My list

Once upon a time I went through a Buk phase, a time when he was the only thing I could read. He got me through some tough times, and for that, I’ll always love the dirty old man. But that was long ago, so I wondered if he was really as awesome as I remembered, or if he just resonated with me because of where my head was at. So I picked up this early collection of poems and once again I was struck by the depth of meaning and emotion. Bukowski is important. His is the voice of a people who aren’t usually celebrated in literature ~ bums and whores, low lifes and riff raff, barflies and jailbirds, madmen and drunks. He speaks their language, for they are his people. It is a language that is raw and often vulgar, but it is also sensitive and poignant, beautiful and true. His portrayal of animals, for instance, reveals his compassion for the marginalized and vulnerable as much as his portrayal of destitute men and women. In “conversation on a telephone,” he describes a bird dying in the jaws of a cat. In “peace,” hunters shoot doves, the symbols of peace. In “ice for eagles,” he presents the goodness of a horse, in contrast to his own abusive father.But The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills is dedicated to Jane and it is the poems about her that move me the most. In “for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough: —” he looks though his dead loves’ possessions, her dresses, her jewelry:“and I call God a liar,I say anything that movedlike thator knewmy namecould never diein the common verity of dying, ”In the end he laments that “they will not/give her back to me. ”He runs the gamut of emotions as he works through his grief. In “notice,” he vents his helpless anger:“the swans drown in bilge water,take down the signs,test the poisons,barricade the cowfrom the bull,the peony from the sun,take the lavender kisses from my night,put the symphonies out on the streetslike beggars,get the nails ready,flog the backs of the saints,stun frogs and mice for the cat,burn the enthralling paintings,piss on the dawn,my loveis dead. ”For me, this is the most powerful poem in the collection. It also demonstrates why Bukowski’s vulgar language is not gratuitous, but an often essential component of his poetry. Those last three lines ~ “piss on the dawn,/my love/is dead” ~ cut to the heart of it. Hear the bitterness of his voice, the words uttered through clenched teeth, the pain made manifest in his sweeping dismissal of the whole damn world. In “spring swan,” he identifies a dead swan with his beloved Jane:“and I felt guilty for the swanas if deathwere a thing of shame”It is a common theme in poetry ~ how life goes on all around the one who grieves for the dead. There is a loneliness in such grief, for the grieving one is an outsider to life.And then there is the tenderness, the love that transcends death, in “for Jane”:“what you werewill not happen again. ”And “remains”:“this will never leave me:that I had loveand love died; ”So again I read these lines and again tears well up in my eyes and if by chance you see them, I will say they are for Buk.

The People Look like Flowers at Last is the last of five collections of never-before published poetry from the late great Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski.In it, he speaks on topics ranging from horse racing to military elephants, lost love to the fear of death.  He writes extensively about writing, and about talking to people about writers such as Camus, Hemingway, and Stein.  He writes about war and fatherhood and cats and women.

Great strange visionary poems by the author of Howl, “in the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century . . .”In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural an gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other. These poems almost unconscious to confess the beatific human fact, the language intuitively chosen as in trance & dream, the rhythms rising on breath from belly thru breast, the hymn completed in tears, the movement of the physical poetry demanding and receiving decades of life while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many worlds the self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self.

I am exactly what I am supposed to be.This is likely my favorite collection by Charles Bukowski. A man made famous for his vulgarity and debauchery—though to cling to such things misses the point and heart of his poetry—The Last Night of the Earth Poems removes the caustic armor and lets the tender heart beat out prose without fear, without need for deflection. While it is often the boozing and whoring and bitterness of Bukowski that is spoken of, particularly in college dorms, I've always felt that his abrasive nature was a mask for a fragile soul wincing away from pain, that there was something beautiful and passionate lurking beneath the gutters. Last Night was Bukowski's final collection written while alive and his awareness of inevitable demise creeps into the pages and allows him to speak more freely and passionately than ever before. A fitting collection to be revisiting as I sit silently with my beer, awaiting the next family funeral, awaiting the sharp daggers of held-back tears and gut-clenching awareness of mortality while a man I love and respect breaths through a tube in a nearby hospital with mere days left. Poetry keeps us eternal, keeps our conquests and regrets, our loves and shames alive and on display for all to learn from and imbibe like a fine wine to satisfy the soul and abate our nerves through the knowledge that we all share the same fate and fears and pains. The Last Night of the Earth is a splendid array of all things Bukowski, from his bitter wit to his most impassioned confessions, and is certainly a collection any fan should have at their fingertips.Confessionwaiting for deathlike a catthat will jump on thebedI am so very sorry formy wifeshe will see thisstiffwhitebodyshake it once, thenmaybeagain“Hank!”Hank won’tanswer.it’s not my death thatworries me, it’s my wifeleft with thispile ofnothing.I want tolet her knowthoughthat all the nightssleepingbeside hereven the uselessargumentswere thingsever splendidand the hardwordsI ever feared tosaycan now besaid:I loveyou.This collection is nearly painful to read at times. Bukowski offers a reflection on his life that is often funny, bitter and, in this collection, very heartbreaking. The ever-famous Bukowski poem Bluebird is found here (I've never felt much for this poem and wonder about its fame, it feels so detached from his typical style and reminds me of some of his extreme early works that I also didn't care much for as they felt as if he was overtly playing too much at 'being poetic' than simply letting the poetry flow freely as he argues for in many of his fine poems about the art of being a poet), as well as the awe-inspiring Dinosauria, We (you can listen to Bukowski read that poem himself here) and many others. There are angry tirades against false poets, hostile statements towards humanity, yet always a tenderness lurking beneath that reminds us of the importance of being good to one another, of appreciating the life we have, or keeping true to ourselves and striving towards our wildest dreams lest we become another fake and phony that Bukowski so detested. Let yourself be stricken with poverty and debauchery, he would say, as long as it was who you are and you stayed true to yourself. There are powerful statements of the ways literature can move us, memories of being driven to the heights of excitement and passion from Knut Hamsun's Hunger or Huxley's Point Counter Point, the pride in betraying his parents wishes and joining the obscene masses of writers (a absolutely fantastic account of this is found in Them and Us). There are humorous poems on feeling out of touch with the forward-moving world such as in Hemingway Never Did This which recounts accidentally deleting a poem from his computer, or the regret that fame came too late in life to make much use of it as in Creative Writing Class . More heartbreaking is his awareness of death and his testimonies to the agonies of old age. 'young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer,' wrote Bukowski. It truly hurts to read a tired and dying Bukoswki, but it fills the heart to the point of beautiful overflow.Are You Drinking?washed-up, on shore, the old yellow notebook out again I write from the bed as I did last year. will see the doctor, Monday. "yes, doctor, weak legs, vertigo, head- aches and my back hurts." "are you drinking?" he will ask. "are you getting yourexercise, your vitamins?" I think that I am just ill with life, the same stale yet fluctuating factors. even at the track I watch the horses run by and it seems meaningless. I leave early after buying tickets on the remaining races. "taking off?" asks the motel clerk. "yes, it's boring," I tell him. "If you think it's boring out there," he tells me, "you oughta be back here." so here I am propped up against my pillows again just an old guy just an old writer with a yellow notebook. something is walking across the floor toward me. oh, it's just my cat this time.The Last Night of the Earth Poems is a perfect Bukowski collection that contains all the joys from his range of poetry but keeps to the most heartfelt of messages. While it isn't an ideal introduction to his work, it is certainly a necessity for anyone who holds any love for the man in their heart. Painful as it may be, this is truly brilliant and a perfect examination of a life as it was lived.4.5/5'So this is the beginning / not the / end.'Dinosauria, WeBorn like thisInto thisAs the chalk faces smileAs Mrs. Death laughsAs the elevators breakAs political landscapes dissolveAs the supermarket bag boy holds a college degreeAs the oily fish spit out their oily preyAs the sun is maskedWe areBorn like thisInto thisInto these carefully mad warsInto the sight of broken factory windows of emptinessInto bars where people no longer speak to each otherInto fist fights that end as shootings and knifingsBorn into thisInto hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to dieInto lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guiltyInto a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closedInto a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroesBorn into thisWalking and living through thisDying because of thisMuted because of thisCastratedDebauchedDisinheritedBecause of thisFooled by thisUsed by thisPissed on by thisMade crazy and sick by thisMade violentMade inhumanBy thisThe heart is blackenedThe fingers reach for the throatThe gunThe knifeThe bombThe fingers reach toward an unresponsive godThe fingers reach for the bottleThe pillThe powderWe are born into this sorrowful deadlinessWe are born into a government 60 years in debtThat soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debtAnd the banks will burnMoney will be uselessThere will be open and unpunished murder in the streetsIt will be guns and roving mobsLand will be uselessFood will become a diminishing returnNuclear power will be taken over by the manyExplosions will continually shake the earthRadiated robot men will stalk each otherThe rich and the chosen will watch from space platformsDante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playgroundThe sun will not be seen and it will always be nightTrees will dieAll vegetation will dieRadiated men will eat the flesh of radiated menThe sea will be poisonedThe lakes and rivers will vanishRain will be the new goldThe rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark windThe last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseasesAnd the space platforms will be destroyed by attritionThe petering out of suppliesThe natural effect of general decayAnd there will be the most beautiful silence never heardBorn out of that.The sun still hidden thereAwaiting the next chapter.

