Tag Archives: Summer 2024

A Year of Last Things

Michael Ondaatje
Knopf ($28)

by Bill Tremblay

T.S. Eliot famously said: “The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” One of the many pleasures in reading Michael Ondaatje’s new collection, A Year of Last Things, is discovering how he fictionalizes his. One senses a real first person in the poems, and not merely because he uses “I” in some poems and in the prose near the end of the book. But the voice here is largely a special third person capable of being intimate and objective at once. These poems are by Ondaatje but not about him in any limited autobiographical sense, except perhaps when he’s writing about writing; thus they evoke a poetics of the transpersonal, leaving a wake reminiscent of Dickinson’s “zero at the bone.”

This poetics takes shape thanks to Ondaatje’s ability to reach for emotional connections through objects cherished for their talismanic power to evoke the beloved. Take the volume’s opening poem, “Lock”:

Reading the lines he loves
he slips them into a pocket,
wishes to die with his clothes
full of torn-free stanzas
and the telephone numbers
of his children in far cities.

The lines carry us forward until we “reach that horizon . . . where you might see your friends.” The poem continues:

How I loved that lock when I saw it
all those summers ago,
                  when we arrived
out of a storm into its evening light,

and gave a stranger some wine
in a tin cup

Even then I wanted
to slip into the wet dark
rectangle and swim on
barefoot to other depths
where nothing could be seen
that was a further story.

“Lock” establishes not only the book’s jump-cut cinematic style but also its romantic sensibility. Ondaatje is all about asking what’s important in life—friendships, encounters, flirtations, intimacies. His feeling for language is set out in “Definition,” which begins “All afternoon I stroll the plotless thirteen hundred/pages of a Sanskrit dictionary”; as he wanders down this path, he brings words, vowels, and accents to

                                      light
from that distant village
reflected in a cloud,
or your lover’s face lit
by the moonlight on a stage

Landscapes nudge the dialect.
In far places travellers know
a faint gesture can mean
desire or scorn,
                                   just as

a sliver of a phrase thrown away
hides charms within its grammar

Throughout A Year of Last Things, Ondaatje montages stories from biographies of artists, composers, philosophers, songs, films, and paintings into “that further intimacy that comes with trusting a fiction, a non-personal truth, going towards what you do not yet know.” “A Cricket in Oplontis 79 CE” fuses the idea of “last things” with the patient work of restoring ancient frescos and mosaics buried in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius whose “fragments / wrested away from lava / to remember the end of a world / how it had all been.” “Nothing else lasted,” the poem tells us, “as if these might be the only memory / of ourselves when we are gone.” One might ponder this poem as an archeology of the present, with its endless talk of the end times; again, Ondaatje seems to suggest what matters is not the creation of “art” but of memorials to what one loved in life.

The book’s prose sections seem to have been waiting in the wings for their turn, especially the author’s memoir of school days in Sri Lanka entitled “Winchester House.” In it, Ondaatje writes about his writing process, including taking traits from real people to build fictional characters “during the hunt for your own story. As with photographs, the world is deliriously random, inarticulate.” Against this backdrop, he relates how there were “years when we learned to protect ourselves by becoming liars, being devious, never confessing to a crime—in fact, confessing to nothing, good or bad.” He goes on: “Stories, letters, films, memoirs of our youth, are nothing without some real clue or glance toward the truth.”

There is no question that A Year of Last Things is a book of major significance. In its summative penultimate piece, “Estuaries,” Ondaatje tells us,

There are places where language refuses to meet a reader, like cursive scripts that flow as if unawakened, or those lost voices of waterfalls. It can occur even where you attempt to end your story—some improbable place, as a friend once wrote, that you will walk through only after you are dead, your bare feet on an ancient mosaic in Tunis that could perhaps guide you like a terza rima towards a safe place to complete your story.

He takes us to such an improbable place in the collection’s coda-like, final poem, “Talking In A River.” Here, perhaps, a more fitting way to find completion emerges:

You journey beyond the familiar properties, find yourself
before long in anonymous water, nothing audible from shore,
only the shake of reflection like a breaking word.
Is this a different mood of the Black River?
With daylight there is the disguised location of the stars.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

To Hell with Poets

Baqytgul Sarmekova
Translated by Mirgul Kali
Tilted Axis Press (£12.99)

by Timothy Walsh

I first encountered Baqytgul Sarmekova’s stories last spring while driving with a friend across the endless steppe in southeastern Kazakhstan. Another friend had sent me a story by Sarmekova titled “The Black Colt,” and as we sped by vast herds of sheep and horses, usually tended by a lone “cowboy” on a horse, I read the story on my phone and was utterly charmed. Sarmekova’s acid-tongued narrator, bumptious wit, dark humor, and adroit compression made me realize at once that this was something new in Kazakh literature.

As we drove through an aul (village) near the border with Kyrgyzstan, the setting perfectly evoked Sarmekova’s story: villagers on horseback or guiding donkey carts hauling loads of dried dung past the occasional gleaming Mercedes. The old mosque and the houses where horses, cows, and donkeys grazed in the yards looked like a scene from centuries past—except for the telephone poles and power lines and a smattering of satellite dishes. It is this uneasy juxtaposition of old and new, tradition and modernity, that Sarmekova dissects in her stories.

Fortunately, a collection of Sarmekova’s stories, To Hell with Poets, is now available in an adroit and nimble first English translation by Mirgul Kali. Kali foregoes footnotes or a glossary, but smartly retains a smattering of Kazakh words that are understandable in context and impart an authentic seasoning. Her translation won a 2022 Pen/ Heim Award, which paved the way for this publication by a notable UK-based small press.

Like “The Black Colt,” each of the twenty stories in To Hell with Poets is highly compressed, distilled like cask-strength Scotch, and all the stories pack a wallop far beyond their weight class. In “The Brown House with the White Zhiguli,” we witness the downfall of a once-proud man and the distinctive house that gives him status as his n’er-do-well son arrives on the scene with disastrous consequences. In “One-Day Marriage,” a mother-and-daughter pair of grifters travel from aul to aul bilking unsuspecting families by arranging sham marriages. In “Moldir,” a vain and urbanized woman recounts a visit to her rural aul for a high school reunion, determined that her friends would see “how removed I’d been from shabby aul life since I moved to the city.” In a flashback during a pause in the conversation, we learn of the tragic fate of Moldir, who was bullied and traumatized by the remorseless narrator. “Dognity” is an unforgettably powerful story narrated by a dog. It is not a comedic tale, but a harrowing four-page noir that evokes a sordid human web of lust, murder, and treachery.

Sarmekova’s prose is direct and unadorned. Her descriptions are acid-etched, her imagery often startlingly apt. She describes a bus pulling into town: “Dragging its belly across the ground, the groaning old bus had finally reached the bazaar at the edge of the city and spat out its passengers.” Elsewhere, a wedding guest’s dress is “so tight that her breasts spilled over the top like swollen, over-proofed dough.” In “Monica,” a woman returns to her native aul and the grave of her brother, which becomes an unwanted reunion with a devoted, simple-minded old woman. Sarmekova sets the scene deftly:

Soon, the yellowish, moss-grown roofs tucked between drab colored hills overgrown with squat tamarisk bushes came into view. The squalid aul looked like a sloppy woman’s kitchen. The graveyard, which used to be nestled at the base of the hills, now sprawled out to the edge of the main road. A march of corpses, I thought to myself.

The stories in To Hell with Poets are unrelentingly bleak.  The characters usually die or experience various sorts of horrible or humiliating situations with all their hopes and dreams dashed. Yet Sarmekova’s authorial voice narrates black comedy with such verve and relish the reader can’t help but feel her pure joy in the act of storytelling, and this joy shines through, almost balancing the tragic outcomes of the characters.

Here is the description of Zharbagul in “The Black Colt,” an unlikely bride-to-be:

Before long, my grandfather returned with Zharbagul, whose bucket-shaped head bobbed up and down in his sidecar as they rode along the bumpy road. This was the first time we had ever met our aunty whose huge head, dark, rough, trowel-shaped face, and stumpy legs were a strange match with her thin pigtails, wire earrings, and lacy, ruffled dress.

Alas, on the next page, Zharbagul is jilted by death as the hapless Turar

stepped carelessly on the broken end of a downed power line and died, his body burned to a crisp. The adults who had gone to look at his body said, “He was grinning ear to ear when he passed on to the Great Beyond.” No one knew if he was beaming at the thought of his beloved Zharbagul or grimacing in pain when the fatal charge struck.

Mercifully, there are a few nostalgic tales focusing on two children growing up in a rural aul that offer some respite—Sarmekova likely sensed the need for a slow movement within her Breugelesque symphony—but mostly the stories of To Hell with Poets carry the reader like a carnival ride, evoking fear and delight simultaneously. The title story focuses on a love-sick would-be poet and a gray-haired mentor who seduces her after thundering out a “long-winded epic” at a wedding reception. In Kazakhstan, poets and poet-singers (akyn, zhirau and sal-seri) are still revered as cultural treasures, so the title To Hell with Poets is provocative—as if Sarmekova is throwing down the gauntlet with these bristling stories that careen across the landscape like tornadoes.

