a pleasant surprise came
in the mail yesterday--
pleasant until i opened it.
a new bukowski book.
he's been dead since
March 9,
1994
but they release
a new batch of poems
once a year, culled
by john martin
from the boxes
of unpublished
pages he left behind,
copyright linda lee,
Buk's legacy to her.
and you. and me.
i got this one
with a gift certificate
at amazon.com and
suspected something
was wrong when i
ordered it--Ecco Press?
what is that? and
why
a hardcover when up
until now it's been Black
Sparrow trade paperbacks?
i open the box and it looks
bad--the cover is shiny,
and though the design
is by Barbara Martin, the
spine is crimped and the
back has a lot of crap
printed on it: ecco
An Imprint of Harper
Collins Publishers
www.harpercollins.com
and a bar code
ISBN 0-06-052735-8
9||780060||527358 52750>
USA $27.50 / CANADA $42.95
and of course
it's a hardcover
only so they can
charge more
of those who
can't help
but buy it.
but the book
as object
is lacking, meant
maybe for a library,
it reminds me of
those stately but empty
Reader's Digest con-
densed anthologies
from the 1960s that
filled the bookshelves
of my assimilated Czech-
American grandparents
who subscribed to
book of the month club
culture to gain instant
admittance. what i'm
saying is it looks like shit.
the words are all there
and as i read i can
forget the feel of it
in my hands but it
lacks the perfection
of the Black Sparrow
editions--their textured
covers, the lack of any
hint of an outside world,
books that were about
nothing but themselves--
and it's never quite
going to sit right on
my bedroom shelf,
is not built to slide
into a jacket pocket,
won't curve to fit.
it's got the inflexible feel
and unforgiving edges
of a high school math text.
so why this lament?
"don't judge a book
by its cover." you can
blow that out your ass.
it's sad to see something
that wasn't broken
get fixed, and if this
were that day in 1998
when i drifted into the
bookstore at columbus
and 66th on my lunchbreak
trying to keep from going
insane i'm not sure i would
have reached for something
that looked like
this, would
probably not have walked
out with 2 books by Buk-
owski, and almost cer-
tainly it would not have
come to this, whatever
this is--call it an imitation,
my best Buk impression.
but that's better
than sounding like a
newscaster or college
professor. we all become
the things we absorb, so
it's best to choose carefully
our influences, covers and all. |
we don't write to be
judged,
we write to get it out of us
so
we don't do something worse. |
|
-Charles
Bukowski
|
|