Spontaneous poetry by the author of On the Road, gathered from underground and ephemeral publications; including “San Francisco Blues,” the variant texts of “Pull My Daisy,” and American haiku.HERE DOWN ON DARK EARTH before we all go to Heaven VISIONS OF AMERICA All that hitchhikin All that railroadin All that comin back to America —Jack Kerouac

A timeless selection of some of Charles Bukowski’s best unpublished and uncollected poemsCharles Bukowski was a prolific writer who produced countless short stories, novels, and poems that have reached beyond their time and place to speak to generations of readers all over the world. Many of his poems remain little known since they appeared in small magazines but were never collected, and a large number of them have yet to be published.In Storm for the Living and the Dead, Abel Debritto has curated a collection of rare and never- before-seen material—poems from obscure, hard-to-find magazines, as well as from libraries and private collections all over the country. In doing so, Debritto has captured the essence of Bukowski’s inimitable poetic style—tough and hilarious but ringing with humanity. Storm for the Living and the Dead is a gift for any devotee of the Dirty Old Man of American letters.

Let Us Compare Mythologies is definitely the work of a young man. Published when he was only 22 – that’s twelve years before the release of his first LP of moody and emotionally battering tunes, Songs of Leonard Cohen - Cohen tries to inhabit the voice of the weary prophet who has abandoned the world so that he may better brood over all his losses in love. Every one of these poems comes armed with biblical imagery (plucked from Judaism and Christianity), references to Homer, quaint notions of Eastern mysticism, and enough allusions of antiquity to fill a Grecian urn. The result is pleasant enough, but one too many of these poems relies on trips to the river with women of the “they will only leave you” variety, as well as mentions of grass and shards from the True Cross. Cohen is also writing fully in the “poems are meant to be abstract and ungrammatical” school of thought, which is a style that makes my poor narrative-oriented brain go, Ouch! But Cohen does prove himself to be competently literate about his posey, and even though the wizened-old-man shtick wears thin, a handful of these poems have that magic you’ll find in his songs, those sobering moments of lucidity that make you want to tell the bartender to go ahead and pour you another stiff one.

