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Linda King (born 1940) is an American sculptor, playwright and poet. [1] She is best known for having been the girlfriend of American writer Charles Bukowski for several years in the early 1970s. [2]
Born in 1940, King grew up in Boulder, Utah. [3] She first married early in life, divorcing after 10 years. [4] During the 1970s, King edited the literary magazine, Purr. [5] King was an actress before she became a sculptor and poet. [4] King has two children. [3]
In 1970, shortly after the end of her marriage, King met Charles Bukowski and offered to make a sculpture of his head. [4] He accepted her offer, and they soon became romantically involved. King was 30 years old and Bukowski was about 20 years her senior when they started their relationship. [1] The relationship has been documented as volatile, turbulent and even physically abusive. On one occasion in 1971, Bukowski broke her nose during an argument. [4] On another occasion, King and Bukowski were accommodated at the City Lights apartment in San Francisco, after a reading at the City Lights Poets Theater. [6] By the following morning there was a broken window and a panel smashed in the door, and King had disappeared. Bukowski blamed her for the damage. [6]
Bukowski's stage debut was as an actor in King’s play Only a Tenant in which she and Bukowski stage-read the first act at the Pasadena Museum of the Artist. [7]
Bukowski and King finally split up for good in 1975, when one night an intoxicated King threw Bukowski's typewriter and books onto the street, angry at his infidelities. [1] The incident is detailed in Bukowski's novel Women , whose leading character, Lydia Vance, is based on King. [1] The same year, King left Los Angeles for Phoenix, because of what she described as "one extended nervous breakdown". [2]
She said of their relationship:
It wasn't that he had other women. It's that he always wanted me to know about them, always wanted to tell me all the details about what they did together. Who does that unless they really want to make you mad? [1]
King remarried and had a third child. The marriage also ended in divorce. [3] She worked as a bartender, waitress, and a part-time care-giver for the elderly. [2] She sold her own traditional portrait busts in clay, and published poems. One in particular, printed in 1997, references Bukowski: "I am the woman who knows for sure that Bukowski's balls were bigger I am the woman who knows that he liked hot chilies in his stew". [2]
In 2004, Phoenix's Paper Heart Gallery featured her paintings, busts and poems, along with documentary films about Bukowski, in a show entitled Friends and Foes of Charles Bukowski. [2]
In 2009, she sold 60 love letters written to her by Bukowski at auction in San Francisco's PBA Galleries. [1] The same year, in order to be nearer to her grandchildren, King moved from Phoenix into an apartment in the Sunset District of San Francisco. [1] In September 2009, she was one of the three poets in the presentation Tales of Bukowski & the Late 1960s LA Poetry Scene: A Reading & Report by Key Poet/Participants at Bird & Beckett Books & Records in San Francisco. [5]
In addition to her bust of Bukowski, King also sculpted busts of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Micheline, Harold Norse, and A. D. Winans. Her play Singing Bullets was staged as part of a showcase by Phoenix's Metro Arts Institute.
King has also sold an edition of at least 15 bronzes of Bukowski. [1]
King wrote a book Loving and Hating Bukowski. [1] She also has written seven collections of poetry:
Her poetry has been published in a wide variety of magazines, including The Bukowski Review and Wormwood Review .
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski's work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground newspaper Open City.
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems. Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach.
Jack Micheline, born Harold Martin Silver, was an American painter and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. One of San Francisco's original Beat poets, he was an innovative artist who was active in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s.
Norma Cole is a Canadian poet, visual artist, translator, and curator. An Anglophone Canadian by birth, Cole learned French at an early age, and went on to translate the works of French poets Emmanuel Hocquard, Danielle Collobert, Fouad Gabriel Naffah, Jean Daive, and others with whom she is intellectually allied. In the late 1970s and 1980s Cole was a member of the San Francisco-based circle of poets congregating around Robert Duncan. Her papers are collected at the Archive for New Poetry at the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California San Diego.
Lisa Jarnot is an American poet. She was born in Buffalo, New York and studied literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1994 she received an MFA in creative writing from Brown University. She has lived in San Francisco, Boulder, Providence, and London. Since the mid-1990s she has been a resident of New York City. She has taught creative writing and literature at Brooklyn College, Long Island University, Naropa University, and the Poetry Project in New York City.
Juan Felipe Herrera is an American poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. He is a major figure in the literary field of Chicano poetry.
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Richard William McBride was an American beat poet, playwright and novelist. He worked at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers from 1954 to 1969.
Alan Bernheimer is an American poet, often associated with the San Francisco Language poets and the New York School poets.
Nancy Joyce Peters is an American publisher, writer, and co-owner with Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books and Publishers in San Francisco until Ferlinghetti's 2021 death.
Allan Davis Winans, known as A. D. Winans, is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and publisher. Born in San Francisco, California, he returned home from Panama in 1958, after serving three years in the military. In 1962, he graduated from San Francisco State College.
Bukowski is a 1973 documentary film produced by Taylor Hackford and directed by Richard Davies.
FrancEyE aka Frances Dean Smith, was an American poet.
Alejandro Murguía is an American poet, short story writer, and editor. He is known for his writings about the San Francisco's Mission District.
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness was a paperback collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski, first published by City Lights Publishers in 1972. It was the first collection of Bukowski's stories to be published, and it was republished in two volumes in 1983, as Tales of Ordinary Madness and The Most Beautiful Woman in Town.
Mark Terrill is a well-traveled American poet, translator, and prose writer who has resided in Northern Germany since the mid-1980s.
Devorah Major is an American writer, poet, performer, essayist, editor, recording artist, and professor. She has won awards in poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction and is San Francisco's third Poet Laureate.
David Ruff (1925-2007) was an American painter and print maker.
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