Charles Bukowski

Linda King | Sweet & Dirty | Hcolom Press/Metropolis

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Linda King showed up in the Vagabond Press mailbox, unsolicited, back in 1972, in Redwood City, California. I’d never heard of her before, but the poems she sent had fire and were free of pretension. I wrote asking if she might have enough material for a chapbook, and she sent the manuscript for Sweet & Dirty. It was only then that I realized she was connected to Bukowski. Vagabond published the book, to the delight of some and the disgust of others. Most of what we published tended to draw these extreme reactions. It was a short press run and was gone in a flash. True to its name, Vagabond was always on the move — Munich, D.C., New Orleans, San Francisco, etc., and in 1974, in Ellensburg, Washington, we brought out a second edition of Sweet & Dirty. It too was gone in a flash. It’s now 2013 with lots of water under the bridge. I hadn’t thought about Sweet & Dirty in a long time, and then Herr Klaus of Outlaw Poetry, a powerhouse literary web site operating out of France, contacted me with the request to bring out a third edition. I agreed, Linda agreed, and here it is. The poems in Sweet & Dirty still have their fire, and also, I realize now, their innocence. What goes around comes around. — John Bennett – Ellensburg, WA, August 10, 2013 Continue reading →

francEyE | Call | Rose of Sharon Press

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francEyE the bearded witch of Ocean Park, was born Frances Elizabeth Dean in San Rafael, California, on St. Joseph’s Day, 1922. Without consulting her, her parents whisked her off to the East Coast where she grew up, beginning to publish in the 1930s in school newspapers and Scholastic. She studied verse writing with Grace Hazard Conkling at Smith College in 1941, had a villanelle published by William Rose Benét in his column The Conning Tower in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1942, but then wrote little and published nothing until about 1963, when she finally returned to California. She has been writing, attending poetry workshops, and publishing here and there ever since.

Her work has been included in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, in L.A. Woman (published in Germany), in two British periodicals, in The Chiron Review, among many others and will be included in the forthcoming anthology of California poets to be published by Tebot Bach next month. Her book of poems, Snaggletooth in Ocean Park, was published in 1996 by The Sacred Beverage Press. Pearl #25 contains a 21-poem sequence called “Why Steal Fire?” Blue Satellite Final Issue contains a 27-poem sequence called The Asteroid Poems

Known as the bearded witch of Ocean Park and the female Charles Bukowski (with whom she had a child), francEyE has been a fixture in the Southern California poetry scene for more than four decades. She writes prolifically in a style compared to Ron Koertge and William Carlos Williams, and frequents poetry readings in both Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area. Continue reading →