Sarmekova comes from Atyrau in western Kazakhstan on the shores of the Caspian Sea, far from the cultural centers of Almaty and Astana—which perhaps partly explains her originality. Atyrau also has the distinction of being where the Ural River empties into the Caspian—the Ural being the traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia. The city is, in fact, bisected by the Ural, so Sarmekova is from a place that has one foot in Europe and one in Asia, which seems fitting given the between-worlds ethos of so many of her stories.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, the literary world in Kazakhstan has evolved, largely jettisoning Socialist Realism and its nation-building celebratory novels in favor of forms that encompass the complexities of an ancient nomadic culture rudely wrenched against its will into the labyrinth of the modern, commercialized, mechanized world. Literature in Kazakhstan today is thriving, but so far only a handful of works have trickled out in English translation, most notably Talasbek Asemkulov’s masterpiece, A Life at Noon, Didar Amantay’s Selected Works, and a pioneering anthology, Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan. One can only hope there is more on the horizon—and particularly one wonders what will come next from Sarmekova.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

galáxias

Haroldo de Campos
Translated by Odile Cisneros
with Suzanne Jill Levine, Charles Perrone, Christopher Middleton, and Norman Maurice Potter
Ugly Duckling Presse ($20)

by Elizabeth Zuba

Who can explain how these things happen, but somehow just a few short weeks after both Jerome Rothenberg and Marjorie Perloff’s passing, here comes the first full translation of galáxias, the magnum opus of Brazilian luminary Haroldo de Campos — a book that both writers spent decades sounding the bells for. Hooray for the universe for this unexpected and poignant tribute—and hooray for Odile Cisneros, whose English rendering of arguably one of the most acrobatic and multilectical literary texts since James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is an absolute triumph.  

But to Rothenberg and Perloff’s point, Campos may still be one of the great literary giants of the twentieth century you’ve never heard of, so here’s a quick recap: Together with his equally brilliant brother Agosto and fellow writer Décio Pignatari, Campos led the concrete poetry revolution in the 1950s and ’60s, writing the manifesto Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry and thrusting Brazil onto the international stage. Serially publishing poems and critical pieces in journals and magazines, his influence as a poet, theorist, and translator was wide-reaching and earth-rattling in all three disciplines; Cuban writer Severo Sarduy called him a “Pound-like patriarch.”

A polymath and polyglot, Campos (sometimes in collaboration with his brother) translated scores of writers into the Portuguese, often for the first time, including Goethe, Pound, Joyce, Mayakovsky, Mallarmé, Dante, Paz, and Homer, not to mention Provençal troubadours, Russian futurists, classical Chinese poets, and the books of Genesis and Ecclesiastes. Regarding Campos’s extraordinary reach, Derrida wrote, “on the horizon of literature, and above all in the intimacy of the language of languages, each time so many languages in each language, I know that Haroldo would have access to that like me, before me, better than me.”

Suffice to say, translation was not a side-hustle for Campos; it was his world view. Also, he didn’t call it translation, but transcreation, or sometimes transillumination, translight, and transluciferation, among other monikers. Proceeding from concepts of concrete poetry, Campos saw words not simply as vehicles for meaning but as little morpheme prisms, abundant and complex in their phonemic and graphic characters, along with potential structural, sonic, and connotative relationalities. For Campos, words, like poetry, do not mean but are. And as such, no word or particular relations of words can ever be made over into another language or anything else, but rather must be born totally anew — reciprocal and parallel yes, but autonomous and equally singular.

It’s hard to give an example of Campos’s transcreation, in that he was transcreating into the Portuguese, but fortunately for us, Cisneros has skillfully adopted Campos’s practice in tackling galáxias. Though the English edition does not include the original Portuguese, here are the volume’s opening lines:

e começo aqui e meço aqui este começo e recomeço e remeço e arremesso
e aqui me meço quando se vive sob a espécie da viagem o que importa
não é a viagem mas o começo . . .

Now, here’s Cisneros (in collaboration with Suzanne Jill Levine— three of the cantos are collaborations with or contributions by other translators) impressively following his lead:

and here i begin i spin here the beguine i respin and grin to begin
to release and realize life begins not arrives at the end of a trip which is
why i begin to respin . . .

And here’s a very literal translation (of my own), just to give you an idea of Levine and Cisneros’s transcreation in action:

and I begin here and I measure here this beginning and I begin again and I stir and I throw
and here I measure when you live in the form of a journey what matters
is not the journey but the beginning . . .

You can hear how rhythm and sound are imperative for Campos, and the way Levine and Cisneros sustain that sonic intoning, while also reimagining it from the lyrical, paroxytonic rhythm of Portuguese into the more monosyllabic staccato of English. Semantically, their lines deviate from the specific meanings of each word of the original, but reciprocate the overall intention: the biblical-cyclical invocation of a journey as a continual beginning. Visually, the English “in” word-endings lace together in a netlike pattern over the lines just as “eço” does in the Portuguese, as do the little sequin i’s that shimmer about them, graphically recreating the “e” (and) in the original.

There’s yet another transcreation-esque move here you might miss if you don’t know that Campos is an unabashed glutton for sliding door homonyms and wormhole cultural-lectical allusions. Brilliantly, Levine and Cisneros mutate “begin” to “beguine” to conjure both the West Indian dance and the classic Cole Porter song “Begin the Beguine,” evoking concepts of lingual and cultural hegemony that will resurface throughout the text. Campos would be proud. To be clear, these first few lines are among the simplest in galáxias; a discussion of this epic poem and its transcreation would take a book-length critical work.

this is not a travel book because travel is not a book of travel
because a book is travel at best i aver it’s a baedeker of epiphanies
at worst i can swear it’s an epiphany in a baedeker for golden domes of
an orthodox russo-byzantine church set deep in geneva going downhill
on route de malagnou heading to the city center through a glimpsed
vision of the oldtown and canals you could get married whynot with the chinese
lions that some fatherfriar wayfarer returning from a journey a
pilgrimage to oriental missions learned to sculpt at the entrance of the esplanade
of convento de são francisco northern paraíba at the cobblestoned entrance
overflowing eight mouths of portalgates in contained and then scattered
steps drying racks of stone and joão pessoa in the summer rain was not
an island by gauguin bronzing away in the distance paradisiacal peace in an iamb of silks
and hair blowing in the wind plumed quill in the sultry summer and seated in a café

Widely considered his magnum opus, Campos wrote galáxias over the course of two decades, starting in 1963 and publishing the poem in its entirety for the first time in 1984; the 1992 edition was additionally accompanied by an audio recording of sixteen of the cantos, reinforcing the importance of the voco in his total verbivocovisual work. In that later edition, Campos says:

The galáxias situate themselves on the border between poetry and prose. In this kaleidoscopic book, there’s an epic, narrative gesture—mini-stories that come together and dissolve . . . but it is the image that prevails, the vision or calling of the epiphanic. . . . This permutational book has, as its semantic backbone, an always recurrent yet varied theme all along: travel as a book and the book as travel (despite the fact that—and for that very reason—it is not exactly a “travel book”. . .).

A series of fifty “galactic cantos” that center loosely around different places Campos has traveled, the work charts not only the poet’s literal journeys around the world, but also the atemporal, multiverse ones he takes by way of spiraling slipstreams of language. Densely covering the right-hand side of the page—absent punctuation, capitalization, stanzas or sections—but balanced with a blank verso not unlike the empty expanse around any galaxy, each canto is in and of itself a lexical and literary cosmic ride that plummets through wormholes of languages, sounds, graphemes, time, and cultural and literary allusions, making it an extraordinary experiment in a Babel-transcendent poetry.

Campos describes the forty-eight cantos that sit between the two beginning-end/end-beginning poems of galáxias as “movable,” each introducing “its ‘difference’ but contain(ing), in itself, like a watermark, the image of the entire book, which can be seen from an Alephic vantagepoint.” Aleph as in A, I asked myself? I looked it up. Probably not. More likely, Alephic as in the mathematical sets that number the infinite. No, I cannot explain that mathematically. But “Alephic” makes a lot of sense as a description for this universe-expanding and yet ultimately contained book—like a subparticle is a thing you can count, but also a way to see forever.

du scheinst ein rotes wort zu faerben through the voice of sophocles through the voice
of hölderlin schiller laughing away goethe smiling illustrious company he must have been
crazy herr hölderlin or he pretended to be because sophocles only meant
you seem worried about something ismene to antigone through the voice of sophocles
one of the most laughable products of pedantry that red-tinted word . . .

