Six Poets

by John Thomas Idlet, Ann Menebroker, Ron Koertge

A selection of poems by six distinguished poets. A drawing of each poet done by Charles Bukowski; a group portrait of the poets done by Bukowski on back cover. A unique side of the notorious street poet rarely glimpsed.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1979

About the author

John Thomas Idlet was born in Baltimore in 1930, the son of a teacher and First world war veteran who claimed to have invented the "double header" ice-cream cone. His father later committed suicide. Thomas attended Loyola College and described being "poisoned by Thomas Wolfe at an early age". After school, he considered entering the priesthood, but instead served in the Air Force during the Korean War, working as cryptographer due to his very high IQ. He was a huge man; 6 feet and 4 inches tall, and 300 pounds, the writer John Arthur Maynard described him "a cut-down version of Paul Bunyan – huge bones, huge ribcage, menacing brow, and beard". After his discharge in 1954, he married, had children and worked as a taxi driver, psychiatric orderly and city worker, while writing never completed novels. Despite a hatred of computers, he later became a computer programmer. He required time off following a truck accident, in which he broke his ankle. During his convalescence, he began to write and grew a beard, which he refused to shave off when he returned to work. As a result he was fired from his job, and was forced to work mixing powders and cleaning vats in his wife's lover's paint factory. Having read Lawrence Lipton's book Holy Barbarians (1959), Thomas sold his books for $20, abandoned his family, and hitchhiked to California. A driver of a Cadillac picked him up outside Pittsburgh and took him to Beverly Hills. Thomas took a bus to Venice Beach, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Reviews

[Kent Winward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hit and miss with nothing spectacular, but the book has some great drawings by Charles Bukowski of each poet that created more character for the poets than the poems themselves.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

Various, Six Poets (Vagabond Press, 1979)

Perhaps I should just give up trying to figure out what poetry is, because it's obvious either I have no idea or the rest of the world has no idea. If I allow myself to believe the former, I end up with the strong desire to simultaneously retch, burn everything I've ever written, and huddle in the corner in a quivering ball. If I believe the latter, I often end up with the same response, because I have roughly a 95% chance, whenever picking up a book of poetry, of finding the usual unreadable crap that really has nothing to do with poetry.

Six Poets has an unfortunate mixture of not-poetry and stuff that ranges from the half-decent to the downright good. Whether you're willing to wade through the swine to get to the pearls is pretty much up to you (but I'll tell you, so you can save time, that all the book's pearls come in Ann Menebroker and Lyn Lifshin's sections). On the other hand, if you're fond of reading political prose broken up into lines to make it look artistic that passes itself off as poetry, you'll find no end of stuff to love here.

I originally bought this because it was illustrated by the late Charles Bukowski (and that no doubt added a great deal to its value when I recently sold it). The illustratins are, in many places, the best thing here-and to call Buk's drawings "naïve" is doing them a service. **