Charles Bukowski's Speedy Poetry Output
Abel Debritto, editor of the Charles Bukowski collection of formerly unpublished and uncollected poems, Storm for the Living and the Dead (Ecco, 2017), tells us the poet "was prolific beyond words," and pumped out over 5,000 poems in his lifetime, often losing them. "Things changed when John Martin came on the scene. Martin, who pretty much founded the now mythical Black Sparrow Press to publish Bukowski’s poetry, persuaded him to make copies of everything he wrote," says Debritto. More from Literary Hub:
In the mid-1980s, Bukowski said that Martin only published one-sixth of his actual output—on the grounds that printing more books would flood the market. In a 1986 letter to Martin, he elaborated on this: “What I am beginning to realize is that Black Sparrow can only publish what it wants to […] It’s like you have a freak monkey in a cage to display at your behest […] You keep holding back on me while my readers are in a rage for a taste of more […] This is murder. You are killing me. No poet in his time has been restricted as you are restricting me.” Murder or not, some of those unused poems are featured in Storm for the Living and the Dead.
Bukowski also claimed that Martin wasn’t keen on printing his “wilder” material, partly blaming Martin’s Christian Scientist beliefs. In Storm there are a few poems that some people will definitely consider wild, if not downright obscene: “love song,” “tough luck,” “warm water bubbles,” and “I thought I was going to get some,” among others, are good contenders for their shock value—perhaps not so much nowadays as back in the 1970s.
Finally, Bukowski would go apeshit over Martin’s refusal to print large batches of poems in little magazines such as The New York Quarterly and the Wormwood Review, especially if they were intended to be published as chapbooks. Martin felt those chapbooks could hurt Black Sparrow Press sales. Clearly upset, Bukowski said he wouldn’t have time to lick so many envelopes if he were to submit smaller batches to a larger number of magazines—submitting was a tedious, time-consuming process for someone so prolific as Bukowski. In the early 1990s, for instance, his production increased considerably after receiving a computer as a Christmas present. He was like a kid with a new toy, writing poems almost feverishly every night well past midnight. The little magazines could not keep up with his mammoth literary output...
Read it all at Literary Hub.