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a sketch of Buckminster Fuller’s imagined Geoscope, but I’d describe it as a human-size earth model you can stick your head into and experience the whole world happening at once from the inside out; Fuller’s hope was to expand one’s sense of an individual relationship to the world as in fact a series of connections and interrelationships. When the architect Jesse Reiser recently recreated a Geoscope of sorts for a show at Princeton University, it was a totally immersive multimedia experience complete with multiple voices, screens, sounds, cultural references, and views from and of earth. Reading galáxias is a little like that, only instead of a Geoscope, it’s a multiverse scope, and instead of a physical structure, the spaceship is language itself. To say it is an otherworldly experience doesn’t begin to cover the sheer magnitude of the joyful abundance that carries you along.

saffron yellow egg vermillion verging on pompeian lava red you could
say after seeing pompeii the amorini friezes against a ground of
giallorosso but this is rome the roman colors like flags the blue
most fine most frigid of that rarefied january morning the mild winter
that year almost springing in the first greens and reds and tawnygold
and redyellow yolkbisque and carmine and oldancient imperial walls
oldancient baroque palazzi mansionhovels alternating with
villas lei può dirmi dov’è la via del consolato i’m not italian i’m an
amurr’kan from inside a sports car and could you tell me sir where
the swiss airline office is tente de me entender professor por favor . . .

Ultimately, writing and translating were metaphysical enterprises for Campos. In his author’s note to the 1984 publication of galáxias, he writes, “today, retrospectively, I would tend to see it as an epic insinuation that resolved itself as an epiphanic one.” Spinning and colliding all that immense knowledge around in his head—particle-accelerator style—Campos saw endless and perpetual connections between words and sounds, images and ideas, that spoke to some greater truth or meaning. As Cisneros and Sergio de Bessa have written in their introduction to Novas (Northwestern University Press, 2005), a selection of Campos’s writings from poetry to theory, Campos saw, in that wild Geoscope brain of his, that “true meaning could only be glimpsed through prismatic refraction.” Lucky are we who get to strap on our space helmets and touch the multiverse through his transilluminated lens.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Free-Floating Between Worlds: An Interview with Gillian Conoley

photo credit: Domenic Stansberry

by Emily Simon

If our world, material and familiar, is broken and harmful, almost dead and gone, then Gillian Conoley’s Notes from the Passenger (Nightboat Books, $17.95) imagines our world miraculously transmogrified—navigable, accommodating, and hospitable through lyric insight. Fractalled images and mythic characters engage in a kind of playful dialogue that is dead serious about its assemblage and precise in its amplitudes.

Notes from the Passenger is Conoley’s ninth collection; her previous books include A Little More Red Sun on the Human (Nightboat, 2019) and Thousand Times Broken (City Lights, 2014), her translation of three books by French poet and artist Henri Michaux. Though our conversation began with Conoley’s latest book, it didn’t take too long for us to digress. “My narration is by nature digressive,” she texted one evening—and indeed, this ruminative, meandering way of thinking and talking is how Conoley and I understand each other best.


Emily Simon: The curiosity cabinet you assemble in Notes from the Passenger is one of sinister, mystical, and delightful stuff—for example, “The Messenger” includes an “overheated RV,” “a moonstone talisman,” “an implant in the hand the size of a grain of rice,” “a divining rod,” “a child’s silver bucket, handle still on the pail,” and much, much more. The poem pulls these images up close for inspection, even admiration, yet it also suggests intense frustration and grief. What is your relationship to images?

Gillian Conoley: I love color, shape, texture, material, detail, all aspects of the visual and sensory world. I like to try to see—though an impossible task, given that humans can only perceive a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum—what we call “reality.” Our visible spectrum is just a fragment, and yet we have this astonishingly rich visual perceptual world before us at all times.

Even given those limitations, I think of the visual as totemic, talismanic, transcendent, seductive, fleeting, ever-changing, immensely pleasurable. The intense frustration and grief that you sense is very interesting.

ES: I sensed frustration and grief in the “aura of intimacy.” I was wondering about the messenger being “smitten by the mystery,” too; it’s as if our world promises a kind of intimacy it cannot deliver, and that seductive promise hangs over like a veil or a shroud. There’s something sexy and obfuscating there.

GC: What is very sad about the “aura of intimacy” is that it isn’t intimacy, but only the aura of it. The messenger in this poem and in the world of the book doesn’t have a message, wasn’t given one—so instead of, say, Hermes, who was a powerful and inventive messenger, our messenger is presented as disenfranchised. Unlike Hermes, who could travel between mortal and divine worlds delivering messages to and from gods and mortals due to his winged sandals (which he wove himself), the messenger in my book is free-floating between worlds due to system collapse. This messenger is caught “in the aura of intimacy // awaiting the message”—much like texting, for example, which contains a lot of waiting, delay, drop out. Texting promises and can deliver speed and communication, but intimacy—touching, seeing, hearing—it withholds, it teases . . . so yes, “sexy and obfuscating” as you point out.

The aura is very much like a veil or a shroud. From John Locke in the seventeenth century to Maurice Merleau-Ponty in our more modern moment, one encounters “the veil of perception.” For Merleau-Ponty, the body was the main conduit of perception, not consciousness as in earlier philosophy; he didn’t think one could separate the body as perceiver from the perceived world. In the digital age I sense a sadness, frustration, or grief over the loss of the body.

The messenger in the poem is not completely without powers, though, being “of temporary noncitizenship // in an exclusive, genderless, paradisiacal future universe, an orb” (and so, a new possible world). The messenger points to “a quiver over history’s ossuary of banality and greed” and, like Hermes, offers travel between worlds: “down pathways to an old // belief system turned glassine” or the “sky blue tube” of the future that has no known destination. Like Hermes, who invented writing in order to make deliveries, the messenger in the poem is engaged in language as an essential tool: “where the mysteries are contemplated // in the true ink and felt // future public orphan of the word.”

ES: I want you to say more about the radical imagination of this collection. How do the poems testify to a possible otherwise in the very center of system collapse, language failure, and injustice?

GC: Catastrophe has its upsides. While writing this book, I wanted to be present to what was happening, to what it was like to be alive in this time. Part of me thought tear it down—go ahead, catastrophe, tear it down—because U.S. culture and government, and many governments and cultures in the world, were not functioning all that well before system collapse anyway; the beautiful unrealized dream of democracy was flailing in its failures, never having made good on its promises to so many. But as terrifying as it was and is to see all breaking and broken, to have so much death present—plague, fascism, a suddenly ferocious climate crisis, pugilists all around—one possible upside is that the world broke open, too, and so much that was simmering, so much hate, racism, homophobia, misogyny, came out in full sight like a festering boil pierced. It’s better to see one’s enemies than have them hidden and protected.

There’s still so much work to do. It’s painful, and the country is more than in a crisis; it is crisis. But I was fascinated by how the vanquished illusion of control opened new ways of being; it’s as if there’s a new space-time continuum we might be able to access. While I was writing, eventually the characters in Notes from the Passenger emerged as travelers along a bardic journey, somewhere between the living and the dead. Time is present or future or ancient. The living and the dead are in communication. There is another world. It’s unknown, but to be more aware of the dead, to let them in—surely that is an act of humility and grace.

ES: I’m picking up on a suggestion that poetry invites us into a realm beyond our world. What poetry does to time, or perhaps how poetry regards time—as elastic, simultaneous, alive—strengthens my belief in ghosts. It sounds like you don’t need convincing, though. Can you say more about how the dead and the living are in communion?

GC: With so many dead around us, how can we not be aware of their presence? For those who are actively grieving someone close, the dead are often so present.

I love what you say about what poetry can do with time’s elasticity and how it strengthens your belief in ghosts. I grew up in a house in which the dead were very much alive: When I was six, my family moved into an old Victorian house owned by two brothers who had no heirs, so all their furniture and objects remained—as though they just got up one day and walked out. The second story landing had floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The brothers, Alva and Vernon, were voracious readers and annotated and wrote marginalia. One of them had polio, so there was an old Otis elevator that malfunctioned and went up and down at odd hours, frightening me and my sister. My mother made a joke of it: “Oh, that’s just the Stiles brothers.” It was magical, and I always felt very fortunate to be living with a dead family. We moved our furniture in with theirs, and the books, which ran the gamut from ancient Greek and Roman classics to Book-of-the-Month Club volumes from the 1930s to the 1950’s, opened up so many worlds. This was in a small rural agricultural town in Central Texas. I still own many of their books, and I have two of their armchairs, where they must have often read.

ES: Is a poem a portal?

GC: Yes.

ES: Is there a practical use for this portal?

GC: A poem is a portal in that it opens the way to the ineffable. “Portal” derives from the Latin portalis––an adjective meaning “of a gate”—and porta, “gate, passage.” I love that it can mean door and also the structure around a door, which makes me think of a corridor, a pathway, an invisible door . . . not exactly a door, maybe the door is missing, but there is some kind of structure that leads into a beyond.

ES: Are information and news—essential forms of truth—always perverted or thwarted by technology?

