About Jory Sherman
Jory Sherman began his literary career as a poet in San Francisco’s famed North Beach in the late 1950s, during the heyday of the Beat Generation. His poetry and short stories were widely published in literary journals when he began writing commercial fiction. He has won numerous awards for his poetry and prose and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Letters for his novel, Grass Kingdom. He won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America for The Medicine Horn. He has also won a number of awards from the Missouri Writers Guild, and other organizations.
Sherman was a book producer, packaging books for many major publishers, including Avon, Bantam, Berkley, Harper Collins, Doubleday, Paperjacks, Pinnacle, Harlequin Gold Eagle, Zebra, and others. His CHILL series of mysteries, published by Pinnacle, appeared in 14 countries. He has published more than 400 books since 1965, more than 1000 articles and 500 short stories. His latest collection is entitled LITTLE JOURNEYS, published by AWOC, with an introduction by distinguished novelist Richard S. Wheeler.
In 1995, Sherman was inducted into the National Writer’s Hall of Fame. He lived in the Ozarks for over 20 years, last making his home in Branson. His writing regularly appears in The Ozarks Mountaineer and Ozarks Monthly his latest collection of Ozarks pieces are in The Hills of Home, published by Hardshell Word Factory and THE SADNESS OF AUTUMN, published by AWOC in Denton, Texas. Another Ozarks collection of stories and articles was just published by Gallivant Press, HILLS OF EDEN. Rebecca J. Vicerky is the publisher of his memoir of his friendship with poet Charles Bukowski, entitled BUKOWSKI & ME, and recently also published his novel, THE BALLAD OF PINEWOOD LAKE. He now lives on a lake in northeast Texas. Literary critics consider Sherman to be among the top 5 of western writers, according to Dale Walker, historian. Warren French, former professor of literature at the University of Florida, wrote that: “Jory Sherman has a strange and powerful knowledge of language and an almost perfect ear.”
Contact: jory@countrynet.net
Website: www.jorysherman.com
TALKING POETRY WITH BUKOWSKI
Yes, Charles Bukowski, the poet, and I discussed poetry in his apartment on Mariposa and the one he had on DeLongpre. But, the conversations were not academic.
There was no talk of iambs, pentameter, tetrameter or hexameter. No discussion of dactyls or caesuras. For all I knew, Hank thought a dactyl was a three-toed prehistoric lizard, and stressed or unstressed syllables or the foot, held no interest for him.
Bukowski wanted blood spilled on the page. He wanted agonized screams from the bars on Western Avenue. He was fascinated with the dog shitting on the lawn outside his window, the whore who lives upstairs, the amber glow of the beer in his hands.
He wanted to use a hammer and a bludgeon to forge the lines in his poems, yet often it was a silversmith’s hammer tapping the delicate crystal of a glass chalice. He loved to talk of Robinson Jeffers and the hawks of Big Sur, the lean prose of Hemingway, and Celine. He did not know of Verlaine, Rimbaud, X, or Lorca, for he was more grounded in the sensory impressions of his own world in the ghetto of West Hollywood where the strets shrieked in blaring red and yellow neon and the beer bottles clinked together on the bar while he eyed a black woman’s short skirt and ebony legs. - Jory Sherman
