Read Beerspit Night and Cursing Online
Authors: Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli
Beerspit Night and Cursing (45 page)
Young, Robert
Zahn, Curtis
Zangwill, Israel
The majority of the letters by Charles Bukowski are from the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Additional letters by Sheri Martinelli are from the Special Collections Department of the Davidson Library of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Thanks to both institutions for reprint permission. Thanks also to Gunther Stuhlmann, editor of
ANAIS: An International Journal
; the Anaïs Nin Trust; the Beinecke Library; the Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Michael Montfort; and Gilbert Lee for use of the photographs contained in this volume.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany to an American soldier father and a German mother in 1920, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944 when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994 at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel,
Pulp
(1994).
During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including the novels
Post Office
(1971),
Factotum
(1975),
Women
(1978),
Ham on Rye
(1982), and
Hollywood
(1989). His most recent books are the posthumous collections
What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
(1999),
Open All Night: New Poems
(2000), and
Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski & Sheri Martinelli 1960-1967
(2001).
All of his books have now been published in translation in over a dozen languages and his worldwide popularity remains undiminished. In the years to come Black Sparrow will publish additional volumes of previously uncollected poetry and letters.
SHERI MARTINELLI
(1918-1996) was an artist, writer, model, and magazine editor. She studied ceramics at the Philadelphia School of Arts, engraving at Atelier 17, and literature with Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Federal Hospital for the Insane. Reproductions of some of her paintings were published in
La Martinelli
(1956), with an introduction by Pound. She edited the
Anagogic & Paideumic Review
(1959-70) and privately published numerous booklets of prose, poetry, and drawings.
STEVEN MOORE
is the author/editor of five previous books—three on William Gaddis, one on Ronald Firbank, and an anthology of vampire poetry—and has contributed numerous essays on modern literature to a variety of periodicals. He knew Sheri Martinelli during the last dozen years of her life.
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C
HARLES
B
UKOWSKI
Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail
(1960)
Longshot Pomes for Broke Players
(1962)
Run with the Hunted
(1962)
It Catches My Heart in Its Hands
(1963)
Crucifix in a Deathhand
(1965)
Cold Dogs in the Courtyard
(1965)
Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts
(1965)
All the Assholes in the World and Mine
(1966)
At Terror Street and Agony Way
(1968)
Poems Written Before Jumping out of an 8 Story Window
(1968)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
(1969)
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills
(1969)
Fire Station
(1970)
Post Office
(1971)
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck
(1972)
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness
(1972)
South of No North
(1973)
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973
(1974)
Factotum
(1975)
Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1974-1977
(1977)
Women
(1978)
Play the Piano Drunk/Like a Percussion Instrument/Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
(1979)
Dangling in the Tournefortia
(1981)
Ham on Rye
(1982)
Bring Me Your Love
(1983)
Hot Water Music
(1983)
There’s No Business
(1984)
War All the Time: Poems 1981-1984
(1984)
You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense
(1986)
The Movie: “Barfly”
(1987)
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966
(1988)
Hollywood
(1989)
Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems
(1990)
The Last Night of the Earth Poems
(1992)
Run with the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader
(1993)
Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970, Volume 1
(1993)
Pulp
(1994)
Shakespeare Never Did This
(augmented edition) (1995)
Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s, Volume 2
(1995)
Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories
(1996)
Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems
(1997)
The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
(1998)
Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978-1994, Volume 3
(1999)
What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
(1999)
Open All Night: New Poems
(2000)
Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960-1967
(2001)
BEERSPIT NIGHT AND CURSING
. Copyright © 2007 by Linda Lee Bukowski. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition JUNE 2007 ISBN: 9780061873515
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1
For a longer account with documentation, see my “Sheri Martinelli: A Modernist Muse,”
Gargoyle
#41 (1998): 28-54. It can also be found online at
rob’t stock
: Robert Stock,
A&P
’s poetry editor.
Rotting Hill
: a collection of satirical short stories published in 1951.
“
now it is…face tigers
”: slightly misquoted from Canto 86: “Now my turn for thin ice and tigers” (582).
“
I bid you
…”: misquoted from a poem in
The Greek Anthology
as translated by Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer) in his
Paraphrases and Translations from the Greek
(1903): “A sailor buried on this shore / Bids you set sail / For many a gallant bark, when I was lost / Weathered the gale.”
Li Po
: Chinese poet (701-762), translated by Pound in
Cathay
(1915) and popularized by Arthur Waley’s
Poetry and Career of Li Po
(1950).
Matz
: apparently an editor of a small magazine.
Hearse…Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail: Hearse
was a magazine edited by E. V. Griffith; his Hearse Press published CB’s first chapbook in October 1960.
Light Year
: little magazine edited by Miles Payne out of Spring Valley, California.
Pain
: Miles Payne, editor of
Light Year
who had rejected CB’s poems. Payne’s 9-page letter is a pretentious sermon on “poetry, superiority, and people.”
my answer
: since CB will continue to refer to Payne’s letter, and because it mentions SM, it is included here:
Pearson
: Norman Holmes Pearson (1909-75), an English professor whom SM had met at St. Elizabeths. She had stored her paintings with him and was now sending work to him for eventual deposit at Yale’s Beinecke Library.
Portfolio II
: CB’s story “20 Tanks from Kasseldown” was published in the third (not second) issue of
Portfolio: An International Review
in 1946.
shekinah
: in Jewish theology, a manifestation of the visible glory of God.
Fry
: Barbara Frye (1932-), CB’s wife from 1955 to 1958.
Rockdrill
: Cantos 85-95 of Pound’s epic poem were first published as
Section: Rock-Drill
in 1956.
gramps
: SM’s term of endearment for Pound.
D.H.Law…statues of wood
”: untraced.
Po Li
: the pen name (obviously a play on Li Po) of SM’s husband Gilbert Lee (1928-), whose family’s name was Li.
hilaritas
: Latin: “joyousness.” CB seems to be quoting from a (lost) letter of SM’s, who probably picked up this term from Canto 83.
Sherman
: Jory Sherman (1932-), a poet who published in
A&P
and elsewhere before turning to writing westerns. See his memoir
Bukowski: Friendship, Fame and Bestial Myth
(Blue Horse, 1981).
Quicksilver, the one about doves
: “Peace” appeared in the summer 1960 issue of
Quicksilver
; rpt. in
DRA
(34-35).
Hitchcock
: George Hitchcock, San Franciscan writer and editor (
San Francisco Review, Kayak
).
Bagel Shop
: coffeehouse in San Francisco at Grant and Green.
Heyter’s Atalier de Set
: Stanley W. Hayter (1901-1988) taught engraving and painting at the Atelier Dix-sept, an art school in New York City prominent in the 1940s. His students included Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko.
gramps said: “ya’ kant git outta hell inna hurrrry”
: cf. Canto 46: “you who think you will / get through hell in a hurry” (231).
Knights temp
.: the Knights Templar, a medieval order of knighthood eventually suppressed by the pope.
Jeff and Adams
: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, American presidents admired by Pound and the subjects of several of his Cantos.
David R. Wang
: Chinese-American poet whom SM met at St. Elizabeths. He’s mentioned in Canto 96 (673) and occasionally contributed to
A&P
.
“
it
DOES COHERE
”: adapted from a line in Pound’s translation of Sophocles’
Women of Trachis
: “Splendour, it all coheres!” (New Directions, 1957), p. 50. (One of SM’s portraits of Pound appears as the frontispiece to this book.) Pound later wrote of his
Cantos
: “it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere” (116/817).