GC: Good question, especially when you juxtapose “information and news” with “essential forms of truth.” On Instagram today I saw a writer from The New Yorker discussing Taylor Swift’s new album, song by song. It was one of those moments that seem so incredulous. Most reporters are influencers. What can carry essential forms of truth? I’d say art has a chance at that; also philosophy. But it must leave room for doubt, for skepticism.

I don’t know much about technology. Typewriters were technology. Cuneiform, the earliest form of writing, a moist clay tablet and a stylus: technology, as flawed as any technology today, as any human. AI is swashbuckling straight into falsehood.

ES: I am so glad you brought up Taylor Swift. I get kind of apoplectic when I hear raves about her—I don’t understand her celebrity, and the media has done nothing to convince me of her exalted place in the culture. Who is she? What stories does she tell? For who, about what?

GC: Here’s my take: American parents are scared to death of who their young offspring might emulate, and Taylor Swift is the antithesis of Amy Winehouse. Swift is an amazing capitalist. Her father was a Merrill Lynch stockbroker, and her mother a mutual fund marketing executive. She’s not from Nashville; she’s from Pennsylvania, where at age ten she made the decision to become a singer after seeing Shania Twain on television. At thirteen, she and her family moved to Nashville to follow her dreams, i.e. to create her brand. She’s a pop culture icon who knows her target audience and how to expand it; there’s a high degree of strategic marketing in her politics. Now I am feeling apoplectic! I also think Swift serves as an antipode to Beyoncé, whose sexual freedom and animus onstage is unparalleled in contemporary popular culture, though it’s also highly packaged. By contrast, Swift is almost sexy—she’s more a Doris Day of our times, projecting a kind of wholesomeness through her look and sound. She fulfills a white American mythos. She’s even got the football boyfriend. It’s all about the poster on a teenager’s bedroom wall.

So Swift does offer a great study of capitalism in our era, though for that I prefer Shark Tank. It is a more honest and straightforward experience of capitalism at work—and it improves one’s math skills. The sense of enterprise and invention, the desire for money mixed with kitsch and courtroom drama, are better representations of the capitalist experience.

ES: The first time you and I met, we were stuffed in the back corner of a very crowded hotel bar, and I remember laughing with you about the texts you were sending your husband. I was reading over your shoulder, and I felt a kinship with your writing there, before I’d even read your new book. Do you enjoy texting? Do you prefer a phone call?

GC: I love texting. Most of my closest friends, the life-long ones, live far away, in other states. I love the speed and the economy of language in texting. Also the lapses of time, and that it doesn’t feel intrusive. If someone doesn’t want to communicate, a delay can happen, and no one takes offense. Or someone can just drop off and pick up on the same thought hours, days, later. With relationships that one has had a long time, one can just dive right back into them as though no time has passed at all. Texts can be very funny. I love one brain moving ahead of the other brain and the kind of slip of communication that happens in between. I love the intimacy, though it’s not a real intimacy—the miracle of being so far away and so close at the same time. It’s sexy and it’s also full of illusion.

I like phone calls too. I have a few friends that I talk to for hours. But this is rarer. A lot of people like the freedom of multi-tasking texting allows. The human voice, more digressions, long narratives, laughing together, hearing the pauses and nuances—there’s nothing like a good phone call.

ES: Do you “doom scroll”?

GC: I’m more of a binge and purge kind of doom-scroller. In recovery, I’d say. More and more I hate giving up my time to it, so I catch the headlines, and if something really horrible happens, I’ll go to several different news sources to get the different takes: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. I also like weird little small town newspapers, and I drive a lot, so I listen to NPR. When I travel I watch cable news, but it’s all a loop.

ES: It’s indeed all a loop. I’ve unfollowed most mainstream news media sources online. I’ve become so jaded about “coverage” and reporting, and I don’t want to be jaded; I want my senses activated, alert, alive, so I can be useful. Hope is a powerful weapon! But it can be very interesting to tune in to cable news, which endlessly streams crisis, crisis, crisis.

GC: And fear, fear, fear. How do you sense “the loop” come into your work? Your prose is surprising and disrupts narrative—there is a strong sense of the intuitive—it has an “I” and involves experience, yet it isn’t “auto-fiction.” Is there any connection between how you form sentences and paragraphs and exterior cultural forms? I don’t think you have to define it (though the marketplace would like you to!), but is it closer to poetry? Does it matter?

ES: Thank you for asking, and you’re right about the intuitive as a structuring device in my work. I used to write more formally conventional, distinct “poems” until I discovered a longer, more disjunctive form: the lyric fragments in my book In Many Ways (Winter Editions, 2023). I think foregrounding the intuitive ferries in a sense of play, desire, propulsion, and so it amplifies the “I,” maybe even exalts that voice or persona on the page. I’m interested in the mind at work, the mind beset with dilemmas and contradictions but also sort of in love with the messiness of living. If poetry is about memory, witness, testimony—truth-telling—then I want the form of my work to reflect the exterior reality, the cultural mesh, from which the “I” speaks.

GC: I like that verb “ferries” and how it evokes motion and travel and propulsion . . . I also like the trust in the “I” that can arise if one pays as much attention to the external as the internal. I think poetry has a restlessness to it, and that its nature might be to put itself in a kind of alignment with the exterior world, what you call “the cultural mesh,” which is ever changing—a world we step into, out of, and alongside, where we hope to be at our most attentive and alive.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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).

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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”).

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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.

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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”).

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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.

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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”).

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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”).

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Selected Poems: 1959-2022

Neeli Cherkovski
Lithic Press ($28)

by Zack Kopp

A writer of poems that fill one up like nourishing and enjoyable word-meals, Neeli Cherkovski (born in 1945) continued creating his artfully imaginative verse right until the end of his life on March 19, 2024. The posthumous publication of Cherkovski’s Selected Poems: 1959-2022 represents his long overdue recognition as one of the most essential poets of the Beat Generation. In addition to the searching, haunted poems in this beautifully printed 400-page book, an introduction by Charles Bernstein situates how their author consistently “bows head in respect to disrespect”; while photographs track a life of literary engagement, starting with a picture taken with Lawrence Ferlinghetti around the time Cherkovski’s Ferlinghetti: A Biography (Doubleday, 1979) was published, and one of an even younger version of Cherkovski sitting on a tricycle next to his friend and mentor Charles Bukowski (also on a tricycle).

Perhaps due to having caroused with Bukowski in Los Angeles during the 1960s—adventures recounted not only by Bukowski in poems, stories, and articles (where he commented more than once that Cherkovski would “make a great rabbi someday,” popularizing and belittling him in one swipe) but also in Cherkovski’s landmark biography Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (Random House, 1991)—Cherkovski’s work has often been perceived in the shadow of Bukowski’s, so proper estimation of his own poetic voice has been delayed. The pair shared a winsome dynamic, as can be seen in an early poem in Selected Poems, “THIS ONE BUKOWSKI THREW INTO THE FIREPLACE (WITHOUT READING)”:

Bukowski looks out of his window
he looks out of his Hollywood window
his forty-year window
his Hollywood Park window
Bukowski looks down from his three story window
he can see little children playing below
and he cries because someday they will die
when the fallout crosses the street they will die
and if not the bomb then age or sickness
or some holy accident
he opens the window to let in the air

But beyond Cherkovski’s teen years, the differences between the writers became more pronounced than their similarities. In contrast to Bukowski’s habitually spare voice, Cherkovski writes poetry as if to give the very letters on the page back their lives by turning them into trees again—albeit in a whole other spirit. Take “Leaves,” from 1979:

ONCE THE UNBREAKABLE LEAVES SPOKE A LANGUAGE
THAT FLOWED LIKE PURE CLEAR WATER FROM THE
BREATHLESS LAND ONTO PROSPEROUS FIELDS & SEA-
LINES STRETCHED TO ISLANDS WHERE TALL SWAYING
PALMS BECAME THATCH-ROOFED HOUSES FOR PEOPLE
WHO BELIEVED IN MANY GODS AND IN TONGUES OF
FIRE THAT CALLED FROM DEEP IN THE RESTLESS
OCEAN & THEY KNEW THE NAMES, LONG OBSCURED,
OF PALM GOD AND GRASS GOD AND GOD IN SAND
AND WATER & THE LEAVES FALL LIKE IRON PLATING
ONTO THE AWAKENING PLAIN & DAWN, INDEFINABLE
BEAST, CRAWLS UP THE COASTAL HILLS AND DOWN
TO THE SHORE & ONCE THE CANYON LEAVES DID
NOT REST LIKE TABLETS, ONE RED, ONE YELLOW,
HOLDING WORDS OF A WISDOM MORE SENTIENT, LESS
BELLICOSE, FILLED WITH GREATER UNDERSTANDING
& THOSE WHO PRESSED THEM INTO BOUND VOLUMES
RESTORED OLD ENERGIES TO THE SUN AND PASSED ON

Always seeing more books in the trees, the ocean full of individual drops of liquid, and mercy going in and out of print as time proceeds, Cherkovski offers readers the flash of living language; there is a primordial omniscience in his work, as if the sudden brightness of dinosaur-brained birds is lighting up the pitch-black darkness.

Let’s therefore remember this wizened Bohemian bard who so passionately wrote from his neighborhood of living letters “near San Francisco but not San Francisco but part of San Francisco, frozen in time somewhere in the sixties or maybe the sixty-eight-seventies,” as he once described it in a Facebook post. Besides being a gifted inimitable West Coast poet and a pioneering proselytizer for the writers he dubbed “Whitman’s Wild Children,” he was a lovely person who invited all who met him into the warm embrace of lyric poetry. Let’s remember him, in fact, by heeding the instructions offered in one of the last poems in this volume, “Don’t Forget Me”:

when I am gone
think of me
as you tinker in
the technological forest
find time to draw
my words on your cloud
think of me as
a strip of bark
on an ash tree
as you lead the bees
on a country path

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

learn my odes by heart
remember the timbre
of my voice,
don’t forget me,
I was a poet

come listen
when my spirit rises
on branches
of the last redwood tree
wipe my tears
tell me I’m remembered
lie if you must

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Women on the Moon

Debora Kuan
The Word Works ($19)

by Julia Klahr

In Women on the Moon, Debora Kuan’s vulnerable new poetry collection, the author draws on her Asian-American heritage to explore the gravity rooting a woman’s life in an “imaginary firmament” by invoking the ethereal figure of Chang-e, the Chinese moon goddess. Divided into five “lunar phases” examining the place of women (particularly women of color) in contemporary American society, the book is a refreshing take on modern femininity that finds magic in the banal domesticity of the everyday.

Kuan’s free verse seems to signal the liberty of expansive contemplation, especially in the book’s “Gibbous” section. In recalling the myth of Chang-e’s path to immortality, the author casts a mystical light on her heritage:

Say a woman leaves you for the moon.
Say you discover after turning over the quilted

page, she’s drunken the elixir,
she’s gone—ghost of indented slippers, pulse

thumping beneath your birdless ribcage.

However, Kuan has no less praise for the corporeal, as in the pithy “Magic Lesson”:

. . . every woman
has been sawed in half
at least a dozen times
before sunset.

The book’s opening phase, “Last Quarter Moon: Mothering,” features “Having a Baby at 43,” a poem that portrays the speaker as apprehensive and vulnerable as she grapples with older motherhood. Following recent egregious displays of anti-Asian sentiment, “One Day in America” subtly evokes an Asian American mother’s fears while watching her child:

         when you catch sight of me,
you practice your wave, opening and shutting

your fist in the weighted air. Your nose and chin
and eyes are splattered with dark red

berry purée, as you kick your feet
in your highchair.

Here, Kuan tries to make sense of a horror-filled day in which the Asian-American spa workers to whom her book is dedicated were brutally killed. Kuan reinforces the devastating impact through enjambment, using meaningful line breaks to help carry the movement of thought. Her language, however, remains informal, with a natural cadence that makes it readable despite the difficult content.

The book’s next phase, “Full Moon: Coupling,” includes a foray into end-stopped and end-rhymed verse, where the interlaced quatrains of “Man & Wife” emphasize a sense of burdensome mundanity and exhaustion:

By dinner, we tear our bread with both hands,
forget candles, eat straight from the pan.
We ready our sorrys on hooks by the nightstands,
so we can reach them as quick as we can.

Images of married life’s predictability and dull routine, where “the complaints go on dripping, / stalactites in a dolomite cave,” continue in wry poems like “How to Live with Your Husband,” but in the book’s final section, Kuan’s speaker seems to embrace the joy of the ordinary in a series of still lifes. The brief tercets of “Still Life With Mushroom” feature deft use of alliteration (“cloud of cartilage”), internal rhymes (“the unsteady / shed”), and other poetic devices that suggest a sense of order and acceptance, one summarized in the poem’s poignant final lines:

I have married my life
to lowliness, and I want
to cry aloud with happiness.

Kuan deploys cultural icons as varied as Anna May Wong and Freddie Mercury as she contemplates subjects ranging from female invisibility to racial stereotyping, and  throughout, her singular lens highlights the inequities of American life. In “The Night After You Lose Your Job,” for instance, Kuan’s characterization of a newly unemployed mother embodies an implicit call for greater recognition of society’s overlooked caregivers.

Lyrical, vulnerable and astute, Women on the Moon is a wide-ranging contemporary ode to womanhood. Shedding light on romance and realism while celebrating the contributions of marginalized women, Kuan’s voice advocates for their honest representation with an acuity that speaks volumes.

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Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle and One Impossible Step

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle
Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases
Roque Dalton
Translated by Jack Hirschman and Barbara Paschke
Seven Stories Press ($18.95)

One Impossible Step: Selected Poems
Orides Fontela
Translated by Chris Daniels
Nightboat Books ($17.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

At first glance, not much connects the work of poets Roque Dalton (1935–1975) from El Salvador and Orides Fontela (1940–1998) from Brazil. Dalton, a committed revolutionary in the armed struggle leading up to his country’s civil war, writes poems in the direct, colloquial expression of everyday people—they are not didactic, yet they do wear their political and social concerns on their sleeves. Fontela’s poems, on the other hand, are far more hermetic; elusive, abstract, and philosophical. And of course, Fontela writes in Portuguese, Dalton in Spanish. Yet the two are contemporaries whose work responds to social conditions during turbulent times. 

Looking at these two disparate poets together—that is, reading them through each other’s lenses—enhances the parameters with which the work of each might be framed. Dalton becomes more philosophical, while Fontela gains in political gravity. Take a short poem by each. Here is one of Fontela’s “Seven Bird Poems”:

We’ll never know
such purity:
bird devouring us
while we sing it.

And this is Dalton’s “Poetic Art 1974”:

Poetry
Forgive me for having helped you understand
you’re not made of words alone.

In each case, the poet addresses their art, Dalton directly and Fontela through the archetypal image of a bird. While Fontela uses the universal “we”—as translator Chris Daniels notes, “Fontela almost never wrote the word ‘eu,’ the subjective form of the Portuguese first-person singular pronoun”—Dalton maintains an intimate “I-Thou” relationship, asking forgiveness for expanding poetry’s knowledge of itself. In both cases, the power of poetry to reach beyond language’s supposed meaning is stressed, albeit from opposing perspectives. Dalton implies the revolutionary context of his poem by including the year in the title, suggesting that poetry has a role to play in a time of cultural unrest and armed struggle, but Fontela also rejects the supposed rarification of poetry—“such purity”—in favor of the more active, even violent, “devouring us” that is within the art form’s transformative power. And while different in tone, both poems extol how poetry can elevate our ability to conceive the world anew.     

Drawing from all of Fontela’s collections of poetry, One Impossible Step represents not only the broadest translation of her corpus into English, but, at only 130 pages, it also operates as a compact overview of her biography and poetics. Daniels (who has also translated Pessoa among other Lusophone authors) ingeniously includes some twenty pages of excerpts from three interviews with Fontela, and Brazilian poet Ricardo Domeneck contributes a succinct afterword that assesses the trajectory of her life and work. Domeneck describes Fontela as

A person who owned no property, who felt neither the need nor the desire for a love relationship, perhaps [she] was uninterested in praising anything but oxygen. Perhaps her poverty led her to abandon adornment and poetic beautification. . . . demonstrat[ing] the linguistic attention of a post-war poet living a historical moment that demanded, in the use of symbols, an awareness of their being signs.

Dalton is much better known to U.S. readers; an earlier edition of this very book, published in the early 1980s under the title Poemas Clandestinos/Clandestine Poems, went through multiple printings. Now released as Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle as the first of a several Dalton translations to be issued over the coming years, it is actually the last, likely unfinished, work of Dalton’s; it comprises five sets of poems by distinct “authors” invented by the poet (though these pseudo-pseudonymous characters are nothing on the scale of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms). It’s unclear quite what Dalton had in mind by casting his voice into different personas, yet perhaps it is more important to draw attention to what these figures have in common: a belief in the necessity of cultural revolution and the use of poetry as a means towards that end. An opening “Declaration of Principles” signed by “the authors” closes by stating that the “enemy poet” (as opposed to the “servant poet” or “clown poet”) must have “a lucid and invincible confidence in the working class” and engage in “direct participation in its struggle.”

Fontela came from the working class, went to school to study philosophy on a scholarship, scraped by as a teacher, then “died in a public hospital in 1998, without a close family, destitute as a poet.” Dalton’s father was an American who financially provided for his education; he traveled internationally, spent time in Cuba honing his belief in communism and guerilla skills, and was tragically murdered in 1975 at the hands of his fellow revolutionaries in El Salvador , a victim of political infighting. Despite the vast differences in their lives, however, both poets created a body of literature hinged upon life—and because of this, these new translations of their work into English are vital.

