early years.

He was born to Marcus James Schuyler and Margaret Daisy Connor in Downers Grove, Illinois, in 1923. His father, of Dutch ancestry, grew up on an Iowa farm until leaving home and becoming a printer and later a journalist with social-justice leanings.

Kernan points out that James worked on his high-school newspaper, perhaps emulating his father, and that “the dated, daily nature of newspapers is reflected in the great many Schuyler poems that bear dates and immortalize particular days.”

The poet’s mother, of English and Irish roots, grew up in Albert Lea, Minnesota. Her mother, Schuyler’s “gentle grandma Ella,” was fondly remembered in several later poems. James’s maternal grandfather committed suicide at twenty-nine by drinking morphine.

Margaret had a college degree and worked in Chicago and later in Washington, D.C., in jobs that aligned her with progressives and early feminists. She got into law school at the University of Chicago, though she never enrolled. Academically at least, James fell far from his mother’s tree. Though bookish in his youth (he memorized big chunks of Wallace Stevens), he was a poor student in high school and flunked out of Bethany College in West Virginia after less than two years. The turbulent 1960s and ’70s were his most productive years as a poet, yet this son of lefties rarely mentioned politics, civil rights, Vietnam, Nixon, or gay liberation.

When James was six, his parents divorced. His mother remarried building contractor Berton Ridenour (“an old book burner” and “a big phony,” per his stepson). By 1937, after a few years in D.C., the family had moved to East Aurora, New York, twenty-five miles from Buffalo.

The college dropout enlisted in the Navy during World War II but went AWOL eight months later on a sex-and-booze bender in New York City. His “undesirable discharge” for homosexuality came after he spent three weeks at hard labor at a bleak military brig on Hart Island. Schuyler didn’t say or write much in later years about his abortive Navy career, which Kernan asserts was “not only traumatic, but shameful and embarrassing.”

John Ashbery and James Schuyler, Great Spruce Head Island, ca. 1968 (Photographer unknown, James Schuyler Papers, Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California)

To New York, Italy

The immediate postwar years found Schuyler in New York, working a dull job at the Voice of America and taking up with Spanish Civil War hero Bill Aalto, a strapping Finn with a violent streak. A modest inheritance from Schuyler’s paternal grandmother financed the couple for two years in Europe, mostly in Italy, where they shared a house in Ischia with W.H. Auden and his partner, Chester Kallman. Schuyler typed poems for Auden. He learned enough Italian to tackle some translations of Giacomo Leopardi, whose poems Schuyler loved. Visitors to Ischia included Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Picasso biographer John Richardson (with whom Schuyler had “intense, rough sex” on a terrace).

Schuyler and Aalto split after nearly five years together, and Schuyler returned to New York in 1949. Writer Anatole Broyard, in his vivid memoir Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (Crown, 1993), recalls this as a time when rents were cheap and “the streets and bars were full of writers and painters and the kind of young men and women who liked to be around them.”

Crucially to the future of American letters, Schuyler came to know a lot of people in this free-wheeling creative coterie, but two were of special importance: “James Schuyler’s close friendships with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, which began in early 1952 and lasted, in O’Hara’s case, for most of the decade, and in Ashbery’s to the end of Schuyler’s life, determined the direction of his life and work.”

Schuyler loved the early works of John and Frank (both Harvard grads); Schuyler wrote that, in turn, they “made me feel that I wasn’t just a poet who was being tested but that I was a poet”—the encouragement was “the most important moment of my life.” The three men—all gay but with varying degrees of openness about it—along with Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest became known as the New York School of poets.

The “school” was at best a loose alliance, with clear differences among its main writers, but united by friendships, time and place and a shared love of painting, ballet, movies, music, cartoons, collaboration, and a “manner” that was anti-didactic, conversational, miles from the high seriousness of Pound and Eliot, more like “jazz that someone like Prokofiev might write.”

Schuyler’s thrill at meeting Ashbery and O’Hara did not prevent a major setback soon after, when he had a manic episode that led to his first psychiatric hospitalization, a stay that lasted ten weeks. While there he wrote the early short poem, “Salute,” which opens with a statement-question: “Past is past, and if one / remembers what one meant / to do and never did, is / not to have thought to do / enough?”

Kernan argues that A Day Like Any Other is not intended as a critical biography, though the book contains thought-provoking discussions of a handful of key poems (“The Crystal Lithium,” “Dining Out with Doug and Frank”). Of “Salute” Kernan points out the irony of a poem written in a mental hospital with a title that in Italian means “health.” I also can’t help hearing in the line “to do and never did” an echo of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be.”

Schuyler’s 1950s mixed sex, love affairs, and art with prodigious amounts of drinking. He and the charismatic, hyperkinetic O’Hara shared an apartment, jobs at MOMA, and a hectic artistic and social life. Schuyler was gathering the stuff of poems, but not writing many of them.

With his boyfriend, pianist Arthur Gold, Schuyler returned to Europe for several months. He met lifelong friend, Fairfield Porter, as well as other painters, chief among them Grace Hartigan and Freilicher. He wrote the novel Alfred and Guinevere (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1958).

It was an era when poets wrote about painters, and painters painted their poet friends. Collaborations flourished. In 1955, Schuyler began contributing short reviews for Art News magazine. He and Ashbery co-wrote, line by line over many years, the comic novel A Nest of Ninnies (Dutton, 1969).

Instability

In addition to his precarious mental state (variously diagnosed as severe depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) Schuyler was “precariously housed for much of his life,” a fact reflected in many poems, as noted by perceptive British scholar Rona Cran. Yet he is rightly celebrated as a superb poet of place whose poems often begin with the view out his window, whether urban, suburban, rural, or psych ward. In 1959, for one example, Schuyler fled a Hamptons rental after a breakup, couch-surfed in Hoboken and the East Village, then hacksawed his way into the apartment on E. 49th Street that he once shared with O’Hara, which by then was condemned, padlocked, and roach-infested.

Housing-wise, Schuyler was ostensibly better off when, beginning in the early 1960s, he lived outside New York City: in Southampton with Porter, his wife Anne, and their children, and at the Porter family summer home on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine. Along with a Vermont house owned by friend and writer Kenward Elmslie, these bucolic places fueled the poet’s endlessly inventive, original way of writing about flowers and trees, the ocean, weather, and light. Though remembered as his happiest years, they were also fraught, as Fairfield was in love with Schuyler, creating myriad complications.

After the Porters finally asked him to leave in the early 1970s, Schuyler lived in a succession of crummy New York rooms, including one where he started a fire in bed, burning himself so badly that he required skin grafts.

At a New York bathhouse in 1971 Schuyler met and began an intense affair with Robert Jordan, a Brooks Brothers salesman with a wife and kids in New Jersey. Liked by few of James’s friends, “Bob” nonetheless inspired Schuyler’s tender, vulnerable “Loving You” poems.

Despite chronic poverty, well-documented mental breakdowns, and sketchy housing, Schuyler’s writing flourished in the 1970s, with the novel What’s For Dinner? (Black Sparrow Press, 1978) and four of his five poetry volumes published between 1969 and 1980. This output included the masterful long poems that anchored his final four books.

In his last twelve years, thanks to a network of friends, a trusted shrink, a caring physician and a multiyear stay at the Chelsea, Schuyler experienced more stability—seeing old and new friends, eating out, enjoying New York.

Schuyler mostly narrates his poems from a condition of gratitude. Dark-themed poems are notably rare. How was it that a man “so tormented by demons,” as David Lehman put it, “would be, in his best poems, so skillful at conveying what happiness feels like?”

Kernan’s essential, readable, sensitive biography offers keen fresh insights but doesn’t fully answer this seeming anomaly. For that, we can with robust pleasure return to the poems, as in “Afterward,” where Schuyler gives a disarmingly simple account of the end of two recent hospitalizations:

It’s
funny to be free again: to
look out and see
the gorgeous October day
and know that I
can stroll right out into
it and for as long as
I wish and that’s what I
do. This room needs flowers.

Editor’s Note: The following poems, read by James Schuyler in his room at the Hotel Chelsea, were recorded by Claude Peck on 9/20/1986. They are copyright Claude Peck and used by permission.

“Letter to a Friend: Who is Nancy Daum” from The Crystal Lithium (1972)

“A Blue Towel” from Hymn to Life (1974)

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

The Matrix and Eecchhooeess

The Matrix
N. H. Pritchard
Primary Information ($20)

Eecchhooeess
N. H. Pritchard
DABA ($24)

by Richard Kostelanetz

N. H. Pritchard (1939-1996) was a New York-based artist and writer whose The Matrix Poems 1960-1970, originally published by Doubleday, has the significant distinction of remaining the most innovative one-author collection of poetry ever released by a commercial house in the U.S. It was groundbreaking at the time not only for its typographical and verbal departures, but for its author’s race, as fifty years ago, in the wake of Civil Rights protests in 1968, our commercial publishers became more open to Black authors than they had been before. It is only appropriate that his innovation be honored now in our current time with new reprints of his two major works.

The Matrix’s cover had a knockout black and white photograph of its author with half of his face in shadows, wearing a collared shirt with a tie and jacket. Pritchard looked elegant, much as Ralph Ellison was elegant—but whereas Ellison emerged from a fatherless family, Pritchard’s father was a physician who immigrated to New York City from “the Antilles,” as his son so elegantly put it. Whereas Ellison didn’t finish Tuskegee, Pritchard went to prep schools before taking his B.A. with honors from NYU and continuing with graduate school in art history.

When I first met Pritchard in the early 1970s, soon after The Matrix was published, he greeted me in his darkened studio apartment on Park Avenue. Though only a year older than me, he seemed not just more sophisticated, but unique in all the ways that a creative person can be. Pritchard’s personal letters resembled the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake; to my copies of his books he added not just a personal inscription but a handmade enhancement of colors and lines that I treasure.

The poems in The Matrix appeared in several formats that still look alternative today. Words were crushed together; some were printed upside down. Weighty phrases were repeated within the page. Words both familiar and unfamiliar had extra spaces between the letters. While some pages had just a large single letter, on other pages the print ran to the outside edges, suggesting that it might well have continued beyond it. The Matrix challenged how a writer’s Collected Poems should look.

As for the texts themselves, they approached the limits of semantic comprehension, as Pritchard’s ideal was what he called the “transreal,” a reflection of his awareness of mystical, supernatural modernism in the visual arts. On an opening recto page was this epigraph for himself: “Words are ancillary to content.” Later in the book, the fourth page of “Gyre’s Galax” repeats the phrase “above beneath” from top to bottom, sometimes amended by the words “it” and “in.” Pritchard wanted to take poetry into a domain previously unknown, one that was indeed above beneath.

In 1971 a second Pritchard collection, Eecchhooeess, appeared from New York University Press; it is perhaps the most radical one-author poetry volume ever to appear from an American university press. Repeating many of the same challenges posed by The Matrix, Eecchhooeess is no less brilliant; its eerie sounds and typographical innovations chimed right in with the Black Arts movement of the day (Pritchard was affiliated with the literary collective Umbra).

The most unusual quality of these new reprints of Pritchard’s books is that they appear intact, with their original front covers duplicated, each totally devoid of any new preface or afterword. Not even Pritchard’s biographical note is updated; only the title and copyright pages are different. While contemporary readers might wish for more background on this utterly unique writer, to get such authentic reprinting a whole half-century later is a treat for fans of groundbreaking poetry indeed.

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Rain Taxi Review of Books Volume 26, No. 3 (#103) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

The Nature-Loving Spirit of Bruno K. Öijer

by Emil Siekkinen

Born in 1951, Swedish poet Bruno K. Öijer has been publishing his work in his native country since the 1970s, yet to date only one of his books, The Trilogy (Action Books, 2020), is available in English translation (although as the title suggests, it comprises three books written in a series). This must change, for as humanity’s assault on the planet grows to epic proportions—waterways are poisoned, forests are felled, slaughterhouses overflow with suffering, and the climate spirals out of control—Öijer has much to say about it; his poetry confronts our exploitive relationship with nature and reveals a profound compassion for life. In this essay I will discuss Öijer’s two most recent collections published in Sweden, 2014’s Och natten viskade Annabel Lee (And the Night Whispered Annabel Lee) and 2024’s Växla ringar med mörkret (Exchange Rings with the Darkness); the translations of quoted passages are my own.

Öijer’s sense of empathy is part of a theme of lifelong alienation that has permeated his work. In “Fantasin” (“The Imagination”), the poet recounts having to write a grade school essay after summer break:

I wrote that I found an injured spider
and mended its leg with tape
when July had passed, the injury had healed
and I could release the spider
I saw it quickly scurry away in the yard
among the dandelions and grass

Öijer’s imagination reflects a nature-loving spirit (no matter that his fable also metaphorizes the imagination itself). Intriguingly, his speaker assumes the role of caretaker to a creature that many people fear and kill without hesitation. To Öijer, perhaps, imagining a relationship beyond fear may be the key to greater kinship between humans and the natural world.

Dreams are another fertile terrain in Öijer’s work. In “Drömträdet” (“The Dream Tree”), a “you” shakes the trunk of the titular tree, causing its leaves to fall and cover the ground, which then falls asleep and dreams. Perhaps this reflects nature’s cyclical essence, which doesn’t produce waste or garbage—or perhaps the ground dreams of a future beyond the Anthropocene:

dreams of the wheel tracks that are gone
the place they led to is covered with grass
only crumbling wooden crosses remain
with unreadable names and dates

Öijer cannot be called an optimist, but he does offer hope that humanity’s destructive advance will eventually be tempered. In “Romans” (“Romance”), clouds (some of which may be traces of air traffic and other sources of human overconsumption) are white wounds in the sky—yet somewhere the sky is not disfigured in this way, and “the roads must first / ask the forest for permission.” In our world, of course, other rules apply. Trees are seen not as living ecosystems but as raw materials; in “Sången”(“The Song”) the landscape is enveloped “in a melancholy, lamenting song” when a spruce is felled, and in “Asfalterade hjärtan” (“Paved Hearts”), the poet highlights the contrast between “the scent of autumn leaves” and the “piercing, unbearable sound” that has replaced it as people methodically saw down everything beautiful.

Öijer prefers nature’s fellowship, and the wolf is one of his totems. In “Varg” (“Wolf”), he claims:

I have already
handed over my soul to the wolves
who take it with them
and wrap it in their own song
hunted on the ground and from the air
they have nothing left to prove
but run endless miles
leaving this world behind

Few animals are as misunderstood and feared as wolves, but the notion that the species harbors an insatiable thirst for human blood belongs in folklore. In his poetry, Öijer often returns to the idea that he (or at least his poetic persona) is an outcast, pursued and hunted—as is the case for many who position themselves outside societal norms and expectations—and it is this version of the wolf that Öijer writes. Figuring the wolf in this manner allows him to feel compassion for the wolf and its existential circumstances, which really are the same for all living beings. As Öijer writes in “Miraklet” (“The Miracle”):

the miracle
when a child is born
and a wolf
and a bird
and a blade of grass

The echo of Whitman here is unmistakable, and Öijer is often compared to his fellow Swede (and Nobel Laureate) Tomas Tranströmer; like them and many other poets, Öijer is a source of wisdom and a servant of life. Here’s hoping more of his work will be brought into English.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

57 Snapshots in Time: A Charles Bukowski Primer

by Abel Debritto

Editor’s Note: This year is the thirtieth anniversary of Charles Bukowski’s death, and today, August 16th, is the author’s birthday. To commemorate, Abel Debritto, author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and A Catalog of Ordinary Madness (Chatwin Books, 2024), and editor of six Bukowski collections for Ecco/HarperCollins, offers an overview of all of Bukowski’s major books to date.

Fifty-seven major books in fifty-seven years. Charles Bukowski’s gargantuan literary output is staggering by most accounts: over 5,500 poems, almost 1,000 prose pieces, and six novels over a span of fifty years. Add to that some 500 poems lost in the mail in the 1960s—those alone are equivalent to some authors’ Complete Works. For a thought-provoking, controversial writer who always seemed to be on a binge, Bukowski was prolific beyond words. Writing was both his disease and his crutch. Some of it was obviously dross, an exercise to get the good stuff going, but at his very best, Bukowski had a unique knack for squeezing magic out of the ordinary with unsurpassed simplicity. Legions of aspiring writers have tried unsuccessfully to emulate his artfully artless style.

For better or worse, Bukowski had little time for arcane metaphors, synecdoches, and iambic pentameters. He was so busy writing “the next line” that he didn’t edit any of the fifty-seven books listed below. His longtime publisher John Martin was entirely responsible for selecting, arranging, and editing the work that appeared under his Black Sparrow Press imprint; Bukowski read the proofs and green-lighted all projects, and Martin put them out. Overall, Bukowski didn’t complain about Martin’s editorial decisions, save in the case of Women: As he said in a letter, “My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way, I don’t want it smoothed out.” A second printing was immediately issued, restoring Bukowski’s unadulterated writing.

A case could be made for the aggressive editing that plagued (and marred) several posthumous publications—not a minor matter since twenty-nine of the fifty-seven books discussed below have been released after Bukowski’s death, and rivers of virtual ink have been spilled to pinpoint the culprit of those countless substandard edits. Although the jury is still out, the consensus seems to be that Bukowski didn’t make the bulk of those changes.

Egregious editing is not the only issue when it comes to Bukowski. There are quite a few myths about him and his work, some of them fueled by the man himself, who got a kick out of deliberately blurring reality and fiction. He was accused of being a male-chauvinist pig long before cancel culture became prevalent, but that misconception largely stemmed from short excerpts from Women and Love Is a Dog from Hell, a lilliputian portion of Bukowski’s actual output. Similar candid, blunt accusations—that he was a drunk lecher, a ludicrous dilettante, a vicious typist, America’s sewer Shakespeare, the bukkake of bad poetry—were but parts of a very distorted picture. To understand Bukowski fully, a quick look at a few excerpts is simply not enough. Tackling all fifty-seven books below might be a bit of a challenge, but ideal contenders to provide a better grasp of Bukowski’s range include: The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills; Mockingbird Wish Me Luck; Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness; Factotum; Ham on Rye; and The Last Night of the Earth Poems.

Misconceptions aside, thirty years after Bukowski’s passing, his spirit still looms large, much to the chagrin of his loudly sensationalist detractors. Translated into over twenty languages and with millions of copies of his books sold worldwide, Bukowski is a reliable steady seller: Some 10,000 copies of Essential Bukowski: Poetry are regularly sold per year in the U.S. alone—a remarkable achievement for a poetry collection in this age. His critical reception is no small feat, either: over a thousand print books and articles are devoted to his work, not to mention hundreds of online reviews and almost 200 anthology appearances, including some highbrow publications. Not bad for the soi-disant drunken bard of the underdog.

It’s hard to establish Bukowski’s popularity in a time when most new releases are forgotten as quickly as they hit the shelves, but younger generations are still clearly thrilled by the work of such an outrageous hell-raiser. One of his best-known quotations, printed in Life Magazine in 1988 when Bukowski was almost seventy, perhaps explains his appeal to the ever-rebellious nature of the youth:

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

No wonder, then, that Bukowski’s books are among the most frequently stolen in bookstores. And if that seems like a dubious indicator of the undying, undisputed demand for his literary output for those who have outgrown or simply dislike it, here’s a stunning fact: all of the work published in these fifty-seven books remains in print.

Three decades after his death, there’s no stopping America’s Dirty Old Man.

1. It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, Loujon Press, 1963

The book that began it all—most publishers and editors discovered Bukowski here. Edited by Jon and Louise Webb, it was a laborious letterpress project limited to 777 copies, with Jon Webb’s discerning eye picking the best poems written between 1955-1963. An early milestone by all accounts, full of lyrical imagery, so scant in later years. Raw and poetic, even surreal at times, it was praised to the skies by Henry Miller and other writers. Critic William Corrington claimed the poems were “the spoken word nailed to paper.” Bukowski was compared to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, W. C. Williams, Celine, and Artaud. The underground legend was born here. Essential: “The Tragedy of the Leaves,” “Old Man, Dead in a Room,” “The Twins.”

2. Crucifix in a Deathhand, Loujon Press, 1965

Another lavishly produced book by the Webbs. Unlike It Catches, all poems were new; Bukowski wrote the bulk of them during a very hot month in New Orleans. Years later, Bukowski said it didn’t represent his best work. Still, Miller maintained that Bukowski was “one of the few poets of today I like, the poet satyr of today’s underground.” A genuine labor of love that helped Bukowski become popular in the alternative literary scene. Essential: “Something for the Touts, the Nuns, the Grocery Clerks and You,” “No. 6,” “They, All of Them, Know,” and the title poem.

3. At Terror Street and Agony Way, Black Sparrow Press (BSP), 1968

According to legend, John Martin founded the now-mythical Black Sparrow Press to publish Bukowski. After a few initial broadsides, At Terror Street was the first full-length book printed by BSP. The “unholy alliance,” as Bukowski called it, was sealed now and then. Most poems had been previously rejected by little magazine editors and were rescued by poet John Thomas, who had recorded them on tape. An early, unsatisfactory attempt at showcasing Bukowski’s unique voice. Essential: “True Story,” “I Met a Genius,” “John Dillinger and Le Chasseur Maudit.”

4. Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Essex House, January 1969

This and the next book propelled Bukowski into small press stardom, becoming the indisputable King of the Underground—as an unwanted side effect, the FBI began to monitor his activities and publications. Martin at BSP and Donald Allen at Grove Press tried to get the rights, but Essex House offered more money to Bukowski. Tagged “endlessly offensive” by critics, these forty-two “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” columns, with hilarious sex-as-tragicomedy undertones, gained Bukowski thousands of readers. The 28,000 copies of the first printing were sold out in months. It was translated into German the next year, getting favorable reviews in major newspapers. Reissued by City Lights in 1973. Essential: the “Frozen Man Stance” section, and the Baldy story.

5. The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, BSP, December 1969

To many, Bukowski’s best poetry book. Presented by bibliographer Sanford Dorbin and Martin as a retrospective exhibit of the strongest poems published in the little magazines. Sensitive, lyrical, with some tough-guy imagery thrown in, making it accessible to the layman. A blast of life-affirming energy that made Martin call Bukowski “a contemporary Whitman who took risks with long, extravagant lines.” Featuring Barbara Martin’s iconic cover, biographer Howard Sounes considered it a “milestone book.” Barely a month after publication, Bukowski was called an “American legend” by reviewers, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet were quoted—apocryphally so—as saying that he was “the best poet in America” in the Los Angeles Times. Essential: “As the Sparrow,” “These Things,” “For Jane: With All the Love I Had, Which Was Not Enough,” “A Poem Is a City,” “Spring Swan,” “Finish.”

6. Post Office, BSP, 1971

After a couple of failed attempts—A Place to Sleep the Night (1956) and The Way the Dead Love (1966)—Martin prodded Bukowski into writing his first novel on the hunch that his fiction would sell even better than his poetry. Shortly before, Martin had helped Bukowski quit his job at the post office to become a full-time writer by promising him a monthly $100 check for life, whether he wrote or not. Fearful of going bankrupt, Bukowski finished Post Office in record time: “I wrote this novel in 20 nights on a pint of whiskey a night, some cigars plus symphony music on the radio. It was easy.” This hilarious, spirited account of the misadventures of his alter ego Henry Chinaski as a postal clerk, written in short chapters with a brisk pace reminiscent of Dos Passos and his beloved John Fante, became a cult hit upon release. A script was completed by writer Don Carpenter in 1977, but the movie was never made. Essential: the scenes with Joyce.

7. Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, City Lights (CL), April 1972 [reissued in two volumes in 1983]

Bukowski at his most provocative: 500 pages full of grimy, sleazy, angst-ridden stories about necrophilia, pedophilia, and bizarre sexual encounters culled from the underground press and girlie magazines—the close-up photograph of an acne-disfigured Bukowski on the cover is foreboding enough. No wonder Martin, a committed Christian Scientist, passed on this, allowing Lawrence Ferlinghetti to champion Bukowski’s dirtiest persona. First titled Bukowskiana, featuring “the wildest shit since Bocaccio and Swift”, as Bukowski proudly said, this collection is like hearing W. C. Fields on paper, a joyous cocktail of shock-value material and entertaining musings on the human condition. Laughter through tears, as Gogol would say. Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane approached Bukowski with a finished movie script based on Erections, but the project didn’t happen. Storie di Ordinaria Follia, shot by Italian cult director Marco Ferreri, was released in 1981 to mixed reviews. Essential: “The Great Zen Wedding,” “Six Inches,” “The Fuck Machine,” “Life and Death in the Charity Ward,” “The Copulating Mermaid…,” “The Fiend,” “Animal Crackers in My Soup” (Bukowski’s favorite).

8. Mockingbird Wish Me Luck, BSP, June 1972

As good as Bukowski ever got, up there with The Days Run Away. As Martin put it, “it’s one of my favorite books, it’s like a flash of lighting, pure and perfect.” A slim volume with high-octane poems—recently written for the most part—with shorter lines than usual and Bukowski treading into more narrative territory quite nonchalantly. So much so that a critic claimed that “he’s technical to the point of making you think he has no craft at all.” Bukowski in a state of grace. Essential: “The Mockingbird,” “Rain,” “Style,” “Those Sons of Bitches,” “The Shoelace,” “Another Academy,” “If We Take” (“and then, / love again / like a streetcar turning the corner / on time”).

9. South of No-North, BSP, 1973

Much like Erections, this is a collection of stories taken from the underground press and the erotic outlets. After the success of Post Office, Martin knew for a fact that prose sold substantially better than poetry, so he picked Bukowski’s tamer stories in an attempt to reach a wider audience. Bukowski’s lowlife affinities are matter-of-factly spelled out in “Guts”: “I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch. I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways . . . I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.” Although reception was generally encouraging, Margins magazine published a negative review with a black border around the text, as if it were an obituary, and soon enough the rumor spread that Bukowski was dead. Essential: “Maja Thurup,” “This Is What Killed Dylan Thomas,” “All the Assholes…,” “Confessions…,” The Way the Dead Love.

10. Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, BSP, 1974

Martin rescued here the best poems from It Catches, Crucifix, At Terror Street, and included a few recent efforts as well as an introduction by Bukowski himself. The new poems in the last section are a far cry from the early surrealist, lyrical style, with a clear focus on narrative, dialogue and Bukowski’s immediate reality. To many, a must-have. Essential: “The Trash Men,” “Trouble With Spain,” “The Fisherman,” “Some People” (“some people never go crazy. / what truly horrible lives / they must lead”).

11. Factotum, BSP, 1975

Partly funded with a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Factotum reads like a series of short-stories woven together by a disarmingly simple—yet fascinating—use of language. Bukowski chronicles Chinaski’s tour-de-force of his years on the bum, being unceremoniously fired from job after job. Never losing his sense of humor, Bukowski displays in no uncertain terms his aversion to the American nine-to-five work ethic, which, according to the New York Times Book Review, made him “closer to a prophet than to a crank.” A twentieth-century picaresque anti-hero novel. Factotum, directed by Bent Hamer and starring Matt Dillon, fell through the cracks in 2005. Essential: The blinds episode and the Wilbur Oxnard story.

12. Love Is a Dog from Hell, BSP, 1977

Bukowski hit the big time after a major profile on him appeared in Rolling Stone in 1976, making him well-known outside the small press circles. Among other tidbits, readers were told that he was W.C. Fields “reincarnated as a writer” and that he learned cunnilingus at fifty. This collection—the first one entirely made up of new poems—was a reflection of Bukowski’s liberated, Dionysian times in the 1970s. In line with the final section in Burning in Water, the poems were less lyrical and more narrative and sexually-oriented. Not surprisingly, it became BSP’s poetry best-seller, and it was made even more popular by a transfixed rendition of “The Crunch” by Bono in the 2003 documentary Born Into This. Essential: “One for the Shoeshine Man,” “An Almost Made up Poem,” “Who in the Hell is Tom Jones?,” “Alone with Everybody,” “The Crunch” (“our educational system tells us / that we can all be / big-ass winners // it hasn’t told us / about the gutters / or the suicides”).

13. Women, BSP, 1978

Despite some unfortunate editing choices by Martin, Bukowski was so satisfied with Women that he said it was “going to be the book. Riots in the streets and etc.” Although most reviewers corroborated it was his best writing to date, some sectors took Bukowski to task for a handful of passages they found downright offensive to women, calling him a male-chauvinist pig and worse. The self-deprecating humor of Bukowski’s sexual exploits and misfortunes with several women who clearly had the upper hand, making him look like a hopeless dummy at times, turned the book into an instant hit since the 8,000 copies of the first printing were sold out in thirty days, eventually making Women BSP’s prose best-seller. Paul Verhoeven of Basic Instinct fame was rumored to direct the film version, but it never happened. Essential: the dialogue throughout, and his now-popular take on drinking: “If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

14. Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until Your Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit, BSP, July 1979

Slim, uneven collection with some old poems such as the classic “Fire Station” as well as all the poems printed in BSP’s Sparrow magazine. Bearing Bukowski’s longest book title ever, Play the Piano is not a particularly memorable volume. Bukowski himself acknowledged as much, saying “there was a certain verve and gamble missing… and there was a lot of repeat stuff.” Essential: “A Radio With Guts,” “Art,” “Fire Station,” “The Proud Thin Dying,” “Hug the Dark,” “Face of a Political Candidate on a Street Billboard.”

15. Shakespeare Never Did This, CL, September 1979 [reissued by BSP in 1995 with 11 poems]

Bukowski’s only travelogue, illustrated with Michael Montfort’s photographs. This new angle on writing chronicled his 1978 trip to Europe. Back in his homeland, he read to 1,200 people in Hamburg, and hundreds were turned away—future Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass had read in the same venue a few months before to 300 people only. In France, he infamously and drunkenly walked off the Apostrophes set, much to the astonishment of the distressed host of the show, Bernard Pivot. His books were sold out the next day. He was interviewed by all major European newspapers and literary magazines, hailing him as “the new saint of literature” and “the best thing that happened to America” since Faulkner, Hemingway, and Mailer. His rock-star status in Europe made him popular and wealthy there while remaining relatively unknown in the U. S. Essential: The Apostrophes episode, and meeting his uncle Heinrich in Andernach, where Bukowski had been born.

16. Dangling in the Tournefortia, BSP, 1981

Foreign royalties were so substantial that Bukowski had to invest his hard-earned money or give it away to the IRS. He moved to San Pedro in 1978 with his wife-to-be Linda Lee, where he bought a large two-story house with a pool, a jacuzzi and a Japanese garden, and this volume reflects his apparent domestic and financial stability—humorously so in some poems. Bukowski felt it was a strong collection as it “rings of the new and the wild and the playful,” but longtime German translator, agent, and friend Carl Weissner said it was his least favorite book. The obvious shift in style, with longer narrative poems and a more pervasive gentleness, could feel a bit of a let-down to some. Still, the New York Times Book Review praised its “ear-pleasing cadences, wit and perfect clarity.” Essential: “We’ve Got to Communicate,” “On the Hustle,” “The Secret of My Endurance,” “Contemporary Literature, I.”

17. Ham on Rye, BSP, 1982

Bukowski’s best novel by most accounts. As Martin recalled, “I had asked Hank to go back and write the story of his childhood. He said, ‘I can’t, I can’t relive all that shit.’ I kept encouraging him, and then he began. It’s my favorite Bukowski novel.” This bildungsroman, which was “harder and slower than the other novels,” as Bukowski noted, re-enacted his growing up in Los Angeles with humor, angst, and sadness, highlighting two life-changing discoveries, the power of writing (“that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies . . . It was going to be easy for me”) and alcohol (“never had I felt so good. It was better than masturbating. It was magic”). Bukowski, shot in 2013 by actor/director James Franco, with an unsanctioned script by Adam Rager based on Ham on Rye, remains in limbo. Essential: the magic of alcohol and writing, and the Nazi trip.

18. Hot Water Music, BSP, September 1983

Much like South of No North, this is a collection of stories first published in the underground press in the 1970s as well as new material printed in periodicals such as High Times. Bukowski was satisfied with the selection, saying “these things are entertaining, they get it done briskly and to the mark.” His favorite story was “The Man Who Loved Elevators.” Essential: “The Death of the Father,” “Fooling Marie,” “You Kissed Lilly”, “How to Get Published” (“genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way”).

19. The Bukowski/Purdy Letters, 1964-1974, The Paget Press, November 1983

Book of correspondence with Canadian poet Al Purdy, edited by Seamus Cooney. The Paget Press was run by Peter Brown, who was BSP’s Canadian distributor. As Martin recalled, “he gave our print shop in Santa Barbara a great Heidelberg offset printing press. As a ‘thank you,’ I allowed him to publish The Bukowski-Purdy Letters and the first edition of Barfly.” Featuring a great deal of shop talk, reviewers noted that Bukowski came off as funny and Purdy as a humorless bore. Brown claimed that it “was met with a certain degree of fanfare. Independent booksellers throughout Canada devoted their main street shop windows to displays of the books.” Quite remarkable for a book of letters addressed to a small audience. Essential: the comments on other writers and Bukowski’s drawings.

20. War All the Time, BSP, November 1984

In line with Dangling, this collection contains a large number of long narrative poems. As a critic remarked, “while others debated how best to restore dramatic structures to verse, Bukowski just sat down and did it,” adding that “his best poems are often the longest. To quote a line here and there makes as much sense as to tell a punch line without the build-up.” Most poems in this collection—with Bukowski’s trademark humor—call for a laid-back approach, especially to enjoy his nostalgic take on dead authors, cats, and art, tinged with pain, cynicism, and, surprisingly enough, optimism. Essential: “The History of a Tough Motherfucker,” “Space Creatures,” “Sparks,” “Oh, Yes,” “Horsemeat,” “Eulogy to a Hell of a Dame.”

21. Barfly, The Paget Press, December 1984

Bukowski’s only film script. Begun in 1979 and first titled The Rats of Thirst, it was commissioned by director Barbet Schroeder, who released Barfly in October 1987, starring Faye Dunaway and Mickey Rourke. The 1984 script contained some material, drawings and scenes that were not used in The Movie: Barfly, published by BSP in September 1987. Much to Bukowski’s astonishment, Schroeder wanted “a plot and an evolvement of character. Shit, my characters seldom evolve, they are too fucked-up.” Tender, dark, and wry, the story focused on three days in the life of the young Bukowski, which movie critic Roger Ebert saw as a “grimy comedy,” claiming it was one of the best movies in 1987. Shortly before, Time magazine had called Bukowski “the laureate of lowlife,” disclosing he was a bestseller in Europe and hardly known in the U. S. Barfly would dramatically change that perception—if only temporarily. Essential: the dialogue throughout, the corn scene.

22. You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense, BSP, 1986

The long, narrative lines in War All the Time gave way here to a more sparse writing style, with short, lean lines. Once again, Bukowski found Martin’s selection strong enough for publication, “a good mix of humor and despair.” As Bukowski got older, a sense of acceptance and gratitude began to permeate his work; his tone became more gentle and his outlook not so tough, softening his otherwise macho voice. Essential: “Beasts Bounding Through Time,” “No Help for That,” “Putrefaction,” “A Magician, Gone,” “Retired,” “Cornered.”

23. The Roominghouse Madrigals, BSP, 1988

In a similar vein to The Days Run Away, this is a collection of poems culled from Bukowski’s early small press publications. With a clear reliance on metaphor rather than narrative, the overall tone is more lyrical than recent efforts. Martin noted that Bukowski “had a hard time coming up with a book title but at the last moment he called me and said, ‘I’ve got it! It’s The Roominghouse Madrigals!’ As always, he was great with titles.” Comparisons with The Days Run Away were largely unfavorable. Essential: “The Genius of the Crowd,” “Destroying Beauty,” “Layover,” “The Loser,” “The Blackbirds Are Rough Today,” “The Best Way to Get Famous Is to Run Away.”

24. Hollywood, BSP, 1989

The indomitable outsider was temporarily swallowed up by the ruthless Hollywood machinery. This novel is a satirical, elegiac account of the Barfly movie-making experience, written in a breezy staccato style that Bukowski defined as “pace, rhythm, dance.” Drink in hand, and with no arm-twisting at all, Bukowski took the chance to happily hang out with Madonna, Sean Penn, Norman Mailer, and other celebrities, but he soon found the limelight sickening and headed back to seclusion. He told Martin that he was looking forward “to the publication of Hollywood much more than the other novels. I think it’s because it’s such a laugher.” Most reviewers agreed it was one of his funniest books. Essential: François Racine and the chicken scenes, and Schroeder threatening the movie producers to cut his little finger off with an electric chainsaw if they didn’t bankroll the movie.

25. Septuagenarian Stew, BSP, 1990

First collection to include both poetry and prose. Martin noted that Bukowski “liked the way the stories and poems played off against one another. Since he had just turned seventy, he called the book Septuagenarian Stew.” Many of the poems were written when Bukowski was down with tuberculosis and couldn’t drink as he was on antibiotics. The resulting clean, sparse lines, similar to You Get So Alone, proved he could deliver the goods even when sober. Essential: “The Life of a Bum,” “The Burning of the Dream,” “Bring Me Your Love,” “Gold in Your Eye,” “Rags, Bottles, Sacks,” “Hell Is a Lonely Place,” “Luck.”

26. The Last Night of the Earth Poems, BSP, 1992

Bukowski’s last poetry collection while alive—a late masterpiece on all counts. After receiving a Mac computer as a Christmas present in 1990, he doubled his already prolific output. He proudly told Martin that he was “running out of magazines to send to. Even some of the university publications are taking my things now.” The early angst was largely gone, replaced by elegiac, zen meditations on life. Like any other rock star, Bukowski had mellowed out, but he confronted death with his indelible humor, mischievously grinning like the Buddha statue he had at home. Martin concluded that it was “one of the most powerful and creative of Hank’s books. He could say twice as much in half the space. Hank’s last poems are like shafts of light that go straight to the heart.” Essential: “We Ain’t Got No Money…,” “Air and Light and Time and Space,” “The Bluebird,” “Flophouse,” “Dinosauria, We,” “Nirvana,” “The Word.”

27. Run with the Hunted, Harper Collins and BSP, May 1993

Bukowski’s first anthology ever, released by mainstream publisher Harper Collins along with the customary BSP limited edition. Poignant selection, a top-notch primer for the unconverted. Chronologically arranged, featuring Bukowski’s most accomplished musings and banter on his favorite topics. As Martin recalled, he “loved telling Hank’s life story in his own words, using excerpts from novels, complete short stories and poems.” A no-holds-barred hagiography that helped Bukowski face leukemia—and death—with his head held up high.

28. Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970, BSP, November 1993

Bukowski at his most honest, full of raw humanity, and stripped of any pretension. Screams is everything that The Bukowski/Purdy Letters wasn’t. A myth-debunker that showed that Bukowski wasn’t only, as Martin put it, “a hulking alcoholic genius getting into bar fights, getting drunk in alleys, rushing home at midnight to write great poetry. Here’s an educated, articulate, funny, very interesting man that many people have got wrong.” To Bukowski, writing letters was another outlet for his creativity. The ultimate misanthrope loved communication as much as anyone else. Essential: letters to the Webbs and Corrington.

29. Pulp, BSP, 1994

Dedicated to “bad writing,” Bukowski finished it shortly before he died—against Linda’s will, he even signed with a trembling hand the “death sheets” for BSP’s limited editions. Begun in 1991, and rewritten in part several times, Bukowski felt he was tired of constantly talking about himself, and took a chance to explore new avenues. This giddy, gritty spoof of the hard-boiled detective novels—Chandler, Hammett, Spillane come to mind—was but a send-up and a send-off of himself as well as a tribute to Black Sparrow Press. Although it’s generally considered Bukowski’s worst novel, it was favorably reviewed in The New York Times and other major newspapers. Bukowski never saw a finished copy of this goodbye note, as he passed away while it was in press. Essential: the heartfelt ending, and the oft-quoted “it wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.”

30. Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s, BSP, 1995

Not as revealing as Screams, but it shone a light on Bukowski’s comings and goings in the 1970s—a third part of the book was made up of letters from the 1960s that were uncovered after Screams was published. As expected, Bukowski is seen attacking other writers, putting down most literature, passionately discussing his latest outpourings, and wryly commenting on his love-gone-wrong affairs. The overall feeling is summed up in a 1961 letter to Jon Webb: “Writing poems is not difficult; living them is.” Essential: letters to Carl Weissner, and the October 18, 1963 letter to Corrington where Bukowski discusses his now-famous motto “don’t try,” engraved on his tombstone.

31. Betting on the Muse, BSP, 1996

Picking up on Septuagenarian Stew’s successful blend of poetry and prose, Betting is a collection of stories and poems that feels like a swan song. In 1994, Martin tried to hire Dorbin to put together a new book of poems culled off the little magazines—similarly to The Days Run Away and The Roominghouse Madrigals—but the project didn’t gel. Instead, Martin used part of a large selection he had already assembled in 1991. Posthumous edits, then, were largely innocuous. Essential: “The Laughing Heart,” “So Now?,” “What Happened to the Loving…,” “The Secret,” “Those Marvelous Lunches.”

31. Bone Palace Ballet, BSP, April 1997

Most of the poems here were taken from the same selection Martin put together in 1991, one of Bukowski’s most prolific years ever. The unusually metaphorical title, as Martin recalled, meant that Bukowski saw “the world as kind of a bone palace, beautiful on the outside, but filled with failure and the remains of those who had gone before on the inside.” The acceptance of death and old age prevails in many of the poems. Essential: “The Kenyon Review and Other Matters,” “First Love,” “The Strange Morning Outside the Bar.”

33. The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, BSP, April 1997

1991 was a unique year in Bukowski’s career. In addition to the customary deluge of poems, he began his most atypical novel, Pulp, and, prodded by editor/writer Jack Grapes, ventured into uncharted territory by trying the journal format. Martin collected most journal entries in The Captain, issuing a deluxe collector’s item in 1997 and the regular edition in 1998, both with art by Robert Crumb, who had already illustrated a few Bukowski short-stories. Sick with leukemia, Bukowski finished The Captain a year before he passed away, proving that despite the wise, mellow, hilarious undertones he still was a misanthropist with a mean streak, unafraid to experiment. Essential: the U2 concert, and yet another popular quotation: “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

34. Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978-1994, BSP, April 1999

The final volume of correspondence provided an insightful look into Bukowski’s old age, still writing letters to dozens of young editors who were aching to print the celebrated Dirty Old Man musings in their emerging little magazines. A feeling of elated acceptance permeates most letters; Bukowski’s dealings with the much-dreaded popularity and old age’s setbacks—tuberculosis and leukemia—exude confidence rather than defeat. Endurance and perseverance kept him on a creative roll; despite the odds, he was unconditionally committed to his craft. Essential: letters to William Packard and John Martin, and the January 21, 1992 letter to Ivan Suvanjieff, which reads as a well-paced horror short-story.

35. What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire, BSP, October 1999

First poetry collection put together by Martin after Bukowski’s passing: although the excruciatingly painful edits began here, Martin had hundreds of unpublished top-notch poems to choose from, making What Matters one of the strongest posthumous books. What Matters became well-known after seven billboards were put up for several months in Los Angeles displaying its title next to Bukowski’s name. As Martin recalled, “one man wrote to the L.A. Times, ‘I was driving to work. I was really depressed. My life was a mess. But when I saw that billboard, it gave me the courage to go on’.” Readers were empowered by “Roll the Dice,” too: “If you’re going to try, go all the / way. otherwise, don’t even start.” Essential: “A New War,” “Christmas Poem to a Man in Jail,” “To Lean Back into It.”

36. Open All Night, BSP, 2000

While assembling this book, Martin drew upon an archive of some 450 poems that he had set aside for future collections. It’s brimming with mundane anecdotes, hilarious catalogs of others’ tribulations, and musings on drinking and existential misgivings. Sexual escapades are duly chronicled down to the last detail, too. What Matters and Open All Night set a pattern that soon became obvious in most posthumous volumes: overall, old poems were more accomplished than recent efforts. Essential: “Dinner, Pain & Transport,” “Beauty Gone,” “The Death of an Era.”

37. Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960-1967, BSP, April 2001

Lacking the overall punch of previous Bukowski-only correspondence volumes, partly due to Martinelli’s convoluted writing and Bukowski’s cringey attempt at flattering her by imitating her style rather unconvincingly, this collection reads like an epistolary novel where the dialogue is both tender and caustic, gripping and repelling. Martinelli was a protégé of Ezra Pound and Anaïs Nin, a talented painter, and a former Vogue model who was completely immersed in post-World War II bohemia. Editor Steven Moore claimed he “did the book because I was interested in Martinelli, not him.” Martin’s assessment also favored Martinelli’s “fascinating figure,” with Bukowski trying to match “his intellect and wit with hers.” Not surprisingly, Bukowski and Martinelli never met. Essential: the ruminations on cats and Ezra Pound, and the drawings at the end.

38. The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps, BSP, September 2001

Last major Bukowski collection to be published by BSP. Shortly after, Martin closed up shop as he was “convinced that the independent publishing industry was on the verge of collapse. I would have continued, but right at that moment Harper Collins came to me and offered to buy the publication rights to Bukowski, Bowles, and Fante. It was a godsend.” Ordinary events are seen through Bukowski’s extraordinary lens, combining wit and cynicism, grittiness and the disputable wisdom of a suburbia Buddha. An uneasy been-there-done-that sense of déja vù begins to shine through these posthumous collections. Essential: “Wine Pulse,” “Carson McCullers,” “A Definition,” “The Condition Book,” “40 Years Ago.”

39. Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way, Ecco, 2002

As part of the lucrative deal with Harper Collins, Martin was to edit the next five collections for Ecco. Selecting from a vast array of old and new material, Martin made “no attempt to print these poems in chronological order.” Rather, they appear thematically grouped, introducing a gentler, mellower Bukowski, with the occasional display of toughness and grittiness to keep hardcore fans happy. Storytelling and self-mockery make it easier to digest the heavily-edited prescriptive poems on horse-racing, drinking, misanthropy, and Bukowski’s womanizing persona. Essential: “So You Want to Be a Writer?,” “After the Sandstorm,” “Nobody but You.”

40. The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain, Ecco, 2003

This volume could have been titled On Death, as many of the poems were written in 1993 and early 1994, barely a few weeks before Bukowski passed away. Despite the overbearing presence of death throughout, there are some unusual, welcome political references and a few clunkers saved by Bukowski’s undying sense of humor—the carte blanche for egregious editing became more evident as posthumous collections kept appearing, leading some reviewers and long-time fans to believe there was an un-Bukowskian whiff about them. Essential: “The Birds,” “A Visitor Complains,” “Cold Summer,” “One More Day.”

41. Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews & Encounters 1963-1993, Sun Dog Press, 2003

A revealing, different take on Bukowski. Editor David Calonne’s discerning selection makes for an insightful, gripping reading, including some nuggets such as a 1967 self-interview where Bukowski unabashedly maintains that the poetic scene is “dominated by soulless, lonely jackasses.” Calonne himself was astonished by the quality of most interviews: “The main discovery here was just how many good interviews Bukowski gave for a supposedly reclusive person.” Reception was so positive that Sunlight was translated into many languages, and the U. S. edition remains in print. Essential: “This Floundering Old Bastard…,” “Paying for Horses…”

42. Slouching Toward Nirvana, Ecco, 2005

One of the weakest posthumous collections. Readers didn’t know most poems had been tampered with, concluding—wrongly so—that posthumous volumes were essentially made up of leftovers and substandard material. Bukowski’s trademark narrative, terse lines along with the philosophical, witty angle on ordinary matters, the unmistakable pace, and his uncanny ability to record things as he saw them, make up for the doctored poems. Essential: “The Wine That Roared,” “I Fought Them from the Moment I Saw Light,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

43. Come On In!, Ecco, 2006

In June 2006, Bukowski’s papers were donated to the Huntington Library in San Marino, where they are now rubbing shoulders with the Ellesmere illuminated manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a vellum copy of the Gutenberg Bible, and a life mask of William Blake. Forty-three years after the publication of It Catches—and forty-three books later—who would have guessed? Most poems deal with the ups and downs of the literary life as seen through Bukowski’s mellower, perennially artless lens. The New York Times review was right on the mark: “That his poems get an F for craft doesn’t bother him.” Proper craftsmanship and institutionalization never turned Bukowski on. Essential: “No Leaders, Please,” “My Cats,” “Mind and Heart.”

44. The People Look Like Flowers at Last, Ecco, March 2007

A large part of the poems here were culled from little magazine appearances, making this collection stronger than previous posthumous offerings. Despite its title, it’s anything but a flower-power paean to the human condition. Rather, it’s vintage Bukowski, a mordant, down-and-out, raffish, at times nostalgic trip down memory lane. While unapologetically trashing most literature, Bukowski surprises readers with some tender asides for his daughter Marina. Essential: “The Snow of Italy,” “Too Near the Slaughterhouse,” “The Dwarf with a Punch,” “Fog,” “Poem for My Daughter,” “I Never Bring My Wife.”

45. The Pleasures of the Damned, Ecco, October 2007

This anthology feels like a four-sided greatest hits album, with Bukowski’s finest thundering on and on. As Martin noted, “it reads like Shakespeare to me. 550 pages of great poems.” Reviewers were mostly elated with the 273-poem selection, too: The New York Times said Bukowski was “a gangster poet who made it to the canon through a secret back door,” while the Los Angeles Times claimed he was “a hit-or-miss talent.” The Washington Post found this collection crude and lyrical, tagging Bukowski as a “closet romantic” who “shocks you on one page and moves you on the next.” A timeless collection for both the uninitiated and the staunchest fan.

46. Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, CL, 2008

From here on out—with the exception of the next book—new collections were no longer subject to the awful edits that marred most posthumous volumes. After a three-decade break, City Lights resumed publishing Bukowski’s prose, unearthing some long-forgotten gems such as a handful of very early stories. Editor Calonne was bewildered to find that “Bukowski was a much-better read, and much more profoundly ‘cultured’ writer, than many of his detractors had supposed.” Reviewers saw it as a “rollercoaster ride” and a “mixed bag” featuring Bukowski’s trademark directness and no-holds-barred take on some topics readers found obscene, controversial, and morally depraved. Essential: “A Rambling Essay on Poetics…,” “Dirty Old Man Confesses,” “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip.”

47. The Continual Condition, Ecco, 2009

Make no mistake, this is the worst posthumous collection by a long shot. It’s a slim volume of subpar, heavily-edited poems. Not only that, twenty of the sixty-three poems were duplicates that had already been published by BSP and Ecco. To top it off, half-a-dozen poems that had been rightfully discarded from previous Ecco projects made it back here. By comparison, the uneven Play the Piano stands out as an all-time masterpiece. Sadly, this largely forgettable and unremarkable book was Martin’s swan song as Bukowski’s editor. Essential: “Bayonets in Candlelight” (still a highlight despite having lost sixty-seven of the original ninety-eight lines in the editing room), “I Saw a Tramp Last Night.”

48. Absence of the Hero, CL, 2010

The “Charles Bukowski: Poet on the Edge” exhibit opened at the Huntington Library in October 2010 and ran until February 2011. Curator Sue Hodson, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, said Bukowski was “a writer for the common man.” In this new collection, Calonne tried to reflect that commonality as well as “Bukowski’s involvement with the Beat movement and his connection to the underground press.” The overall reflective tone, with flashes of hope throughout, was deemed “masterfully comic” by critics. Essential: “Cacoethes Scribendi,” “He Beats His Women,” “Christ with Barbecue Sauce” (first rejected by Playboy, Nola Express, and Ferlinghetti himself in the 1970s, Bukowski thought this story on cannibalism was a humorous masterpiece because it admitted “to all human possibilities without guilt”).

49. More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, CL, 2011

A guiltless, playful Bukowski emerges in most of the columns collected here, mercilessly ridiculing Flower Power ideology, recounting explicit sexual encounters, pondering about suicide, and poking fun at aggrieved readers. This time around, Calonne wanted to “to show the range of the various kinds of writing Bukowski submitted. I also explored the influence of the column on artists such as Tom Waits and Raymond Carver.” Vulgar, fearless, antiacademic, and hilarious, these columns remain as relevant and original as they were in the late 1960s and early 1970s in their attempt at shocking readers from all walks of life, liberals included. Essential: the column about visiting the Webbs in New Orleans, “My Friend, the Gambler.”

50. The Bell Tolls for No One, CL, July 13, 2015

A nice companion to the infamous Erections in that most material here is sordid, raunchy, and grimy—definitely not for the squeamish. As Calonne noted, this collection contains “some of Bukowski’s more ‘edgy’ stories. He combined them with drawings and prefigured the contemporary craze for graphic novels.” But, then again, there’s always gold in the city dump: some sort of Bukowskian beauty shines through most of these dreary portrayals. After all, the incorrigible Dirty Old Man was a marshmallow at heart—or so his lovers said. Essential: “A Kind, Understanding Face,” “Break-In.”

51. On Writing, Ecco, July 14, 2015

The first in the ON series, this volume of previously unpublished correspondence features provocative, passionate musings to his friends, publishers, and editors, along with several never-before-seen photographs, facsimile letters, and drawings. The well-versed misanthrope who always downplayed learning found his first true love in writing early on. “There’s music in everything, even defeat,” he says at one point with such conviction that it seems even plausible, like seas parting or walking on water. And, finally, the Buddha of San Pedro confesses in his old age: “There is nothing more magic and beautiful than lines forming across paper. It’s all there is. It’s all there ever was. No reward is greater than the doing.” Essential: the early letters; the ruminations on style and grammar; the ever-present, contagious compulsion to write: “Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.”

52. On Cats, Ecco, December 2015

Without question, a crowd-pleaser, and a popular one at that—it’s the best-seller in the ON series. A mixed bag of drawings, photographs, prose, letter and poem excerpts, featuring previously uncollected and unpublished material. Bukowski shows his affection for cats with unmistakable grittiness, sparing readers of the much-dreaded cloying asides. An early letter sums it up: “The cat is the beautiful devil.” A gentler Bukowski appears in the final pages, calling cats his teachers and writing in stone some wisdom for the ages: “The more cats you have, the longer you’ll live.” Essential: “Conversation on a Telephone,” “Startled Into Life Like Fire,” “One for the Old Boy.”

53. On Love, Ecco, February 2016

On Love happened because On Sex didn’t—Linda objected to the publisher exploiting Bukowski’s dirtiest persona. Another mixed bag of drawings, prose, letter, and poem excerpts along with some new material. As expected, Bukowski’s definition of love is hardly romantic: “Love is the crushed cats / of the universe . . . love is Dostoyevsky at the / roulette wheel . . . love is an old woman / pinching a loaf of bread.” Although Bukowski’s love for women, friends, his daughter, literature, cars, and cats is as raw as it gets, his confession to Linda is anything but schmaltzy: “And the hard / words / I ever feared to / say / can now be / said: / I love / you.” So much for Bukowski the tough, male-chauvinist pig. Essential: “My Real Love in Athens,” “Love Poem to Marina,” “A Love Poem for All the Women I Have Known.”

54. Essential Bukowski: Poetry, Ecco, October 2016

Boiling down Bukowski’s staggering output to ninety-five poems only is next to impossible—several Essential Bukowski collections are potentially conceivable. A crowd-pleaser of sorts and a steady seller, this collection features the prescriptive classics, poem facsimiles, drawings, and the previously uncollected “swastika star buttoned to my ass” as a tribute to Carl Weissner. Ideal for newcomers and seasoned fans wanting to review some of Bukowski’s most accomplished poems. Reception was unequivocal: “For sheer reading pleasure and consistent quality of content, Essential Bukowski is the best Bukowski book published.”

55. Storm for the Living and the Dead, Ecco, 2017

First unpublished poetry collection in twenty-five years to faithfully reproduce all poems as they were originally written, showing Bukowski in the raw, with no shady make-up. Taking no prisoners, Bukowski wrote some of them for their shock value, but rather than being merely offensive and divisive they showcase his dark humor. The inclusion of some experimental poems and a handful of long-lost gems makes for a welcome stylistic variety. Reviews were rightfully disparate: Some called it “drunken drivel” and “the nadir of Bukowski’s posthumous publications,” while at the other end of the spectrum it was seen as “a stunning collection that might be remembered as the single work that best represents the full range—the unmasking, as it were—of Charles Bukowski’s oeuvre.” Essential: “Song for This Swiftly-Sweeping Sorrow,” “I Was Shit,” “Poem for Dante.”

56. The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way, CL, 2018

The last offering from City Lights stands as an excellent companion to On Writing. As Calonne remarks, it’s “a book of essays and stories devoted to the theme of writing,” including reviews and interviews where Bukowski reflects “on his life as an author who began in complete anonymity and ended as a world-famous literary figure.” Bukowski’s timeless bravado is not lost on the reader: when asked about his advice on writing, he nonchalantly suggests that betting on the racetrack is the way to go. Essential: “Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way,” “Confessions of a Badass Poet.”

57. On Drinking, Ecco, 2019

After discarding On Death and On the Racetrack, On Drinking was the next Ecco collection to hit the shelves. It’s a chronologically arranged volume of drawings, prose, letter and poem excerpts that also features new material. Although Bukowski infamously almost hemorrhaged to death in 1954, he kept on drinking non-stop during the next decades. If anything, alcohol gave him a chance for instant reincarnation: “Drinking is an emotional thing . . . It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.” Late in his life, he realized that being on the wagon didn’t hamper his creativity: “I think I write as well sober as drunk. Took me a long time to find that out.” Essential: “The Great Zen Wedding,” “Tonight,” “Mozart Wrote His First Opera Before the Age of Fourteen.”

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Byron Matters: Lessons on the Life and Death of a Romantic Poet

by Mike Dillon

April 19, 2024 marks the bicentennial of the death of Lord Byron. The devastatingly handsome British poet—“mad, bad and dangerous to know,” in Lady Caroline Lamb’s memorable words—was only thirty-six years old when, weakened by his physician’s incessant bloodletting, he died of fever in the tidal marsh town of Missolonghi (or Messolonghi), Greece, far from the boudoirs and scandals of London and Italy that made him perhaps the most famous man in Europe after Napoleon.

Byron had journeyed to Greece to lend his fame and money to the Greek War of Independence, which erupted in 1821 after four centuries of Ottoman rule. Though he is still regarded as one of the essential Romantic poets and remembered for his wildly picaresque adventures, Byron’s life-long opposition to political and personal oppression may be his most enduring legacy—and it bears special resonance in our own era, when the torch of democracy flickers in an ill wind.

The Greek War of Independence attracted liberal Philhellenes in England and across Europe, much like the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War more than a century later attracted liberal sympathizers in the U.S. and on the continent. Fifth-century Athens was the wellspring of self-government the American Revolution drew from; Byron looked to the new American nation (and especially its already iconic leader George Washington) with envy and admiration.

After the drowning death of his friend and fellow poet Percy Shelley in 1822, Byron cast about for the next chapter in his life. He even thought of venturing to South America to aid freedom-fighter Simon Bolivar in his campaign against the Spanish Empire. But Byron chose Greece, where he had traveled as a young man, embracing the Greek cause as his own. As he wrote in “Journal in Cephalonia”:

The dead have been awakened — shall I sleep?
The World’s at war with tyrants — shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe — and shall I pause to reap?
I slumber not; the thorn is in my Couch.

Byron outfitted Greek fighters and exercised a strong hand in strategy and the training of troops. His leadership skills and command of detail, let alone his money and fame, introduced the needed gravitas to cool the friction between Greek factions.

Byron’s death in Messolonghi shocked the English-speaking world and galvanized Greek resistance to the Ottomans. In his 1924 study of the poet’s final years, Byron: The Last Journey, Harold Nicolson wrote: “Lord Byron accomplished nothing at Missolonghi except his own suicide; but by that single act of heroism he secured the liberation of Greece.”

Yet if Byron’s ten-month Greek adventure is a coda tacked on to one of the most colorful author biographies of all time, his fateful journey to Missolonghi is the fulfillment of what had come before. A prime example occurred on February 27, 1812, when Byron rose to deliver his maiden speech in the House of Lords—a speech that deserves to be bold-faced in any account of Byron’s legacy.

Byron, a titled young man of twenty-four educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, proceeded to defend the enraged weavers in the north of England who, in one of the first acts of rebellion against the Industrial Revolution, went about destroying the new textile frames that were taking away their daily bread. The Tory government called in the troops and the House of Commons proposed a bill calling for the frame breakers to be hung. When the bill moved on to the House of Lords, Byron’s speech, worthy of Voltaire or Swift, addressed the protesters’ violence:

But whilst these outrages must be admitted to exist to an alarming extent, it cannot be denied that they have arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress; the perseverance of these miserable men in their proceedings tends to prove that nothing but absolute want could have driven a large, once honest and industrious, body of the people, into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their families, and the community.

Then, with supreme facetiousness:

In the foolishness of their hearts they imagined that the maintenance and well-doing of the industrious poor were objects of greater consequence than the enrichment of a few individuals by any improvement, in the implements of trade, which threw the workmen out of employment, and rendered the laborer unworthy of his hire.

Towards the end of his impassioned address, Byron drove the point home:

I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country.

With a child of privilege speaking out in defense of the angry Luddites, the bill was watered down to the point where hanging was no longer an option. In the next century W.H. Auden famously wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen”; sometimes, however, as in this case, the eloquence of poets does.

Byron’s poetry, for generations all the rage, has slipped in the critical canon, but there are still good reasons to read his work. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is the sourcebook for the brooding, mercurial introversion later dubbed “Byronic,” as well as a marvelous travelogue of the Mediterranean basin through the eyes of the young lord. His unfinished satirical masterpiece Don Juan—with its whip-smart, easy-going handling of ottava rima, a difficult form—might be considered an avatar of rap: “I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / the age discovers he is not the true one,” the rhapsodic tale begins; it proceeds, through sixteen cantos, to eviscerate the pomposities and hypocrisies of the age.

Byron’s copious letters, too, reveal the brilliance and insouciant wit, often self-deprecating, that tugged paramours of both sexes in his direction. It’s this wit, in fact, that allowed him to look up from his deathbed at the mournful faces gathered around him and mutter, in Italian, one last Byronic quip: “O, this is a beautiful scene.”

Missolonghi, a small town on the Gulf of Patras, is sacred in Greek history for its role in the War of Independence. Following a siege by the Ottomans, after stout resistance, starvation, and sacrifice, Missolonghi’s terrible suffering culminated in a massacre two years after Byron’s death. The atrocity captured Europe’s attention, much as Byron’s martyr-status had, and strengthened the cause of Greece’s freedom. At the entrance into the town is the Garden of Heroes, honoring those who resisted Ottoman rule; Byron’s marble statue stands there, in the place where his heart was buried. Byron’s body was shipped back to England and interred in the family vault in St. Mary Magdalene Church in Nottinghamshire, having been refused burial at Westminster Abbey (though a memorial stone was finally placed there in 1969).

This July, the Messolonghi Byron Society will host its 48th International Byron Conference to mark the bicentennial of Byron’s death; the conference is titled “Byron: The Pilgrim of Eternity,” a moniker Shelley hung on his quicksilver friend. Among the array of scholarly topics on the agenda, a discussion of Byron’s ongoing afterlife is prominent. The society’s three-story building bordering the sea is the north star of Byron studies in Greece and plays host to scholars, classroom field trips, and curious travelers.

It’s no surprise that Byron vociferously opposed the removal of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, and he wrote a long poem, “The Curse of Minerva,” declaiming his position. More than 200 years later, the Elgin Marbles still reside in the British Museum, and are the subject of white-knuckled negotiations between Britain and Greece for their return. The ever-present past carries on. As does the urgency of these words from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which should resonate in our own chaotic times:

Yet let us ponder boldly; ‘tis a base
Abandonment of reason to resign
Our right of thought, our last and only place
Of refuge — this, at least, shall be mine.

Feature

How to See

Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

David Salle
Originally published by W.W. Norton & Company (2016)

This review is part of A Look Back, a series across Rain Taxi’s print and online editions that reflects on older books that continue to resonate.

by Josh Steinbauer

Art writing has been a problem in the art world for decades. Beyond criticism, even the didactic texts posted on gallery and museum walls are so routinely convoluted that the style of writing has become known as “International Art English.” The art writing of David Salle, however, lands differently, not because it’s anti-institutional—he’s a darling of the institution—but because he simply refuses to let the art he’s passionate about fall prey to dissertation-ese. Take this description from the tribute to his former teacher John Baldessari:

It speaks to the amazingly resilient desire to make art, which is to say, to forge unlikely connections between things, to access unexpected emotional currents, to make poetry, to make a new meaning or at least shake off the old one.

Salle’s contagious enthusiasm and commitment to plain language make his How to See a pleasure to read. None of the essays in this collection wade into solipsistic debates about what is and isn’t art (have designations like non-objectivism or post-structuralism ever wrung more meaning out of a work?), and all of them show that art writing can be more interesting and accessible than academic analysis.

Intriguingly, Salle links the rise of insufferable art speak to the ascension of Conceptual Art and the art world’s shifted attention toward artists’ intentions: “In my view, intentionality is not just overrated; it puts the cart so far out in front that the horse, sensing futility, gives up and lies down in the street.” Indeed, for decades now, the focus has been on where the artist wanted to go (which demands explication) rather than where they actually went (which is right in front of us).

Salle, on the other hand, does away with hubristic artist statements and PR ambiguities, and devotes more space to how artists talk about art among themselves. As he stated in a 2016 PBS NewsHour interview: “Art is something someone made. It’s a product of human endeavor. As such, it’s not that diﬀerent from having a conversation with someone.”^[1] He doesn’t make any attempts at professional distance (he is more than happy to interview his friends) and is enjoyably catty about it: “In fact, there are really only three types of conversation among artists: complaining about critics, bashing other artists, and real estate.”

