Essential Bukowski: Poetry
‘The best poet in America’ Jean Genet‘He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels’ Leonard CohenThe definitive collection from a writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, acutely observant writing has left an enduring markHere is Bukowski eating walnuts and scratching his back, rolling a cigarette while listening to Brahms, showering with Linda in the mid-afternoon.Here is Bukowski knowing that the secret is beyond him, that people who never go crazy live truly horrible lives, that there’s a bluebird in his heart that wants to get out.Here is Bukowski at his most hilarious and heart-breaking, his most raw and profound; here is Bukowski at his best.
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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
First published in the United States by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, in 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Linda Lee Bukowski
Cover photograph of Charles Bukowski by Mark Hanauer
Charles Bukowski asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008225155
Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008225162
Version: 2016-10-21
CONTENTS
friendly advice to a lot of young men, and a lot of old men, too
the day I kicked a bankroll out the window
to the whore who took my poems
the best way to get famous is to run away
the state of world affairs from a 3rd floor window
for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough
john dillinger and le chasseur maudit
something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you . . .
and the moon and the stars and the world:
swastika star buttoned to my ass
the blackbirds are rough today
the last days of the suicide kid
girl in a miniskirt reading the Bible outside my window
face of a political candidate on a street billboard
a love poem for all the women I have known
and a horse with greenblue eyes walks on the sun
the history of a tough motherfucker
we ain’t got no money, honey, but we got rain
With more than twenty Charles Bukowski poetry books now available in print and dozens of first-rate unpublished poems on file, an essential collection has been long overdue. The task at hand was titanic: A prolific author by any measure, with some five thousand poems on record written over a span of fifty years, Bukowski famously wrote almost every night in an alcoholic stupor, trashing most of the gibberish the morning after. Picking Bukowski’s best poems out of this massive heap was daunting, to say the least.
“The bluebird,” “the genius of the crowd,” “roll the dice,” “the crunch,” and other popular poems were strong contenders even before I put together a tentative list. As I pored over both the published and the unpublished work, some relatively obscure gems, such as “when Hugo Wolf went mad,” “sparks,” “the loser,” and “another academy” came back to life for me. I also included poems that were pivotal in Bukowski’s career, like “swastika star buttoned to my ass,” which moved longtime German translator, agent, and friend Carl Weissner to become a fervent Bukowski enthusiast after reading it in a small press magazine in England in 1966. There were one hundred and seventy poems in my final selection for the book, which then had to be cut down to only ninety-two—“democracy,” “they, all of them, know,” “the word,” and other top-notch poems had to be discarded.
These ninety-two essential poems barely represent two percent of Bukowski’s mammoth output, but his poetic evolution is hard to miss in this chronological collection. The early poems, with their lyricism and occasional surreal imagery, give way in the 1970s to Bukowski’s “Dirty Old Man” macho persona, when he finally achieves success in his fifties, after which he takes, in his final years, a more philosophical stance on life. Through it all, what remains the same is Bukowski’s brilliance at capturing things as they are, his crystal-clear snapshots of his immediate experiences as well as the world at large, which he hardly ever photoshopped after the fact.