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Criticism By Translation: An Interview with Peter Valente

by John Wisniewski and Eric Lorberer

One of the exciting things about contemporary literature is how writing, translation, and criticism exist on a continuum, each practice bolstering the others to take the art to new heights. Occasionally, this continuum manifests in a single individual, a polymath of seemingly boundless energy. In the following interview, readers will discover one such individual, Peter Valente; his many publications and activities of the past decade are better described by him below than in any introduction we could write. With each of us curious about different aspects of Valente’s prodigious output, we had many questions, so we thank him for expansively addressing them all.

Rain Taxi: Tell us a bit about your literary background—how did you come to the world of writing?

Peter Valente: I first published poems in those xeroxed, hand-stapled mags that were still coming out in the early ’90s, such as Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy’s wonderful Mirage #4 [Periodical]—they published my first poem in 1994. Later, I published work in literary magazines like Lee Chapman’s First Intensity and Peter O’Leary’s LVNG. I had graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a minor in American Literature in 1992, and I was living in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, working in a bookstore. I attended as many readings as I could at the Poetry Project and elsewhere in New York City—a great way to get a substantial education in poetry.

I also read everything I could get my hands on from the great small press publishers of the day—Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s Burning Deck, Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press, Steve Clay’s Granary Books, Annabel Lee’s Vehicle Editions, Geoff Young’s The Figures, and many others. I used Spencer Selby’s list of experimental magazines to find places to send work, and when I sent some pages of artwork to John M. Bennett at Lost & Found Times, he wrote on them and sent me back photocopies to give out for free. These early experiences with publishers taught me so much about community and the possibilities for collaboration, which came full circle for me later when I collaborated on a book with Kevin Killian called Ekstasis (BlazeVox, 2017). Oh, and during this time (the late ’90s), I published my first chapbook, Forge of Words a Forest, with Jensen Daniels, an imprint of Talisman House.

All these experiences were important for a young poet, because they exposed me to multiple poetry scenes throughout the United States and Europe—different ways a poem could exist in the world—as well as to certain trends in poetry at the time. They also led me to correspond with editors and writers I admired—not only Peter O’Leary and Kevin Killian, but also older writers like Gustaf Sobin, William Bronk, and Gerrit Lansing—again, correspondence can be an education in poetry all its own. John Wieners was an especially big influence on me at the time; I carried his Selected Poems, 1958-1984 (Black Sparrow, 1986) everywhere, reading it on trains, buses, park benches, whenever I had a chance. I’ll never replace my worn-out copy since there are so many memories associated it with it. I remember seeing Wieners read with Eleni Sikelianos in the late ‘90s at the old Teachers and Writers Collaborative space on Union Square; I went up to him afterwards and told him I had just picked up Behind the State Capitol, or Cincinnati Pike (Good Gay Poets, 1975) and he said, “Hold on to it, it’ll be valuable someday.” The 1969 Angel Hair edition of his Asylum Poems is also one of my most treasured books. I’m glad there’s growing interest in Wieners’s poetry, with a collected poems edited by Robert Dewhurst and a biography of him in the works.

RT: What about translating—when did that begin?

PV: Well, I didn’t seriously start translating books until 2014, when I realized I was drawn to writers such as Antonin Artaud and Sandro Penna, along with certain voices from the ancient world like Catullus, because their writings in one way or another were centered on an exploration of the body. Filmmaking helped me change my thinking about my writing (which in my late twenties was somewhat abstract) by leading me out to the streets, where I became involved in situations that demanded a dialogue or some form of intervention; when I attempted to extend these practices to writing, the result was an interest in opening up conversations through translation—dialogues with writers who were literary “outcasts” and for whom the sexual body is an important subject. This includes the five Classical Roman poets I translated in Let the Games Begin (Talisman House, 2015) and especially Catullus, who I tackled with Catullus: Versions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), as well as the more modern writers I work on.

RT: A perfect way to segue into talking about the Italian poets you’ve translated over the past decade. What led to the creation of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna (Punctum Books, 2014)?

PV: Penna is not well known in the U.S.; there were only a few translations of his work in English, all hard to find. Pasolini said that despite being a great poet, Penna was “destined to be a poet at the margins, not known, even despised.” The times have certainly changed somewhat—gay poets are more visible now than they’ve ever been—but there is still much more recovery work to be done; so many writers unjustly ignored in their time have poems that deserve a second look. Penna was openly gay and when Pasolini first arrived in Rome in 1950, he sought him out; they became good friends and frequent companions, their bond strengthened by their mutual love for young men (they both loved the ragazzi that prowled the outskirts of Rome). Penna also knew Eugenio Montale, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1975, but Montale objected to the homosexual content of Penna’s work, which led to a rift in their friendship. Penna published very little in the ’60s; the last book he approved for publication, The Sleepless Traveler, was published a month after his death in Rome on January 21, 1977. I think Penna’s various silences and refusals to publish were his way of showing that he didn’t care about how his work was received in academic circles. Anyway, when I delved into Penna’s poems I found them to be utterly brilliant, so I knew I had to translate him.

RT: Since you brought up Pasolini, let’s talk about him next; you’ve published translations of his poems in places like Jacket and The Baffler. Will there ever be a book of this work—and what is it like translating such an iconic artist, as compared to poets who are lesser known here in the U.S.?

PV: I don’t presently have plans to publish a book of my Pasolini translations, but I find him continually fascinating. Throughout his life he was an outspoken critic of what he believed was destroying Italy. In the United States, he is largely seen as a civic poet, but I wanted to focus on other kinds of poems. For example, his collection The Hobby of the Sonnet contains a series of love poems that show he was a lyric poet of the highest order. It was an eye-opening experience translating these poems, which have a fascinating backstory: While shooting La Ricotta (1963), Pasolini met the young man who would become his intimate companion for many years, Giovanni (“Ninetto”) Davoli; he was fourteen when he met Pasolini, who had just turned forty.  Soon Ninetto became part of Pasolini’s entourage and began appearing in his films, starting with The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and culminating with The Arabian Nights (1974). “In me, he found the naturalness of the world he knew growing up,” Ninetto said, and I think that’s true: This was the world that Pasolini saw devastated by the changes Italy was undergoing in the ’60s. During the filming of The Canterbury Tales (1972), however, Ninetto told Pasolini that he intended to marry (which he did, in January 1973), promising that nothing fundamental would change as a result.  But Pasolini was inconsolable. The series of poems he began in the fall of 1971, The Hobby of the Sonnet, charts the series of emotional upheavals Pasolini underwent during this time. After the wedding Pasolini’s anger subsided, and in 1973 he wrote, “seeing that you have retained a little love for me / exclusively, this means everything.” Desire had given way to affection and loyalty. In The Arabian Nights Pasolini cast Ninetto as Aziz, a character he described as “joy, happiness, a living ballet.” Ninetto’s first son was named Pier Paolo. The Hobby of the Sonnet wasn’t published in Italy until after Pasolini’s murder in 1975, and while I and others have published translations of some of the poems, the entire sequence has never been published in English as far as I know.

RT: And finally, you’ve given us Nanni Balestrini’s Blackout (Commune Editions, 2017). How did you discover his work?

PV: I first discovered Balestrini’s poems in the anthology The Promised Land: Italian Poetry After 1975 (Sun & Moon Press, 1999). I had been aware of his novels in English translation published by Verso, but no book of his poetry had yet been translated—so I decided to translate this long poem, which is not only one of Balestrini’s best books but also extremely relevant to our time. Blackout is a requiem for the generation of 1968, whose hopes and ideals were exhausted by the time of the poem’s composition in 1979. The impetus for the poem was the New York City power outage of 1977, which lasted for over twenty-four hours and received widespread media attention because of episodes of violence and looting—but the historical events with which Blackout is concerned (and about which it is critical) span the revolutionary movement in Italy from 1969 to 1979, which involved not only university students but eventually the entire Italian working class, who took part in strikes, demonstrations, and acts of sabotage. Workers fought with fascists and police in Rome, Milan, Turin—and lives were lost amidst the violence.

As a result of mass arrests in 1979, Balestrini was indicted and fled to France; there he began to collect the materials that would eventually become Blackout. He was essentially creating a map to understand the political climate, examining the sequence of historical events whose consequence was repression and asking why no further revolutionary action is possible. In a sense, Blackout faithfully records the end of a world, the extraordinary period of creativity and hope that had characterized the late ’60s and early ’70s. But as much as it is an elegy, Blackout is also a call to action for future generations to counter the ever-present problem of power. We must collapse distinctions which enforce the duality of superior/inferior; we must imaginatively interrupt and redirect the flow of knowledge, moving through fissures and gaps to arrive at a new language and way of perceiving the world. The threat of physical and psychic death is all too real in this unstable political climate.

RT: You also translate from the French; two of your most recent translations are the novel Nicolas Pages (Semiotexte, 2023) by Guillaume Dustan and The Illuminated, or The Precursors of Socialism: Tales and Portraits (Wakefield Press, 2022) by Gerard de Nerval. What can you tell us about these titles?