Bukowski the fiction writer and Bukowski the poet always seemed to be two different people. I've read a handful of his poems over the years and recognized a fire in him that is totally lacking from his novel work. In his poems, there lies a confident drunk, asleep at the wheel of life, seamlessly floating on by, content with distraction and apathy. In his fiction, there's an emptiness that's so passive, it's hardly a story at all.This is the first volume of his poetry that I've read from start to finish and, at points, it was like reading poetry for the first time and realizing what the medium is capable of. Other times, it was like listening to someone's drunk grandfather repeat what he did yesterday in his sad life. Bukowski writes about the same thing many times over and he wants you to know that he drinks, fucks, gambles and doesn't care about any of it.He never comes off as arrogant, which someone younger would maybe try. Instead, he lists his vices as a laundry list with no power to them, as if they're just there to keep him going. He's no tortured artist. He's just a man getting by, too tired to regret in large doses. He's one long shrug, spouting off some of the most true things you've ever known.Some poems are just small things he observed, so small that you're mad that he wrote a poem about it. Other poems have a furious passion for living a shitty life and it's brilliant. It's really hit or miss, and it's that way in blocks. It'll be three poems in a row that make you think Bukowski was given the keys of life and then it'll be three poems of Bukowski wasting your time like an old drunk at a bar.When he's good, he's goddamn glorious. When he's bad, he's miserable.In life and in poetry.

A book length collaboration between two underground legends, Charles Bukowski and Robert Crumb. Bukowski's last journals candidly and humorously reveal the events in the writer's life as death draws inexorably nearer, thereby illuminating our own lives and natures, and to give new meaning to what was once only familiar. Crumb has illustrated the text with 12 full-page drawings and a portrait of Bukowski.

Fear makes me a writer, fear and a lack of confidence. A major new biography on an increasingly important American literary icon, by the most acclaimed writer on the Beat Generation, Barry Miles. Miles knew all the key players in the Beat era, including William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and also recorded with Bukowski. Having spoken with people close to Bukowski, and with a full examination of Bukowski's extensive writings, Miles has written the definitive story of the laureate of American low-life.

This book contains the famous poem "the shoelace". . .it’s not the large things thatsend a man to themadhouse. death he’s ready for, ormurder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…no, it’s the continuing series of small tragediesthat send a man to themadhouse…not the death of his lovebut a shoelace that snapswith no time left. . .

Alternate cover edition can be found here. Poetry was at the center of Jack Kerouac’s sense of mission as a writer. “I’d better be a poet / Or lay down dead,” he wrote in “San Francisco Blues.” The celebrated “spontaneous bop prosody” of his prose was a direct outgrowth of the poetry that filled his notebooks throughout his writing life. This landmark edition gathers for the first time all of Kerouac’s major poetic works—Mexico City Blues, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Book of Blues, Pomes All Sizes, Old Angel Midnight, Desolation Pops, Book of Haikus—along with a rich assortment of his uncollected poems, six published here for the first time.Kerouac wrote poetry in forms as diverse as the classical Japanese haiku (and his own American variants of it, which he sometimes called “Pops”), the Buddhist sutra, the prose poetry of Old Angel Midnight (which he described as “the haddal-da-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight”), doggerel ballads and free-form songs, the psalms preserved in early notebooks, and the poetic “blues” he developed in Mexico City Blues and other serial works, seeing himself as “a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.”But his sense of form was closely allied to a commitment to spontaneous utterance—to a poetry awake to “All the endless conception of living beings / Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness / Throughout the ten directions of space”—and a longing for transcendent experience that marked his work from the beginning. “My only ambition,” he wrote in 1943, “is to be free in art.” That freedom came at a high personal price. Kerouac’s collected poems immerse us in what editor Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell describes as “the impenetrable complexities, engulfing vulnerabilities, and insoluble demands that life made on his heart and mind.”Many poets have found Kerouac a liberating influence on their work. Robert Creeley called him “a genius at the register of the speaking voice, a human voice talking”; Michael McClure saw him as using “the whole of his life . . . as an instrument of perception”; for Allen Ginsberg he was “a poetic influence over the entire planet”; and Bob Dylan singled out Mexico City Blues as crucial to his own artistic development.

Here, for the first time, is a volume that gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half century of brilliant work from one of America's great poets. The chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of American poetry, liberating it from closed academic forms with the creation of open, vocal, spontaneous, and energetic postmodern verse in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg's classics Howl, Reality Sandwiches, Kaddish, Planet News, and The Fall of America led American (and international) poetry toward uncensored vernacular, explicit candor, the ecstatic, the rhapsodic, and the sincere—all leavened by an attractive and pervasive streak of common sense. Ginsberg's raw tones and attitudes of spiritual liberation also helped catalyze a psychological revolution that has become a permanent part of our cultural heritage, profoundly influencing not only poetry and popular song and speech, but also our view of the world.The uninterrupted energy of Ginsberg's remarkable career is clearly revealed in this collection. Seen in order of composition, the poems reflect on one another; they are not only works but also a work. Included here are all the poems from the earlier volume Collected Poems 1947-1980, and from Ginsberg's subsequent and final three books of new poetry: White Shroud, Cosmopolitan Greetings, and Death & Fame. Enriching this book are illustrations by Ginsberg's artist friends; unusual and illuminating notes to the poems, inimitably prepared by the poet himself; extensive indexes; as well as prefaces and various other materials that accompanied the original publications.

Charles Bukowki’s stories, poems, and novels have left an enduring mark on our culture. In this collection of previously unpublished material—letters to publishers, editors, friends, and fellow writers—Bukowski shares his insights on the art of creation.On Writing reveals an artist brutally frank about the drudgery of work, and canny and uncompromising about the absurdities of life—and of art. It illuminates the hard-edged, complex humanity of a true American legend and countercultural icon—the “laureate of American lowlife” (Time)—who stoically recorded society’s downtrodden and depraved. It exposes an artist grounded in the visceral, whose work reverberates with his central ideal: “Don’t try.”Piercing, poignant, and often hilarious, On Writing is filled not only with memorable lines but also with Bukowski’s trademark toughness, levened with moments of grace, pathos, and intimacy.

This anthology contains a cross-section covering his career, including such legendary songs as 'Suzanne', 'Sisters of Mercy', 'Bird on the Wire', 'Famous Blue Raincoat' and 'I'm Your Man' and searingly memorable poems from many collections including Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers and Death of a Lady's Man. Encompassing the erotic and the melancholy, the mystical and the sardonic, this volume showcases a writer of dazzling intelligence and live-wire emotional immediacy.

One of the most recognizable poets of the last century, Charles Bukowski is simultaneously a common man and an icon of urban depravity. He uses strong, blunt language to describe life as he lives it, and through it all charts the mutations of morality in modern America.Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way is a treasure trove of confessional poetry written towards then end of Bukowski’s life.  With the overhang of failing health and waning fame, he reflects on his travels, his gambling and drinking, working, not working, sex and love, eating, cats, and more.Sifting Through is Bukowski at his most meditative – published posthumously, it’s completely non-performative, and gets to the heart of Bukowski’s lifelong pursuit of natural language and raw honesty.We recommend you read this as Bukowski wrote: by sifting through the madness for what hits you as the word, the line, the way.

he's a difficult crank, too much bukowski is probably not good for the mental health, but there is beauty in the ugliness. or there is truth, which is sometimes the same thing. revelation.in this book, i keep coming back to "white dog":I went for a walk on Hollywood Boulevard.I looked down and there was a large white dogwalking beside me.his pace was exactly the same as mine,we stopped at traffic signals together.a woman smiled at us.he must have walked 8 blocks with me.then I went into a grocery store andwhen I came out he was gone.or she was gone.the wonderful white dogwith a trace of yellow in its fur.the large blue eyes were gone.the grinning mouth was gone.the lolling tongue was gone.things are so easily lost.things just can't be kept forever.I got the blues.I got the blues.that dog loved andtrusted me andI let it walk away.

One of the letters that made me buy this book: "To William Wantling' nov 29 1965maybe my last letter offended you? remember being drunk as usual but remember mentioning something about a desire to rape eleven year old girls. I said desire, not actuality. in other words, if you had an eleven year old daughter staying with me you might consider her pretty safe, at least a lot safer than with men who won't admit their desires even to themselves, or if to themselves, then not to the rest of the world. I am not saying that I am anything special but as I say that if you take offense at my naturalism, at that which nature has put into me, then, you are a damn fool.