And this is one of the books to start with.

He’s been called a lot of things and has a bit of a legend built up around him. The fact that he was on one hand a fat, drunk, lazy, angry misogynist is true. The fact that on the other hand he was an honest, revealing, relentless, driven storyteller is equally as true. He has over 60 books in print, and if you could read them all without buying a bottle of whiskey and calling it a day I’d be impressed.

This particular work of Bukowski’s is from 1979, about midway through his writing life, and is dedicated to Linda Lee Beighle, “the best,” who he had a long-term relationship with and was eventually married to in 1985. He dedicates the book to “waiting/ in a life full of little stories/ for a death to come.” He would wait another 30 years and write more books and poetry after the age of 59 (when he published this book) than most people write in an entire lifetime.

The poems, which often come as short bursts of storyline or scenes from a life you feel like you’re glad you are not part of, deal with Bukowski’s continually favorite topics: how much work sucks, how broke he is, the revolving door of women in his life, the Los Angeles underground, and drinking heavily. Those are nothing new for a poet or a storyteller.

What makes Bukowski stand out is that he never once, not for an instant, feels sorry for himself. You get the sense that he sat down one day, looked at his hands and thought, “Hm. I like all this stuff but it’s destroying me. And I know it. What I’ll do is ride the lifestyle wave with all its potholes and document it. Live it and write it.” And then he just did. His poems don’t make the ugly beautiful, as many poets have the tendency to do- they are without sappy sentiment, but can come off as so real and dreamlike at the same time that you swear you were in the room with him. He makes the beautiful and disgusting the same. He tells life like he lived it, tells the people as they are, and never apologizes for anything. And he knows, as he says, “I’m lucky. I’ve always been/ lucky:/ even when I was starving to death/ the bands were playing for/ me./ but the red Porsche is very nice/ and she is/ too, and/ I’ve learned to feel good when/ I feel good.”

And that is the dirty, rotten zen of Bukowski’s poems. He is completely accepting of the future even as he is completely in the moment. He deals with the minute as it ticks, respects and even loves the degenerate circle he has drawn for himself, and, again, he doesn’t apologize for it. He doesn’t celebrate it either. He tells its stories. His stories. And he tells them with the care and precision of a man describing his backyard to a child. There is a little magic because he’s so good at it, and it’s not your backyard.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia