what is everyone's favorite Bukowski poem? and thoughts on his other work.
I have read Post Office, Hollywood, and Women. doing a report on "young in new orleans" for english right now
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what is everyone's favorite Bukowski poem? and thoughts on his other work.
I have read Post Office, Hollywood, and Women. doing a report on "young in new orleans" for english right now
I apologize that I never responded to this thread earlier, being a fan of most of Bukowski's work. I recently saw an independent film made after him, mostly biography, called Bukowski: Born Into This; I would recommend it, if you have access.
Some of my favorite poems:
The Blackbirds Are Rough Today
lonely as a dry and used orchard
spread over the earth
for use and surrender.
shot down like an ex-pug selling
dailies on the corner.
taken by tears like
an aging chorus girl
who has gotten her last check.
a hanky is in order your lord your
worship.
the blackbirds are rough today
like
ingrown toenails
in an overnight
jail---
wine wine whine,
the blackbirds run around and
fly around
harping about
Spanish melodies and bones.
and everywhere is
nowhere---
the dream is as bad as
flapjacks and flat tires:
why do we go on
with our minds and
pockets full of
dust
like a bad boy just out of
school---
you tell
me,
you who were a hero in some
revolution
you who teach children
you who drink with calmness
you who own large homes
and walk in gardens
you who have killed a man and own a
beautiful wife
you tell me
why I am on fire like old dry
garbage.
we might surely have some interesting
correspondence.
it will keep the mailman busy.
and the butterflies and ants and bridges and
cemeteries
the rocket-makers and dogs and garage mechanics
will still go on a
while
until we run out of stamps
and/or
ideas.
don't be ashamed of
anything; I guess God meant it all
like
locks on
doors.
---
Young In New Orleans
starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for
hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, maybe it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I was always white.
and hardly charmed by the
world.
New Orleans was a place to
hide.
I could piss away my life,
unmolested.
except for the rats.
the rats in my dark small room
very much resented sharing it
with me.
they were large and fearless
and stared at me with eyes
that spoke
an unblinking
death.
women were beyond me.
they saw something
depraved.
there was one waitress
a little older than
I, she rather smiled,
lingered when she
brought my
coffee.
that was plenty for
me, that was
enough.
there was something about
that city, though
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.
sitting up in my bed
the llights out,
hearing the outside
sounds,
lifting my cheap
bottle of wine,
letting the warmth of
the grape
enter
me
as I heard the rats
moving about the
room,
I preferred them
to
humans.
being lost,
being crazy maybe
is not so bad
if you can be
that way
undisturbed.
New Orleans gave me
that.
nobody ever called
my name.
no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no
anything.
me and the
rats
and my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was a
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know.
---
man in the sun
she reads to me from the New Yorker
which I don't buy, don't know
how they get in here, but it's
something about the Mafia
one of the heads of the Mafia
who ate too much and had it too easy
too many fine women patting his
walnuts, and he got fat sucking at good
cigars and young breasts and he
has these heart attacks - and so
one day somebody is driving him
in his big car along the road
and he doesn't feel so good
and he asks the boy to stop and let
him out and the boy lays him out
along the road in the fine sunshine
and before he dies he says:
how beautiful life can be, and
then he's gone.
sometimes you've got to kill 4 or 5
thousand men before you somehow
get to believe that the sparrow
is immortal, money is piss and
that you have been wasting
your time.
this one is amazing, I love his work but I haven't found a book by him in bookstores here in Iceland...
"question and answer"
he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about
that--
it had kept them going when
all seemed
truly
hopeless.
putting the blade on the table, he
flicked it with a finger
and it whirled
in a flashing circle
under the light.
who the hell is going to save
me? he
thought.
as the knife stopped spinning
the answer came:
you're going to have to
save yourself.
still smiling,
a: he lit a
cigarette
b: he poured
another
drink
c: gave the blade
another
spin.
from http://todayinliterature.com/
Bukowski and the Barfly Life
On this day in 1994 Charles Bukowski died. He published over fifty books of poetry and prose in a career spanning a half-century, becoming the Grand Old Man of the fringe presses. He came by his skid-row, blue-collar themes honestly, enduring decades of bosses ...
"...with bad breath and big feet, men
who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk
as if melody had never been invented....
and the inevitable landlady,
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world had failed us
both"
http://todayinliterature.com/assets/...-200x300-2.jpg
Bukowski's gravestone bears the inscription, "Don't Try."
Haven't read any of his work but love the poem you posted.
Second that. Not a Bukowsi fan but after reading that part (?) of the poem you posted, I might be getting interested.
