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Bukowski and The Beats: A Commentary on the Beat Generation (Translated from the French by Alison Ardron)((Followed by: An Evening at Buk's Place - an Interview with Charles Bukowski) - all by Jean-Francois Duval.
256 pages. $15.95. Sun Dog Press, 22058 Cumberland Dr., Northville, MI 48167 sundogpr@voyager.net

So, let's say that Duval has for sure done his homework. If you are new to all of this Beatness and Bukowskiness this is a clean and focused place to start. Not to cluttered with critical gibberish, factual, I mean tons of the factual, not over written or beating you up or slapping you with this theory or that. But not watering down the drinks either. A huge amount of pictures and additional material. A gigantic bibliography of Bukowski books, CDs. tapes, articles, and the same with the Beats. He has stuff listed that I have never seen. Stuff I never heard of! And he has generously footnoted all he says. Oh this does not make this a textbook! It just faithfully gives you the places that Duval has discovered that allows him to write his exposition. I'm impressed. Duval does some definitions of Bukowski in relation to The Beats. And points out that in this way and that he, Bukowski, is like The Beats and vice-versa and then unlike The Beats and Kerouac this way and then that. Read it and follow the thinking in the facts. The book is rounded out by then a long and solid interview with Bukowski, an interview that does not repeat that same old same old. It is new stuff. It is clean, a good slice. A thing of smartness and a good thing to own. But now I wonder. On what shelf shell this book rest? With Kerouac, Ginsberg, The Beats, or with Bukowski? I don't know. Maybe this is a new shelf altogether. Well, make it new, said Ezra.

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Opera Meets Skid Row.Drinking With Bukowski: Recollections of the Poet Laureate of Skid Row - edited by Daniel Weizmann.
Thunder Mouth Press, 841 Broadway, Fourth Floor, NY, NY. 10003. 221 pages. $15.95.

What could all of this be about, I wondered? And I wondered if any of this would be any good or just some kinda gimmick book to make the buck off the Buk. And there were not pictures. Just writing. And some of the writing was poems on top of that. And I wondered if these poems, although they were poems by poets I recognized and admired, were not just poem dribble buckets of buckin bull snot? Now I must write that I do not gamble because sometimes I just can't trust my first notions of buckets of buckin bull snot coated chicken wing brain. All my first fears about this Weizmann book were misguided, cynical, hornet nest infested stupidities and I should have been thinking about butterflies landing on pierced nipples. I wanna also mention before I get on with it that Weizmann, the editor here, also edited a collection of punk era posters called Fucked Up and Photocopies, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in punk aesthetic and art - it is a classic and a text that should be everywhere. Anyway, this book here to view is not punk, but Buk. Well, I must write that Weizmann did his well homework. He gathered up stuff by A. D. Winans, Gerald Locklin, Neeli Cherkovski, as he should of. And then he dug about here and there and came up with the Karen Finley piece on Bukowski (I had only heard of this) and got writing about Bukowski from Cupcakes, FrancEyE, Linda King, and poems from Raymond Carver (one of the classics about Bukowski) and from Wanda Coleman, and remembrances of all things past by John Thomas and Philomene Long and Harold Norse and Barry Miles. I mean here he is, Weizmann, he is workin! And from Bukowski country he has poems and prose by Joan Jobe Smith, Fred Voss, John Kay and a personal narrative, Bukowski Spit in my Face by David Barker (This is another one that I had only heard about during conversation around the office Scotch and Water cooler.). Let us toss in writing by Todd Moore and John Bennett and let's round it of with the some icing - a very interesting and informative interview with Bukowski done by Sean Penn. Of course there is more. And then there is more. And it is a healthy walk around the block book. No fat. Not a biography. Just right for a beer on Thursday night after work. Or after shoveling the snow, working on the water heater etc. No myth. Not sloppy tributes about how I live in the mountains in Korea and think Bukowski's urine smells like fermented yak sperm that makes me want to swim with wino walrus! No, no, no, no. Here is a well paced, smartly edited, inclusive and insightful collection of works that brings the life, times, art and person of Charles Bukowski a little more into the real. You will enjoy it. You enjoy it and eat a half dozen crab legs too. • TOP

The Life Force Poems - by Gerald Locklin.
Water Row Press, P.O. Box 438 Sudbury, MA. 01776. 205 pages $16.95.

