Dangling in the Tournefortia
Charles Bukowski
The poems between Play the Piano Drunk and Ham on Rye, named for the flowering shrub in the San Pedro garden years.
Dangling in the Tournefortia, published by Black Sparrow Press in 1981, collects Charles Bukowski's poems from the turn of the 1980s — after the European fame of 1978, settled in San Pedro, with Ham on Rye a year away. The tournefortia of the title is a flowering shrub: a plant name where earlier titles had rooming houses and terror streets, which is itself a fair summary of how the circumstances had changed. The first edition followed the Black Sparrow pattern of the years — 750 trade copies alongside 350 signed — and the collection has remained in print since. The subjects hold steady against the changed life: the track, the typewriter, the women, the past, now watched from a garden.
The collection continues the line that Play the Piano Drunk opened and War All the Time completed: the poet of poverty auditing his own comfort. Reading the three in order gives the whole San Pedro turn — fame arriving, the settling, and the past refusing to settle with it. This is the middle volume, written while Ham on Rye was taking shape at the same desk.
The connective collection between Play the Piano Drunk and War All the Time — the settling, recorded as it happened.
A shrub in the title where the early books had terror streets: the changed circumstances, admitted in one word.
1978
The European trips and the move to San Pedro reset the circumstances the poems record.
1981
Black Sparrow Press publishes the collection: 750 trade copies and 350 signed.
1982
Ham on Rye, written across the same window, is published.
Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
Charles Bukowski
The collection before it — the first of the San Pedro three.
Read our takeWar All the Time
Charles Bukowski
A 1981 poetry collection by Charles Bukowski, published by Black Sparrow Press — the poems of the early San Pedro years, between Play the Piano Drunk and War All the Time.
A tournefortia is a flowering shrub. The title places the poems in the garden of the settled San Pedro life — a deliberate distance from the rooming-house titles of the 1960s.
The novel was being written during this collection's window and appeared the following year. The poems are the same years, seen from the desk instead of the childhood.
750 trade copies, with 350 numbered and signed alongside — the standard Black Sparrow pattern of those years.
Yes — Ecco keeps it in print under the original Black Sparrow ISBN.
John Fante, the novelist Bukowski discovered in a Los Angeles library and championed until Black Sparrow brought Ask the Dust back into print in 1980.
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The San Pedro years in the career arc.
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