In “ Alone With Everybody” he says that there is “no chance / at all: / we are all trapped / by a singular / fate” and “nobody ever finds the one.” That’s some pretty bleak stuff, but the posthumously published, “ The Laughing Heart,” gives us a glimpse into the more hopeful side of Bukowski with lines of positivity like “you can’t beat death but / you can beat death in life, sometimes.”

From extended interview and documentary “The Charles Bukowski Tapes,” the man himself said, “The further away I am from the human race, the better I feel… I do not like the human race” - a cynical quote, no doubt.īukowski can certainly be a bit of a downer in his writing. Bukowski wrote about humanity, but with a distanced and detached approach. Finally, Bukowski received an offer to work as a full-time writer for John Martin and Black Sparrow Press, quitting the post office job once and for all to “play at writer and starve,” as he put it.īukowski’s poetry is unlike most of what you’ll read from any other poet. Postal Service and continued to write poetry. In the ‘60s, Bukowski returned to his job with the U.S. A hospital visit for a near-fatal bleeding ulcer is what got Bukowski back into writing - specifically writing poetry. During those ten years, Bukowski worked at a pickle factory, a post office and other intermittent jobs as he wandered the United States. Bukowski graduated from Los Angeles High School and attended Los Angeles City College for a couple of years before dropping out to pursue a writing career in New York.īukowski had little initial publishing success in New York and ended up quitting writing for about ten years. 16, 1920, in Andernach, Germany, but raised in Los Angeles, Bukowski had a rough childhood characterized by frequent abuse from his father and exclusion from other children because of his clothing, German accent and a severe case of acne he would later develop in his teenage years. To me, these little details and complexities are what make Bukowski’s poetry so profound and worth every bit of praise received.īorn Aug. Bukowski boasts an impressive body of work composed of short stories, novels and thousands of poems - lots of which explore controversial themes of violence, sex, poverty and more.īukowski is often pigeonholed into categories of cynicism and alcoholism, so much so that critics tend to overlook the delicate and sentimental intricacies prevalent in his work. The late German American writer Charles Bukowski found beauty in the disturbed, the taboo - the things in life that most tend to avoid or miss completely. Beauty is often tagged onto the symmetrical, the flawless - the things in life that beg to be looked at.

Bukowski poems