Beerspit Night and Cursing Read Online Free PDF Page B

Organizing Pound’s papers became the primary activity of her days, interrupted often by family concerns and her own failing health. She took the time to contribute a brief statement to a festschrift for Allen Ginsberg’s sixtieth birthday, and remained interested in some Pound events, attending a Pound-Yeats conference at the University of Maine in 1990 that featured her art.
    In her final years Sheri liked to park her camper in front of the local supermarket and watch the people come and go. It was there that she died on 3 November 1996, almost twenty-four years to the day after the death of her beloved Maestro, and forty years after he transformed the fisherman’s granddaughter into a goddess: “Ra-Set in her barge now / over deep sapphire” (92/638).
     
    Had Bukowski received a typical form-letter rejection from Martinelli when he first submitted his poems in 1960, he would probably have tossed it aside and moved on to the next magazine. But Sheri presumed to give him some advice, and he bristled at that. “I can’t be bothered with gash trying to realign my outlook,” he wrote to Jory Sherman in characteristically coarse fashion ( SB 21). He defended his aesthetics in his response to Sheri’s rejection letter, and so began a rambunctious correspondence that lasted for seven years. It’s surprising they had anything to say to each other, for they were complete opposites in almost every way. Though roughly the same age—Martinelli was forty-two, Bukowski turned forty that year—Sheri was emotional, idealistic, and quick to embrace metaphysical systems and conspiracy theories, while he was sensible, pessimistic, and down to earth. She admired the literary classics, while Bukowski had little use for them. She studied the I Ching , while he studied the racing form. She was very health-conscious and paid close attention to dietary matters, whereas Bukowski couldn’t be bothered with such things. There was even a marked physical difference: Sheri, the ex- Vogue model, was what Bukowski called “a looker,” while he admitted he was an ugly man. (“Beauty and the Beast,” Alexander Theroux has called them.) And, most important, they held diametrically opposed views on the purpose of poetry. For Bukowski, it was solely a means of self-expression and followed no rules but his own, while for Martinelli poetry was a guide to civilized behavior and a vehicle for the exploration of spiritual truths, with a long tradition to be respected and followed. It’s the romantic outlook versus the classical: the difference between Keats and Pope, Whitman and Eliot, or—to use the authors championed by Bukowski and Martinelli—between Robinson Jeffers and H.D. Sheri accused Bukowski of building “ass-hole palaces” in his poems, of wallowing in the mud rather than turning his mind to higher matters ( SB 21, 134). The only writer they admired in common was Ezra Pound, though for different reasons.
    And yet each recognized the other as a true individual, a person of spirit. Within weeks of their first exchange of letters they were writing regularly, opening up to each other as soul-mates, sharing intimate secrets and confessing to their desperate attempts to find meaningful activity in life. Sheri recognized Bukowski’s talent, even though she deplored his subject matter, and he praised her as “one woman in 90 million women,” no matter how harshly she criticized him. He was proud to be in correspondence with her: in a 1965 letter to writer William Wantling, Bukowski reported: “Pound’s x-girl friend Martinelli trying to cough up my whore-O-scope. stars, something. just think, somebody Pound went to bed with is now writing me, has been for years. my, my” ( SB 234). Several times Bukowski talked of driving up to visit her, and Sheri once considered coming down (with her husband) to move in with him. However, they never met, and both realized this was probably for the best.
    The bulk of these letters were written during