A 2004 article by William Booth in the Washington Post, Charles Bukowski, Bard of Booze
A Filmmaker Toasts the L.A. Writer Who Poured Over His Work
begins like this:
LOS ANGELES -- One of his old haunts still stands, a cement hangover in the smoggy sunshine, the courtyard apartment with dead plants on De Longpre Avenue in East Hollywood where Charles Bukowski lived and wrote and drank and wrote some more. He was literature's most prolific boozer.
The self-styled "dirty old man," besotted and beatific, lived his life in Los Angeles, the poet laureate of sour alleys and dark bars, of racetracks and long shots. "LA was the end of a dead culture crawled west to get away from itself," he once wrote. "LA knew it was rotten and laughed at it."
Bukowski wrote about men and women as beaten down as a crunched beer can, about endurance, rage, longing, sex and, mostly, about himself. He was a bestseller in Brazil; his poetry is taught to high school students in France; in the United States, in his day, he was a symbol of rebellion, but is probably best known for the 1987 film "Barfly," where he was portrayed by Mickey Rourke (alongside Faye Dunaway), the screenplay written by Bukowski himself for a movie he didn't really like very much.
Today, Bukowski remains a cult favorite, though the critics aren't exactly sure whether to consider him a modern Walt Whitman or a minor misogynistic poet in the post-Beat tradition.....
Two of Charles Bukowski's poems, plus a few more of his words:
The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski
your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
Beasts Bounding Through Time by Charles Bukowski
Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward us
impossibly.
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
“For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum
“We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes”
