CHARLES BUKOWSKI 1920-1994

Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, and carne to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles, where he worked for mam years for the U.S. Postal Service. Although his work is reminiscent of Beat poetry in its confessionalism, existential bleakness, and use of American speech, Bukowski implicitly rejects visionary and shamanistic poetics in favor of a gritty roominghouse lyricism. His many books of poetry, which appeared almost yearly, include The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969), Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972), Burning in Water Drowning in Fame: Selected Poems 1955-1973 (1974), Love Is a Dogfrom Hell (1977), War All the Time: Poems 1981-1984 (1984), The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966 (1988), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). Also known as a novelist and short story writer, Bukowski primarily wrote autobiographical narrative poems. Critic Julin Smith writes of his work, "From John Fante, Bukowski took the idea that the streets of Los Angeles (not Hollywood) represented a viable fictional world; from Celine, an attitude of misanthropic extremism. But Ernest Hemingway, the most accessible modernist, provided Bukowski with a macho role model, an existential material, and an experimental style already pushed in the direction of American 'speech.' "
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Bukowski's terse writing style is often compared to Hemingway's; in his story "Class," Bukowski humorously acknowledges this literary debt by having Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's fictional counterpart in much of his writing, knock out the elderly Hemingway. One critic finds in Bukowski's "horizontal" poetry of surfaces a characteristically postmodern rejection of metaphysics that "contents itself with the flesh, the surface of the human condition."* Bukowski's writing has an extraordinary popularity in Europe. Perhaps due to its "anti-literary" character, his work is rarely the subject of scholarship in the United States. Bukowski was also author of the screenplay for Barbet Schroeder's film Barfty (1987).
1. " C h a r l e s Bukowski and the Avant-Garde,'* The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 5, No. 3 ( F a l l 1985), p. 57. 2. John William Corrington, " C h a r l e s Bukowski and the Savage Surfaces," Northwest Review, Vol. 6, No. 4 ( F a l l 1963), p. 123.

crucifix in a deathhand
yes, they begin out i n a w i l l o w , I think the starch mountains begin out i n the w i l l o w and keep right on going without regard for pumas and nectarines somehow these mountains are like an od woman w i t h a bad memory and a shopping basket. we are i n a basin. that is the idea, d o w n i n the sand and the alleys, this land punched-in, cuffed-out, divided, held like a crucifix i n a deathhand,
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crucifix in a deathhand this land bought, resold, bought again and sold again, the wars long over, the Spaniards all the way back i n Spain d o w n i n the thimble again, and now real estaters, subdividers, landlords, freeway engineers arguing. this is their land and I walk on it, live on i t a little w h i l e near Hollywood here I see young men in rooms listening to glazed recordings and I think too of od men sick of music sick of everything, and death like suicide I think is sometimes voluntary, and to get your hold on the land here i t is best to return to the Grand Central M a r k e t , see the od Mexican women, the poor . . . I am sure you have seen these same women many years before arguing w i t h the same young Japanese clerks w i t t y , knowledgeable and golden among their soaring store of oranges, apples avocados, tomatoes, cucumbers and you know how these look, they do look good as i f you could eat them all light a cigar and smoke away the bad w o r l d . then it's best to go back to the bars, the same bars wooden, stale, merciless, green w i t h the young policeman walking through scared and looking for trouble, and the beer is still bad it has an edge that already mixes w i t h vomit and decay, and you've got to be strong i n the shadows to ignore i t , to ignore the poor and to ignore yourself and the shopping bag between your legs d o w n there feeling good w i t h its avocados and oranges and fresh fish and w i n e bottles, w h o needs a Fort Lauderdale winter? 25 years ago there used to be a whore there w i t h a film over one eye, who was too fat and made little silver bells out of cigarette tinfoil. the sun seemed warmer then although this was probably not true, and you take your shopping bag outside and walk along the street and the green beer hangs there just above your stomach like a short and shameful shawl, and you look around and no longer see any od men.

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1965

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C H A R L E S

B U K O W S K I

startled into life like fire

in grievous deity my cat walks around he walks around and around with electric tai) and push-button eyes he is alive and plush and final as a p l u m tree neither of us understands cathedrals or the man outside watering his lawn i f I were all the man that he is cat i f there were men like this the w o r l d could begin he leaps up on the couch and walks through porticoes of m y admira tion. 1965

i am dead but i know the dead are not like this

the dead can sleep they don't get up and rage they don't have a w i f e . her w h i t e face like a flower i n a closed w i n d o w lifts up and looks at me.

the mockingbird the curtain smokes a cigarette and a moth dies i n a freeway crash as I examine the shadows of my hands. an o w l , the size of a baby clock rings for me, come on come on it says as Jerusalem is hustled down crotch-stained halls. the 5 a.m. grass is nasal now in hums of battleships and valleys in the raped light that brings o n the fascist birds. I put out the lamp and get i n bed beside her, she thinks l'm there mumbles a rosy gratitude as I stretch m y legs to coffin length get i n and swim away f r o m frogs and fortunes.

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my od man
16 years od d u r i n g the depression I ' d come home d r u n k and all m y c l o t h i n g shorts, shirts, stockings suitcase, and pages of short stories w o u l d be thrown out on the front l a w n and about the street. my mother would be waiting behind a tree: " H e n r y , Henry, don't go i n . . . he'll kill you, he's read your stories . . . " " I can w h i p his ass . . . " " H e n r y , please take this . . . and find yourself a r o o m . " but it w o r r i e d h i m that I might not finish high school so I ' d be back again. one evening he walked i n w i t h the pages of one of m y short stories (which I had never submitted to h i m )

my od man and he said, " t h i s is a great short story." I said, " o . k . , " and he handed i t to me and I read i t . it was a story about a nch man w h o had a fight w i t h his w i f e and had gone out into the night for a cup of coffee and had observed the waitress and the spoons and forks and the salt and pepper shakers and the nen sign in the w i n d o w and then had gone back to his stable to see and touch his favorite horse w h o then kicked h i m in the head and killed h i m . somehow the story held meaning for h i m though w h e n I had w r i t t e n i t I had no idea of w h a t I was w r i t i n g about. so I told h i m , "o.k., od man, you can have i t . " and he took it and walked out and closed the door. I guess that's as cise as we ever got.

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1977