As I have come to know Gerald Locklin's poetry these past half dozen years or so, I have grown found of their easy rolling lines and Locklin's quick wit and his ability to find the ironic is so many of our everyday situations. This book delivers the pizza and salad and Chinese food to the doorstep. And you don't have to tip! But I must now write that this book of poetry moved me, moved me to an other place I might call sublime. It is more than just a book of poems. The Life Force Poems is a ruby in the turban of the master. I must write that it is a masterwork, his best big collection and perhaps his best collection most of forever and ever. It is supberb. Locklin, it seems to me, has found that place in poetry where the poem itself as an entity gives way to essence. The world does not get into this poetry or get in the way. The works are so refined that the poetry hovers above the poems. This poetry is a world. He begins this collection with a group of poems about the works and life of Van Gogh. Van Gogh is probably one of only a handful of artists whose work is recognized by the crowd. They might know Pollack, maybe. They probably have some sense of what a Picasso looks likes. Probably Michelangleo and De Vinci - but they don't count - too old. And I am sure lots of folk know Warhol's soup cans. The old timers were just religion. The others - modern art - I don't get it. You have heard it. What is it? But Van Gogh! He is, as Kenneth Rexroth once pointed out is some review of Van Gogh's letters to Theo, Van Gogh was or is - yes IS- the only painter people recognize, that people really love. It is the people part of that real love that Locklin has captured. His poetry is totally intoxicating and seducing and pulls one into its center as would a Van Gogh flower suck you into its heart as if you, dear reader, were some drunken, stumbling Bachus bee reveling a reveler in the pollen and honey of this bowkay. Now, some of you I am sure remember the Locklin poems and prose of heavy drinking and the wild, high life. That's gone. In its stead there is art and jazz, which Locklin consumes like cans of beer and bottles of cream sherry. At poetic art, at heart, Locklin is a sensualist and his poems spring from the heightened states of life. He is stimulated to art by art and moved deep to create. In one of his Van Gogh poems Locklin writes about the young art student Van Gogh observing his fellows art students drawing the stuff of life but they were drawing it as if it were dead. When I read some poems, about life and living, they, for sure seem dead. But I have to write that like Van Gogh, Gerald Locklin has found the pulse of living and has transformed its vigor and joy into art. Locklin has written life into what was dead poetry. He has captured the life force of each instant and has produced a force of poetry like an aura, and dare I write a halo! His Catholicism would be amused by that, I think and about his likeness to Van Gogh. Still these things do work in describing this book, this bar, which for all of us, has been just cranked up a few more notches and on which also, the bar, sit fully filled drinks for all.

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The Clevelanders. - Kirpan Press
48 pages. 8 ˝ x 11 inches. $20. Kirpan Press, PO Box 2943 Vancouver WA 98668-2943 Plus $2.00 postage etc. payable to A. Horvath.

A. Horvath, publisher for more than 35 years, has got it in his blood. It is his blood. He has hear here with heart pumping wildly assembled The Clevelanders being James R. Lowell, d.a. levy, rjs, Geoffrey Cook, Kent Taylor and Tom Kryss. Those who were there then, when it was born, a poetry that belonged to all people. They were there, like the Three Kings and the shepherds. Now when you think of the history, when you study the history that is of what is THE HOLD today, a first major manifestation of that power, that sociology off the island of Manhattan, below the towers of the academy, away from that peninsula called San F., first came bursting up in Cleveland like volcanoes of marching to sneakers on concrete and tuba notes of the French Revolution. I think Rimbaud was there. I think Bakunin was there. What a place of the Gods! What a time of endless spring! The 1960s and the burgeoning of the small press, the radical press, the revolutionary press, the press in opposition to the corporate and against the poetry of poodles and rich kids. I am with you in Cleveland. Holy, holy, holy, holy. It is so comfortable and proper and correct to have the senior members of this small press world of ours so cherished in this beautiful book by Alan Horvath, which features the not enough published words of James Lowell (Asphodel bookshop) and his work in this book called Letter to Margaret Randall frames the era when poetry was busted, not ignored and poets were in fact still dangerous (not to each other -as we slash and burn each other with tired gossip, but dangerous to government and police and the right-wing!). Bush you wouldn't last a minute! And d. a. levy collages here and collages of Kent Taylor harvesting of popular culture and juxtapositioning with cartoon and those of rjs, which are then poems more mod contemporary for their proposal of multiple entry points and the reading of vis-pictures in the context of poem (word and visual are equal in them) and the poems of Cook, Taylor and Kryss breaking the sleeping stone with dinosaur poem fire power. Here the pure pleasure of the roots of the great tree. Here that rain beating in time on tin roofs and in gutters feeding those wells from which we still drink and gorge. Here we become intoxicated the sheer force of poetry and poems from the pure place of poetry and poems. Poems, yes poems, poems without the shit!

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