PV: I translated The Illuminated because I considered it an important book that filled a gap in Nerval studies. Collectively, its narratives of six men show Nerval’s attempt to map an alternative history of the eighteenth century through the eyes of these visionaries. They also show that Nerval’s descents into madness (he suffered from bouts of mental illness throughout his life) were followed by ascents back to reality that resulted in a clearer vision of truth; as he wrote, “Is there not something of reason to be extracted from madness?” And so, Nerval embarked on these portraits, extracting a kind of moral from each of these figures’ confrontation with the abyss opened by “the death of God,” in a century that relegated visionaries to the position of outcasts.

Published in 1999, Nicolas Pages marks a departure from the Sadean preoccupations of Dustan’s previous three novels. It is in essence a love story. The writing is trashy, corporeal, frantic, but also collage-like, encyclopedic, philosophic: Dustan includes articles that he initially wrote for various magazines on the history of “house” music, on the history of homosexual virility since the 1970s, on modes of transmission and repression of SM practices, on the links between literature and sexuality, and on the notion of gay literature. It is a call for gay rights, a vibrant plea for autofiction, a reconciliation with his homosexual identity, a message of hope and energy, and a hymn to life, humanity, love, pleasure, and desire.  Inconstant, insolent, anti-conformist, and provocative, Dustan inaugurates a “gay literature” that is no longer painful or shameful but epicurean and cheerful without lapsing into idealism.

RT: How did The Artaud Variations (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014) come about?

PV: Essentially as an experiment. I had been interested in Artaud ever since I first read his work in college. Much later, I encountered Ezra Pound’s idea of “criticism by translation,” which required “an intense penetration of the author’s sense” and “an exact projection of one’s psychic contents.” I was thinking about these ideas when I wrote The Artaud Variations. I combined my own writing, as a kind of commentary, with my translations of sections from Artaud’s work. Writing this book was an intense and almost overwhelming experience. Sylvère Lotringer (1938-2012), the publisher of Semiotext(e), was one of the first to understand what I was doing, and he kindly wrote a blurb for the book that captures what I was going for: “Peter Valente has done everything that a translator/reader of Artaud shouldn’t do: he crossed the line and merged his own writing with the original. But he did it to such a mind-blowing extreme that Artaud’s voice becomes his own.”

RT:  Since then, you’ve clearly doubled down on your devotion to Artaud, and have released three books from the London-based publisher Infinity Land Press: 2020’s Succubations and Incubations: Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (1945-1947), co-translated with Cole Heinowitz, and two books in 2023, The New Revelations of Being and Other Mystical Writings and Obliteration of the World: A Guide to the Occult Belief System of Antonin Artaud. Can you give us a quick tour through these titles?

PV: Succubations and Incubations contains a selection of letters (1945-1947) from Artaud’s consummate work, Suppôts et Supplications [Henchmen and Torturings], which provides readers with a vivid, uniquely intimate view of Artaud’s final years. They show Artaud at his most exposed, and perhaps also his most explosive, tragic, sad, even humorous. Commenting on and elaborating key themes from his earlier writing while venturing into new territory, Artaud recounts his torture and violation in asylums, his crucifixion two thousand years ago in Golgotha, his deception by occult initiates and doubles, and his intended journey to Tibet—where, aided by his “daughters of the heart,” he will finally put an end to these “maneuvers of obscene bewitchment.” Artaud also speaks of his plan to create a “body without organs” and extends this idea to the visual arts, where he argues that painting and drawing must wage a ceaseless battle against the limits of representation. There is an unmistakable unity of vision that permeates the letters.

The New Revelations of Being and other Mystical Writings contains texts written by Artaud between 1933-1937, works that explore astrology, alchemy, Eastern philosophies, Christian ritual and magic, the Tarot, and the civilizations of India and Mexico. Artaud’s extensive reading and thinking on metaphysics and religion produced “Notes on Oriental, Greek and Indian Cultures.” Also included are the important essays, “Mexico and Civilization,” “The Eternal Betrayal of the Whites,” “The Life and Death of Satan the Fire” and “The Breath that Returns to God…” But the central text in this volume is The New Revelations of Being. In this work, Artaud is the “Revealed One,” the madman and fool of the Tarot, who possesses secret knowledge which he believes will allow him to enact his apocalyptic vision of a world transformed through destruction.

Obliteration of the World contains my own essays exploring the hermetic side of Artaud’s thought, focusing on a series of letters written, late in his life, to André Breton, Georges Braque, Marthe Robert, Anie Besnard, and Collette Thomas. “Artaud’s Sacred Triad” uses the Qabalah and ideas about the Tarot to deepen ideas about Artaud’s sexuality and magick. “Cubism and the Gnostic” presents Artaud’s criticism of Georges Braque, which goes beyond mere aesthetics to question the essence of representation. “Artaud’s Book of the Dead” explores the Tibetan idea of the afterlife and Artaud’s relation to it; for him, the body that has evolved through time and suffered ceaseless persecutions both in life and in the afterlife is the corrupt body born of the spirit of God—thus, God is one of Artaud’s greatest enemies. “The Incestuous Father and His Daughters of the Heart” engages Artaud’s relation to the various women in his life; to these women, Artaud was alternately sympathetic and cruel, manipulative and romantic. The final essay is concerned with Artaud’s travels in Mexico, focusing on the importance to him of the mystical staff of St. Patrick. These essays were the result of years of thinking about Artaud’s work.

RT: As you pointed out, this work focuses on late-period Artaud, to which translator-scholars like Clayton Eshleman and Stephen Barber have also drawn attention. What is it about this phase of Artaud’s life and work that is so challenging?

PV: I remember reading in Clayton Eshleman’s introduction to his translation of Artaud, Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works From The Final Period (Exact Change, 2004), that “there are two major projects facing future Artaud translators, the 300-page Suppôts et Supplications (Volume XIV) presented in two books, which Artaud considered to be his summational work; and the Cahiers de Rodez (Volume XV-XXI), over two thousand pages, worked at daily throughout Artaud’s recovery period in Rodez. There are also four volumes of notebook material from Artaud’s last two years in Paris.” So that led me to try to tackle thinking about and translating some of this work. Most U.S. readers only know Artaud from Jack Hirschman’s Artaud Anthology (City Lights, 1965) and Susan Sontag’s and Helen Weaver’s Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976) but even that book, though more well-rounded than Hirschman’s, “proposes that Artaud’s importance lies in the pre-Rodez work,” as Eshleman writes.

The later work is challenging: Artaud’s apocalyptic vision for mankind led him on a journey, beginning in Mexico in 1936 and ending, tragically, in Ireland in 1937, with a mental breakdown and silence. After the fateful journey to Ireland, he was placed in a straitjacket and eventually sent to the Rodez asylum. In the late work we see Artaud reconstructing a life that was destroyed. He develops a vast cosmology in which there are demonic entities and an entire panoply of beings that constitute the spirit world, and in which occurs a dramatic fight between these entities and mankind, which Artaud insisted had nothing to do with the spirit. It is a world completely unlike the surrealist and visionary one most U.S. readers associate with Artaud—and it is a cosmology that he ultimately rejects in favor of silence: In 1948, Artaud wrote: “At this moment, I want to destroy my thought and my mind. Above all, thought, mind and consciousness. I do not want to suppose anything, admit anything, enter into anything, discuss anything…”

RT: Do you have any more Artaud projects in the hopper?

PV: Later this year, Infinity Land Press will publish my translation of The True Story of Artaud-Mômo, which contains the complete text of Artaud’s final lecture, given in Paris on the night of January 13, 1947. It was his last public performance, one in which he forcefully ruptured all received and polite notions of performance, lecture, or even theatre–he pushed himself and his viewers past the realm of what could be comfortably absorbed. This work became an important reference point for various post-war intellectuals and artists, such as the Lettrists, the New Realists, the Beat Generation, and the movement of action poetry. What makes the text so riveting and powerful is that unlike in his other writings, Artaud is summing up a lifetime of experiences and pain at the hands of society and doctors—it is the closest thing we have to an autobiography.

RT: As if writing and translating weren’t enough, you also work in visual media. Why did you decide to make films?

PV: It came about by accident. In 2010 I started showing films (from my own collection of DVDs) twice a week at a nursing home in Jersey; although I was writing, I wasn’t publishing books. One night at the home, I met someone who had a Bolex camera and wanted to shoot a film; with no working script, we shot a film over a weekend, Liminal, that was shown at Anthology Film Archives. Later I made my own films, but without any money—I had to use what was readily available. I shot my first few films with a small point-and-shoot Canon camera and a few friends; in my later films, I dispensed with “actors” entirely, using myself or random people on the street when needed. I usually followed my instinct rather than a prepared script—in fact, I’ve never made a film with a script of any kind. I start with an idea and improvise from that, like free jazz musicians such as Cecil Taylor and Derek Bailey. Georges Méliès had to improvise his films during the early age of cinema, and the result was magical: A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904) hold up even to this day. Improvisation governs almost all aspects of my life, and certainly those that have to do with artistic creation.