R.I.P. Charles Bukowski. For those who have not read his amazing, yet often shocking, work: http://www.online-literature.com/for...ead.php?t=3815
I always preferred his novels and short stories to his poetry, which (to me) just seemed like his prose cut into the shape of poems. His childhood memoir Ham on Rye is my favorite--an unflinching depiction of a child's dawning realization of the nature of the world around him. He owed a lot to Hemingway in terms of style--tough, terse dialogue with the underlying emotion remaining unstated.
I think he owed more to Henry Miller, and the nihilism of Celine.
im reading "post office" and yeah i can see a lot of henry miller in the prose. its a great novel by the way and such an easy and interesting read. apparently he was classed along with the beat generation but i think he was far better than kerouac and co who were always overrated in my mind. yeah so if youre into writers making fun of bosses from the perspective of the downtrodden everyday worker...no scrub that, if youre interested in a good read then give charles bukowski a go!
:banana:
i meant to write, he also reminds me of hunter thompson's style of writing. bukowski's great, has anyone read john fante's "ask the dust"? its apparently bukowski's favourite novel
:banana:
anyone realise that in charles bukowski's last novel "pulp" the character of nicky belane is similar to the cedric the entertainer's character in the coen brothers film "intolerable cruelty"? cedric's character busts into rooms yelling "IM GONNA NAIL YO' ***!" while brandishing a camcorder to film the adulterous liasons of a married person and someone else, just like nicky belane does in "pulp". those unoriginal thinkers, the coens....
:banana:
Post Office was the first piece of work I'd read by Charles......rest in peace...I enjoyed this genre quite a bit...albeit could make you "go postal" for sure.Quote:
Originally Posted by mister_noel_y2k
While I could only stomach about 10 minutes of the flick and blanch at the thought of ever having to watch someone named “whatever the entertainer” I wouldn’t chastise the Coen Brothers for being “unoriginal” (although their last few movies have suuuuucked), moreso as fairly well read chaps.Quote:
Originally Posted by mister_noel_y2k
Aside from the William Faulkner’ness in “Barton Fink”, they’ve had several other nods to the Faulkner (the carpet being defiled in “The Big Lebowski”, etc).
very true old chap, despite their last coupla movies sucking they have had a brilliant run of good movies like the big lebowski, the man who didn't (something) and o brother where art thou (based on homer i think) so theyre a good bunch of chaps when theyre directing their own material but when it comes to someone else writing the script like in intolerable cruelty then they tend to suck
:banana:
I enjoy the writings of Charles Bukowski because they make me laugh for all the wrong reasons. How many writers can pull that off?
I admit that a writer nicknamed Buke the Puke for his habit of throwing up regularly is a little hard on the sensibilities. For one thing he looked like a frog -- the combination of acne scarring and a perpetual watery-eyed hangover. His characters are always on the john with a bad case of the beer ****s when they discover the toilet paper rack is empty. His alcoholic girlfriend once asked Bukowski if he ever wiped his *** after she found brown stains on their bed sheets. If that happened to me, I'd feel too embarrassed to put it in a book, but Bukowski believed in telling the truth, warts and all.
My favorite Bukowski book is "Factotum" about his hobo journeys around the country when he was a young man. He took crappy jobs temporarily to eat and rent dumpy apartments and drank every day to keep from going crazy. During those years, he learned an important lesson about the Protestant work ethic:
“Frankly, I was horrified by work, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed…It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, ****, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?…Of all the ways you can spend your life, working a job is a low ignominious goal.”
I also liked many of Bukowski's free-verse poems. One volume of poetry was titled "Love Is A Dog From Hell." Amen, brother.
Bukowski never made much money from his writing until he was an old man. Even then, his books sold much better in Europe than the U.S. Then came the film "Barfly," which was a financial windfall for Bukowski. I liked the movie and the hilarious performance by Mickey Rourke. The critics and most other people hated it. Bukowski laughed all the way to the bank and wrote a book about the experience titled "Hollywood."
In his old age Bukowski proved the addage that living well is the best revenge. He bought a nice car and a respectable house, where he lived with a woman who took loving care of him. He learned to drink good wine instead of beer and cheap whisky. He still gambled on the horses, but kept his losses to a minimum. He gave speeches to college students eager to learn about writing. In 1994 he died at the age of 74 happier than he had ever been in his younger life.
Bukowski was a unique success story. He lived the dream that all writers have -- of being lifted out of misery by the magic of storytelling. He just had to wait until he was almost too old to enjoy it.
I haven't ever read anything by him, mainly due to the fact that Bukowski novels are insanely expensive in France but one day (soon) I shall. Both his poetry and his prose.