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Jules Smith -
ART, SURVIVAL AND SO FORTH
The Poetry of Charles Bukowski.

This is the book that thoughtful readers of Charles Bukowski have been waiting for. Based on extensive research, it places Bukowski's poetry in it's American cultural context, and explores the key poems and collections in his development. It traces magazines, literary contacts and influences from the mid-1940's to The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992).

Want to know about Bukowski and the movies, the Beats, Hemingway, Céline and Walt Whitman? About how and why Bukowski formed his unique style and image? And about where he fits in to West Coast and post-War American verse? Scholarly but accessible, this is the essential book to have. Also contains drawings by David Hernandez, rare photographs of C.B., and a preface by Gerald Locklin.

"No library, personal or professional, that takes itself seriously should be without this vigorous and indispensable volume. Jules Smith does for Bukowski studies what Bukowski did for American literature - electrify it."
Gerald Locklin

Preface

   This culmination of twenty years of loving labor on the work of Charles Bukowski by Jules Smith represents a critical breakthrough, a shift in perspective, and an elevation of Bukowski Studies to a new plane of serious technical analysis and informed historical positioning. Although the book takes into consideration the best of the American and Continental commentary that currently exists, it also offers an intriguing and uniquely British point of view. Buk's work is seen as heavily indebted to the Hollywood movies of the 1930s and'40s and to the young author's outsider status as having been declared psychologically unfit for service in the Second World War.
   Smith investigates in detail the formal influences of Whitman's broadening of subject matter, iterative parallelisms, and revival of narrative, Robinson Jeffers' Inhumanism, and the long, strophic lines of both predecessors. As a poet based for thirty-six years in Southerm California, I am especially grateful for the insightful attention paid to the complex relationship of subsequent generations of L.A./Long Beach writers to the Bukowkian model. I share, furthermore, his conviction that Bukowski's work is of at least the stature of Ginsberg's, Kerouac's, and Henry Miller's - I would, in fact, place him a notch above all three. I also find of great significance the "anxiety of influence," to invoke Harold Bloom's terminology, of Bukowski's Oedipal relationship to his towering, glowering forefather, Ernest Hemingway.
   All who value the achievements of Charles Bukowski will rejoice that he is at last enjoying the high level of scholarly attention and prestige signalled by the publication of this landmark study.

Gerald Locklin.

Jules Smith
ART, SURVIVAL AND SO FORTH.
Wrecking Ball Press
ISBN 1-903110-03-3