Of course, a criticism to be leveled against celebrating one’s own network (particularly for a white guy from the 1980s art world) is that it doesn’t make for much diversity. How to See features the usual suspects in a range from eggshell to alabaster—Lichtenstein, Acconci, Polke, Stella, Koons, et al. But fixing a lack of diversity in the art world isn’t Salle’s project here. His purpose in How To See is a reverential one, as he explained in a 2016 interview in Interview: “I find it so amazing and so full of wonder when something is good. I do feel like we should celebrate it rather than worry about whether it’s on the right side of history.”^[2]

This insistent positivity might seem pretty basic, but for art criticism it’s worth applauding—some of the most esteemed critics (even Pulitzer Prize winners) too gleefully punch down. Granted, everyone enjoys the occasional evisceration of a Goliath or the flushed cheeks of an emperor, but bad reviews are ultimately junk food. Salle knows that a critic’s job is to point you to the best work they can find and start a conversation.

“Portrait of a Book Report: David Salle” Josh Steinbauer 2023. Art courtesy of the reviewer, one in a series of renditions of writers alongside their words featured on his Instagram (@joshsteinbauer).

“It seems just yesterday I was an enfant terrible, an outsider knocking on the door of the house of art. I don’t remember being invited inside. Nevertheless, time passes. Now I’m up here.” This is how Salle begins “Art Is Not A Popularity Contest,” his commencement speech delivered at the New York Academy of Art and tucked into this book at the end. Time has indeed passed—Salle is a long way from his birthplace in an “overgrown cow town”^[3] in Oklahoma, and his enfant terrible days at the legendary Cal Arts in the ’70s have receded like a hairline—but “up here” is the inside of museum collections all over the world.

This trajectory, of course, has enormous consequences for Salle’s career as an art critic, since he has come to know many of the others inside as well. And the visual arts have notorious walls separating insiders and outsiders, but for a guy who’s already in the history books, he isn’t caught polishing his all-access pass. Instead, he uses that very access to push past stuffy halls and curatorial pretensions and drop us into more relaxed reflection and chatter among friends. As intentions go, Salle doesn’t work too hard at bringing down the art world’s walls, but How To See props open a window for those inner conversations to float out.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/one-painter-understanding-art-simple-looking
[2] https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/david-salle-1
[3] https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/its-not-nice-to-kick-the-dead-but-in-this-one-case-i-dont-really-care-an-hour-with-david-salle-4090/

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A Centennial Celebration: James Schuyler

by W. C. Bamberger

November 9, 2023 marked the centenary of the birth of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Schuyler. Schuyler, who died of complications from a stroke in 1991, wrote his poems in matchlessly clear language, not a single line or word straining for “poetic” effect. He also wrote novels and criticism with the same sharp observation and clarity.

Schuyler was born in Chicago, but his family moved to Washington D.C.; after his mother divorced his father and remarried, they moved to Maryland and then to the Buffalo area. Schuyler’s stepfather so disapproved of his voracious reading habit that he refused to let Schuyler have a library card. Schuyler attended Bethany College in West Virginia from 1941 to 1943. He left without earning a degree, and in later years claimed he spent all his time there playing bridge.

Schuyler served in the Navy from 1943 to 1947. He lived for a time on the Isle of Ischia in Italy where he worked as a secretary for W.H. Auden before moving to New York in 1950. By the mid-1950s, Schuyler was writing for Art News (taking Frank O’Hara’s position when O’Hara left in 1956) and working as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Schuyler’s work in the art world introduced him to many prominent painters, including Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter, with whom Schuyler lived from 1961 to 1972. Anne Porter once said, “Jimmy came for a visit and stayed eleven years.”^[1]

Freely Espousing, Schuyler’s first major collection, was published in 1969, when he was forty-six, and includes several poems that are among his most well-known. Schuyler was an expert gardener, an adviser to his friends on plants and flowers in regard both to gardening and poetry. This interest in part shapes his poem “Salute,” where he parallels the life experiences he hoped for with a plan he’d had to gather every type of flower in a field and study them before they wilted—a plan that never came to fruition. He resists feeling regret:

Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

Equally memorable are his beautiful threnody on the death of Frank O’Hara, “Buried at Springs,” and the poem “May 24th or So,” with its often-quoted concluding lines:

Why it seems awfully far
from the green hell of August
and the winter rictus,
dashed off, like the easiest thing

Schuyler’s other major collections include The Crystal Lithium (1972), Hymn to Life (1974), The Morning of the Poem (1980), and A Few Days (1985). Schuyler also wrote novels, including Alfred and Guinevere (1958), A Nest of Ninnies, written with John Ashbery (1969), and What’s for Dinner (1978).

Schuyler’s poems are often autobiographical in a matter-of-fact way, and yet contemplative, with very little self-absorption or self-importance. And they are often addressed to or about his friends. The title poem of his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Morning of the Poem, comprising over 14,000 words, is dedicated to painter Darragh Park. Much of the poem is addressed to a “you,” but this “you” only intermittently refers to Park: “When you read this poem you will have to decide / Which of the ‘yous’ are ‘you.'” This means that even we readers who never knew Schuyler can feel he is addressing us too.

Schuyler opens the poem with other uncertainties, about the date and even about who he is: “July 8 or July 9 the eighth surely, certainly / 1976 that I know /… I being whoever I am get out of bed.” He is staying with his mother in East Aurora, New York, but his thoughts cast a wide net. He relates memories of days in New York City, of travels, of a friend playing with his whippet; Fairfield Porter appears, other poets and artists make fleeting appearances, he longs to be back home in Chelsea, listening to Ida Cox, being sketched as he reads: “I’m posing, seated / By the tall window and the Ming tree, and look / out across the Chelsea street.” He thinks about sex; he recalls his vexing struggle to stay dry in a Paris “pissoir (I mean, a vespasienne),” but the poem includes very little that could be thought of as dramatic incident.

Schuyler suffered from depression and from manic episodes, during which he sometimes had to be restrained and hospitalized. He wrote about these experiences in his sequence “The Payne Whitney Poems,” titled after the psychiatric clinic in Manhattan. James McCourt wrote that while Schuyler “embezzled heaven,” he also “harried hell . . . the internal realm of chill and longing and dread of chaos.”^[2] All the while Schuyler was struggling to right his life, he continued to write poetry, prose, and art criticism. Wayne Koestenbaum, reviewing Schuyler’s art criticism, points out how “In a review of Fairfield Porter’s paintings, Schuyler states what might be taken as his own credo: ‘Look now. It will never be more fascinating.’”^[3]

Selected Art Writings of James Schuyler was issued in 1998, The Diary of James Schuyler in 1997, both by Black Sparrow Press. These are interesting, but even more so are the two collections of his letters: Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951–1991 (Turtle Point Press, $28), edited by William Corbett and released in a revised anniversary edition this fall, and The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara, published by Turtle Point in 2006. The letters, being addressed to someone other than himself, are livelier, juicer and more linguistically inventive than his diaristic prose.

Schuyler also wrote some diary entries specifically for a book project with Darragh Park. Schuyler had nearly stopped writing in his diary, and Park’s project proposal inspired him to begin writing diary notes again. Two Journals, published by Tibor de Nagy Editions in 1995, is a collection of jottings by Schuyler and drawings by Park done a decade earlier. The drawings are not illustrations for Schuyler’s notes, nor do Schuyler’s entries comment on the drawings. In his brief preface to the book Park explains: “James Schuyler and I decided to keep accompanying journals which would not, however, be mutually descriptive. … Much of this constituted raw material for the work of us both, often finding expression later in poems and paintings.”^[4]

After the Porters informed Schuyler that he was no longer welcome to stay in their home, he moved several times, eventually settling in the Chelsea Hotel. He continued to write through the 1980s but became increasingly reclusive as he was beset with financial and health problems. Friends did their best to keep him from becoming totally isolated; Michael Lally describes a dinner at Park’s apartment, just the two of them and Schuyler, at which “Darragh and I kept up the conversation and every now and then Darragh would defer to Jimmy, giving him a chance to offer his opinion of whatever we were talking about, but Jimmy remained silent. Until it was time for me to go, when Jimmy spoke up, graciously declaring what a wonderful dinner it had been, especially the conversation.”^[5]Schuyler’s friends had recognized what he was comfortable with and accepted him as he was.

In 1977, Z Press issued The Home Book: Prose and Poems, 1951 to 1970, edited by another of Schuyler’s artist friends, Trevor Winkfield. This book gathers up two decades of fugitive pieces; after the poems, free-form prose, and quirky short plays, the book ends with “For Joe Brainard,” a long sequence of dated diary entries. The editor chooses to close on the entry for Jan 1, 1968: Here Schuyler notes the snowy weather and then warmly describes how much he is enjoying the autobiography and letters of Charles Darwin,

a man whose concerns are on the largest and most detailed scale. He often sounds so surprised that he turned out to be him. The autobiographical part has the advantage of having been written for his family—simplicity and only the reticence of intimacy. He seems to have no scores to settle whatever. I can’t think of a book with which I would rather have begun the New Year.^[6]

Schuyler himself is just this sort of writer. I hope that many readers will take the centenary of his birth as a chance to discover or rediscover his extraordinary work.

[1] Douglas Crase, “A Voice Like the Day,” in Lines from London Terrace (Brooklyn: Pressed Wafer, 2017), 127-141, this quote p. 131.

[2] James McCourt, Queer Street (W.W. Norton: NY, 2004), 419.

[3] Wayne Koestenbaum, “Host With the Most” in ArtForum (March 1999), pp. 25, 29.

[4] James Schuyler and Darragh Park. Two Journals (New York: Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1995), 7.

[5] “Darragh Park R.I.P.,” Lally’s Alley, April 28, 2009. http://lallysalley.blogspot.com/2009/04/darragh-park-rip.html

[6] James Schuyler, The Home Book (Calais, VT: Z Press, 1977), 97.

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