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Bukowski Review. Issue 2. Winter 2002-03. - Editor: Joan Jobe Smith.
3030 East 2nd Street, Long Beech, California 90803. Subscription is $11.00 per year. Write for more information.

A menu of full courses, a buffet, an all you can eat salad bar, a banquet, a balance hard to find is here reached, like the tops of mountains, like the bottoms of oceans. Damned hard to please Anubis and Christ and Cupid, Peter and Paul, Ying and Yang, Eng and Chang, brown eggs, white eggs, etc. and enough. If there was an ideal Bukowski review, part homage, part poetry, part critical, information, fun, interview, information, photographs, stuff and talking over a beer or two, three, this would be it. It is. The universe of Bukowski is in order here in this issue of The Bukowski Review. Thanks Joan Jobe Smith - lioness editoress. As the Buk might write, a picnic basket. So keep it going. Subscribe. Submit your wallet. Send some dollars. YOU will be happy, pleased, surprised, thrilled and intoxicated and a few other things. Let me drop some names: Gerald Locklin, Fred Voss, Gerald Nicosia, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, John Brantingham, Linda King, Joyce Metzger, Daniel Goude, Don Pierstorff, Billy Jones, Ann Menebroker, Michael Eastabrook, Melody Blake, Gary Goude, Juanita Joaquin, W. David Wright, Herb Kitson, Jack Saunders, Alan Dent. There.

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Opera Meets Skid Row. CD. - by Valerian Ruminski, Bass.
Nickel City Opera, PO Box 2616, Buffalo, New York 14240-2616. $16.95
http://nickelcityopera.com

BUKOWSKI BUKOWSKI BUKOWSKI. That's the hook. Welcome to this review, which is about The Ave Opera Theatre's presentation of Opera Meets Skid Row, which is based upon Charles Bukowski's skid row fascination, preoccupation with classical music. Damn. It was an easy thing to match the two - but it takes/took some form of insight and guts. But here it is. Valerian Ruminski (a bass - as in singer) is the star. He does the opera parts of this presentation or collage of Bukowski like character speaking poems - (spoke by Bob Kravitz) and classic opera singin. I have no measure or expertise to say where Ruminski fits in the world of singers or opera. So I have only my own instinct. I am not an opera fan. But I find myself drawn to this production because it is good, you can listen to it without being pissed, yeah - listen-able, not overbearing or arrogant and not heavy with the high sniff art fluff stuff. Ruminski, for my money, does a fantastic job - he sings Brahms and Henry Purcell and tosses in Old Man River by Jerome Kern. These then punctuated with spoken word by Kravitz. Then, the last section about 1/3 of the CD are a batch of Bukowski Songs by composer Persis Anne Vehar - also sung by Ruminski. So you have the essential Bukowski energy meshed with musical compositional genius and belted out operatically by the brilliant Ruminski and you have a tribute that that is an homage that is solid work towering about the others. Well worth the time to listen again and again. You have Ruminski, Bukowski and Buffalo, New York (the city of no illusions!) What more? Well you have Persis Anne Vehar and William Hicks on piano and an audience responding to this live performance. What more? Well, you have product that stands unique among the Bukowski memoirs and products floating around because it is an independent work! What more? It is totally accessible to the ear of the street, Bukowski ear, your ear. Listen, friends, you have your Christmas money. You have all those empty bottles waiting to be cashed in. You have the change you found under the cushions on the couch, the quarters under the bed. Get it together. I can only imagine the Buk listening to this one until it is tissue thin. What a wonderful knit - Bukowski/real opera. Wow.

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Stashu Kapinski Strikes Out - by Joseph Lisowski.
Rank Stranger Press, 156 Crest Drive, Mount Olive, NC 28365
email rsp@nc.rr.com No price for the book given.
Send $4.81 ($5.00 bill or singles - easier to mail) or write.

Cover by our own cait collins. That is a form of blurb. You know you are goin for a humping ride. (She got work in recent issue 6 of the Whirligig - check it out - but that is a different story.)...
So after reading Table of Contents I page to 21 where is supposed to be the info about the author. But there is none. I thought this is fine gesture. I like it. And the poems within begin with the person of the works - Kapinski - being the I of the poems being hit by a limo. If this isn't life I think. I think each morning each and everyone who pays his or her own electric bill is hit by a limo (driven by Bush these days - but that is a different story). Well, we have the speech of the people, the poems of the people, the cadence of people poetry, grit, hangover and the like. Ride by a bar that opens as early as possible on any and or every morning - there you has Lisowski's poems. Urban, ethnic. Workin people. And representative of this other form of poetry that tosses egg salad at Billy Collins and Bob Pinsky. By some miracle when I flipped this book open this AM I come to the page with the poem titled ASH WEDNESDAY. Catholic, I love it - all bars are full of Catholics. Anyway - so the incident: there is Kapinski in a bar noticing everyone with ashes on the forehead (that is what Catholics do on Ash Wednesday) and Kapinski is looking around at the ashed Catholics and then see some women and thinks he will wonder over and chat. And he looks in the mirror and there on his forehead - ashes. Christ. Indeed. Of course. If we are not all marked men and women when as we are about to begin the ancient ritual of courtship and breeding? well - no other poem captures better that instant. Damn. I know now that I head to the can to shit, shave and shower? no matter what? the ashes. Ashes, ashes. All fall down.

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Keep It Off by Theodore Knapsack. - by Tyler Evans,
2002. 3 Nevada Street, Syosset, NY 11791. wordfalling@hotmail.com
I imagine $3.47 or so.

The young poet's first experience within that realm of art that is the other brings intoxication. For some it brings nearly instant death and for others it brings nearly endless ecstasy. Knapsack is a young poet and this is Knapsack's first book. Who knows which way he will go? And ? it do not matter. What if this guy jumps ship like Hart Crane! Think of it. You read about him here! And if you send the $3.47! Think of it, you will have his first book! So let's go against the grain and look at the new guy's work. Knapsack sings the poem. They are songs, sung poems, or heavily influenced by youthful listening to pop song - the most prevalent and popular form of contemporary poetry. And the poems engage intense and heavy love and or drug use. Perhaps they are one in the same, which is then the message of work. Knapsack embraces his darkness from which these letters are sent out to this world. If Santa had these to distribute as gifts, I guess they would be left under the trees of lions, crocodiles, sharks or street kids, undergrounders, zinesters and the world of the other people. Maybe leave Santa a cookie and a Winston and you might get lucky.

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