What makes bukowski

The effect is as though some legendary tough guy, a cross between Philip Marlowe and Paul Bunyan, were to take the barstool next to you, buy a round, and start telling his life story:. I was shacked with a silken-legged beauty. I drank and fought all night, was the terror of the local bars. An uncannily prolific afterlife was something that Bukowski counted on. And he rejected on principle the notion of poetry as a craft, a matter of labor and revision.

Such poems offer the same kind of vicarious wish fulfillment that differently inclined readers might find in spy novels or gangster movies, with their parodies of unbound masculinity. He bears the same relation to poetry as Zane Grey does to fiction, or Ayn Rand to philosophy—a highly colored, morally uncomplicated cartoon of the real thing.

The crucial episodes in his biography are reworked again and again in his poems and novels, so that any reader quickly learns the broad outlines of his story. Look at your knickers and shirt! Why do you do this to your clothes? Born in Germany to an American-serviceman father and a German mother, Bukowski moved at the age of three to Los Angeles. The Depression, which shadowed his whole adolescence, affected him primarily through his father, who took out his frustrations on his wife and son.

Bukowski describes terrible beatings, sadistically inflicted for minor transgressions like missing a blade of grass when he mowed the lawn. There they were—all the withheld screams—spouting out in another form.

This disfigurement helped to make Bukowski a surly, friendless teen-ager. But what attracted me most to Bukowskis writing was the simplicity, the conversational feel, the feeling you where talking to the man on the street. Bukowski was of no school of writing Bukowski is a kind of precursor to all the 'bad' small time poets, internet poets, average poets, terrible poets, loner poets, the poets who will not be known outside of a few close family and friends. Olaf said:. Bukowski works on different levels, for better or for worse.

I always describe him as a 'Cat in the Hat' for adults. However the real joy is searching for the inner beauty in his work. If one knows how and where to look, there's a treasure of emotions and philosophy hidden in his stuff. Hi, Plus, there are some really great poets that are involved in the small press. They do not attempt to copy Buk's style, as his style is what made HIM. But to say that all the small time poets are bad is not being fair to the talent that IS out there.

Founding member. His life and his work were equal on the same plane. There was no separation. That's like saying the Beatles were the precursors to every shitty garage band. They may well be, but they also inspired very many great musicians. The same can be said for Bukowski. Everything that followed him or was inspired by him is not "bad," "average" or "terrible.

There are already plenty of threads about his persona ONLY. Lawrence, etc. Bukowski wrote the man: that's who he was on the most basic level He worked his craft but largely it was already there he was jsut workin with what he had writing and expressing in a way that was integral to his entire way of life and mindset same as e.

Yes, 'Cat in the Hat' simple. That's how I describe Bukowski to those who haven't read him. And no, you can't do it because you didn't think to do it yourself. It took years, decades for Bukowski to get to where he wanted to be. Years of writing, millions of words, thousands of 'pomes' so that people could read his stuff and think 'Shit, I could do this! Whenever he attempted fiction his last novel being a great example it fell flat. Even his poetry is non-fiction. There's one story he wrote I forget the name where he's sitting in a bar and he wants to be alone and some random guy starts talking to him: "its horrible about all those girls who were burned" and Bukowski says I'm getting the words a little off.

Doing this from memory , "I don't know. But Bukowski was honest, "It was a newspaper headline. If it happened in front of me I'd probably feel different about it. He had very few boundaries as to how far his honesty could go. He never wrote about his daughter after she reached a certain age. That's about the only boundary I can find. Every other writer has so many things they can't write about: family, spouses, exes, children, jobs, bosses, colleagues, friends.

That's why they make stuff up. No other writer before or since has done that. For a particular example, see his novel, Women which detailed every sexual nuance of every woman who dared to sleep with him after he achieved some success. Most of these women were horrified after the book came out.

I try as hard as possible to remove all boundaries. But it's a challenge with each post I do. Bukowski got two stories published when he was young 24 and 26 years old but almost all of his stories were rejected by publishers. So he quit writing for ten years. Then, in the mid s he started up again. He submitted tons of poems and stories everywhere he could. It took him years to get published. It took him even more years to get really noticed. And it finally took him about 15 years of writing every day and writing thousands of poems and stories before he finally started making a living as a writer.

He wrote his first novel at the age of 49 and it was financially successful. After 25 years of plugging away at it he was finally a successful writer. Most people give up much earlier, much younger. Both my grandfather and father wanted to be musicians, for instance. Both gave up in their 20s and 30s and took what they thought was the safer route.

The safer route being, in my opinion, what ultimately killed both of them. And this persistence was while he was going through three marriages, dozens of jobs, and non-stop alcoholism. Some of this is documented poorly in the move Barfly but I think a better movie about Bukowski is the indie that Matt Dillon did about his novel, Factotum which details the 10 years he was going from job to job, woman to woman, just trying to survive as an alcoholic in a world that kept beating him down.

When the party became repetitive, it was almost like Bukowski no longer felt he needed to be there to write about it. One line he shared that stuck out to me and a line I think is worth closing with was…. By Cole Schafer but mostly Charles Bukowski. You gotta check this out -- Sticky Notes is my email list reserved strictly for entrepreneurs and creatives looking to sell like a Florida Snow Cone Vendor on the hottest day of the year.

Honey Copy. Riff on advertising, writing, creativity and life ——. Charles Bukowski's writing style was both his greatest strength and weakness. Now, I want to kick some dirt on him.