RT: You also have published photographic work—tell us about Street Level (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015).

PV: During the summer of 2012, I filmed, alone and with a cheap camera, homeless vets, former drug addicts, and gang members in New Jersey and on the Lower East Side. I was planning to make a documentary to be called Street Level; the film was never completed, but the book of the same name featured stills from the film. Despite considerable risk, I was trying to capture the language and face of despair and anger otherwise silenced in the media. There is, as we all know, an increasing divide between the everyday “normal” life of most Americans and the “extraordinary” life of the privileged, but many of the men and women I filmed live outside these two worlds—and thus they are invisible. But they have something to tell us, and we must listen. They have the possibility, as we all do, of being transformed. This would mean seeing all of us connected, where there are no false dividing lines, no mysterious Others, but a single body of which we are a part, working together and accepting our differences.

RT: Let’s close with some other strands of what you do in the writing world, starting with fiction. Can you speak a bit about your novella “Parthenogenesis”?

PV: “Parthenogenesis” was my attempt at writing a kind of science-fiction novella. It includes subjects like telepathy, cyborg bodies, time travel, pop culture, and class critique; in terms of narrative, I wanted to create a story that is essentially a series of fragments, moving between the past and the present—the impression of a narrative pulsing underneath rather than immediately apparent. That pulse, like a heartbeat, dark and violent but also transformative, drives the narrative toward the possibility of revolution and magic. A character in the book says: “Magic draws from the forbidden…the first magical act is becoming aware that I AM a self…distinct from others who carry the same social role.” In other words, the first act of revolution takes place within. “Parthenogenesis” and “Plague in the Imperial City” were published together as Two Novellas (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017).

RT: Among the plethora of books you’ve recently published are A Credible Utopia: Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter (Punctum, 2022), and a poetry volume you edited, Breathlehem: The Selected Poems of Jim Brodey (Local Knowledge, 2024). Both are, in a sense, homages to artists largely unknown beyond devotees of film and poetry. How did these projects come about?

PV: Regarding the Schroeter book, I attended a retrospective of his films in 2012 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; I had been aware of his name from having watched some of the so-called New German Cinema, but I was immediately attracted to Schroeter’s films because they seemed so unusual compared to the other German films at the time. I admired their theatricality and almost unhinged emotional quality; they seemed improvised and irreverent. Schroeter was a kind of romantic with both feet in the real world—his films don’t take themselves too seriously, even when dealing with serious subjects like the nature of love and death.

Also, as a filmmaker, I’ve worked in 8mm, 16mm, and digital, so when viewing his films, I asked myself questions like: How did he get that lighting to produce such an image? What kind of film did he use? What kind of camera? I also admired his use of texts from literature, such as the Songs of Maldoror by Lautréamont, which Schroeter used in both The Death of Maria Malibran and a later film, Deux. And I admired the way he used music to comment on a character’s thoughts, or to conflict with what is on the screen; most of my films do not contain dialogue but I made extensive use of different kinds of music, from opera to popular music to jazz. I imagine Schroeter must have been aware of Kenneth Anger’s use of music in his films, the way it comments on the images and adds another dimension to what one is seeing on the screen.  So, I approached Schroeter from the viewpoint of a filmmaker first, and not an academic.

As for Jim Brodey: It’s been thirty years since Hard Press published Heart of the Breath, a collection of Brodey’s poems edited by Clark Coolidge, and all his individual books remain out of print—so I just thought it was time for a Selected Poems to bring his work back into circulation for readers. Breathlehem contains selections from all of Brodey’s work including some poems that only appeared in magazines and were never collected in a book. I also included numerous photos of Brodey, both alone and in the company of other poets. My aim was to document an active and exciting period in the New York poetry world that Jim Brodey was a part of—as well as to serve as a reminder that he was and is one of our best poets.

RT: What are you working on next?

PV: I’m currently editing a series of texts on the filmmaker Harry Smith. My experience in film had led me to working as a proofreader and general editor and I also helped to get photos for the reissue of Paola Igiori’s American Magus: Harry Smith (originally published by Inandout Press, 1996) that Semiotexte published in 2022. While working on that book, I came into contact with many people who knew him, and this resulted in my putting together a collection of texts, photographs, letters, and even an unpublished document by Harry. The book is going to be published by Inner Traditions in 2025. I’ll also have a new book of reviews and essays in 2025 from Punctum Books; that will include essays on John Wieners, Jack Spicer, and David Wojnarowicz, as well as on John Ruskin and Gavin Douglas’ translation of the Aeneid. The book will also include reviews of books by Will Alexander, Bernadette Mayer, and Cookie Mueller. After that, who knows?

photo from Street Level

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American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson

Edited by Philip Brookman and Casey Riley
Steidl/The Gordon Parks Foundation/Minneapolis Institute of Art ($65)

by Chris Barsanti

Like many great collaborations, the iconic partnership of Gordon Parks and Ella Watson was an accident. In 1942, only a couple of years after the Kansas-born and Minnesota-seasoned Parks had left the Twin Cities, he started a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C. In his autobiography A Choice of Weapons, Parks described talking to FSA head Roy Stryker about the challenges of “using my camera effectively against intolerance.” Stryker, whose agency was tasked with fighting poverty and had already hired the likes of Walter Evans and Dorothea Lange to visualize the devastation wrought by the Great Depression, had some advice for Parks: Pointing to a Black “charwoman” mopping the hallway, Stryker said, “See what she has to say about life and things. You might find her interesting.” Parks spent four months with Watson at her work and home. The result is one of the most visually striking and quietly charged photo series of the twentieth century.

American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson, the catalog to an exhibition of the same name at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, lays out what Parks found. In the museum show, the roughly sixty images are presented in four different categories (“Care,” “Community,” “Faith,” and “Labor”); these distinctions aren’t used in the catalog but regardless, the portraits comprise a very specific slice of life. Watson, a teenage mother whose husband was killed just before the birth of their second child, was raising two grandchildren on her own when she met Parks. A slim, upright woman with a narrow face and watchful eyes, Watson has a stoic quality in these images that suggests timelessness and stubborn dignity.

Parks’s best work is marked by his empathy. No matter how many portraits he made or awards he received, the artist who once earned his keep by playing piano in a Minneapolis brothel maintained a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God connection to his subjects. That bond is clear in American Gothic, which is less a high-flying artist’s hierarchical view of a laborer than it is a wordless conversation between two Black government workers in an environment where each had to continually prove their worth.

Parks might have been expected to bring to this series the lightning-in-a-bottle quality that characterizes his best street photography—but with Watson, he takes his time. She is carefully framed in every shot, often lit as well as the women in his fashion work. The compositions are not dashed-off but complex and layered, especially in those pictures which document the church that Watson, who was very religious, attended.

Not surprisingly, the keynote image is the iconic and initially controversial photograph that gives the exhibition and catalog their title. Multiple images show Watson sweeping the FSA hallways and offices, a poised figure in a white dress with her head down—whether from shyness, focus on her work, or both—getting on with things in a darkened institution where she was likely rarely noticed. In “Ella Watson Sweeping,” Parks seems to have placed a lamp on the floor behind a desk, creating a pool of upward-casting light that throws dramatic shadows. Watson looks heroic and unbowed yet human to a fault, without the distancing of attempted iconography.  

“American Gothic” itself remains a wonder. In what could be considered our nation’s Mona Lisa, Watson looks just off to the side of the camera with a steady, just shy of exhausted look. There is an upside-down broom in one hand, a mop visible to the right, and behind her an American flag, casting its complicated aura of high ideals and promises unkept over everything. Taken just twelve years after Grant Wood’s instantly famous Flemish-inspired painting of two similarly stoic Midwestern farmers, Parks’s photograph is similarly open-ended—it grabs the eye but doesn’t insist; you are compelled to look but are not sure what you see. Despite this ambiguity, Parks’s juxtaposition of Watson in front of the flag, with its unspoken critique of a government fighting authoritarianism abroad and maintaining inequality at home, was something of a bombshell: “You’ve got the right idea, but you’re going to get us all fired!” Stryker supposedly told Parks.

Interestingly, there is little in the exhibition that specifically addresses the class and racial disparities Parks found in Washington, D.C. (though one picture of two Black children playing with a white doll seems to prefigure his infamous “Doll Test” photo taken five years later). Although he grew up attending segregated schools, Parks was still shocked by just how institutionalized Jim Crow bigotry was in our nation’s capital, where he could not shop for clothes or get lunch where he chose because he was Black. Did he and Watson talk about this? Did they have to?

Tellingly, the book’s spine and cover credit the work to “Gordon Parks and Ella Watson.” He had the camera and the eye that produced these photographs. But her life, and everything that constituted it, was her own.

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