With titles like "Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail," "Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness," and "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," Charles Bukowski's work is still the stuff that teenage poet-boys read on the bus. Bukowski is a...
[more]With titles like "Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail," "Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness," and "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," Charles Bukowski's work is still the stuff that teenage poet-boys read on the bus. Bukowski is a movement-less poet: not a Beat or a Confessional, not of the Meat or New York schools. Artistically, he is often compared to Hemingway and Henry Miller, macho writers who focus on the male psyche. But neither of them has the gallows humor of Bukowski, who made as much fun of his later fame and fortune as he did of his early down-and-out years.
Bukowski is rude, lewd, hilarious, and accurate. His writing is a success story of the white American vernacular: spare, supple, sensitive, and dirty. His material is acutely autobiographical, but Bukowski's quick mind always connects the personal to the world beyond. His work also has a timeless quality to it, with regular references to Classical writers, themes, and situations -- this is a writer concerned with aligning himself with the history of his craft.
Though he's well known for his prose, Bukowski felt that poetry was the thread of sanity running through his otherwise rough-and-tumble life. The son of immigrants, Bukowski was born in Germany in 1920 and moved with his parents to the U.S. shortly afterward. His life seems to have been irreversibly shaped by the abuse he received from his brutal father -- he later described their relationship in the prose work "Ham and Rye."
Having written his first stories as a teenager, Bukowski left school and family behind at 22 and became a drifter. He worked various jobs as a manual laborer and continued to write in his spare time. Then in 1942 he met his first love (he was prone to female trouble); with her, he departed on a drinking binge that took up the next ten years. Only when he came out of it, sobering up in the hospital after suffering a bleeding ulcer, did he begin to write again. This time he wouldn't stop (though he wouldn't quit drinking, either). Bukowski said that he'd die if he quit writing, and that he'd only quit writing by dying.
After penning several prose and poetry publications, Bukowski began producing a weekly column in the late '60s; "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," which appeared in the alternative newspaper Open City, gave him a wide readership and fanned the flames of an already considerable underground reputation.
In 1969 Bukowski got the offer of every writer's fantasies. John Martin of Black Sparrow Books promised him $100 a month to write full-time for the rest of his life. Bukowski quit his day job and formed a lifelong partnership with Martin. His career practically got away from him after that; in 1974, for example, he had the confounding experience (for a poet) of selling 50,000 copies of his book "Poems Written Before Jumping out of an 8-Story Window" in Germany. Continuing in this vein, Bukowski was offered the chance to write a screenplay based on his life -- the resulting film, "Barfly," made him a cult hero.
Bukowski continued to be productive until his death from leukemia in 1994. In fact, he was so prolific that Black Sparrow Press still puts out posthumous works by the guy they hired back in 1969.
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