Unearthing the Real Bukowski

No, this is not like the Neruda saga. We're talking about resurrecting the original POEMS as written by Charles Bukowski. At PBS NewsHour, Elizabeth Flock writes about scholar Abel Debritto's efforts to return the posthumously published Bukowski poems to their original versions, as intended by the poet himself. Debritto doesn't name names, but he has discovered many egregious emendations to Bukowski's writing made by his editors after his death. We'll take a look from the top:

When Abel Debritto first started researching and writing about Charles Bukowski, he knew that the prolific underground poet, short story writer and novelist, who had written thousands of poems in his lifetime, had been posthumously edited. He knew that some of the poems that had come out after his death seemed very unlike what he had published during his life. But he didn’t know how much had been changed — or how badly.

But as Debritto, a scholar who has edited books about Bukowski’s poetry on love, cats, and writing, began looking into his Bukowski archives and original manuscripts, he grew appalled. Instead of the love-it-or-hate-it but very recognizable voice of the “King of the Underground, “the “Dirty Old Man,” the womanizer (many would say misogynist) and drunk who favored the raw and the obscene, Debritto found fluffy imagery and trite language laced throughout his posthumous poems.

“Some of the changes are so awful, it’s almost embarrassing,” said Debritto, citing as example a 1992 poem Bukowski originally entitled “stone tiger, frozen sea,” which had been completely reworked for another volume of posthumous poetry with just two lines left unchanged. Its new title: “like a dolphin.”

The edits sound awfully fishy (or dolphiny?) to us! Read on at PBS NewsHour.