how Bukowski did it

[revolutionR]

how Bukowski did it
how was he able to write like that
to be able to tell it from memory
to describe these scenes so vivid
from his life with passion and guts

he came out of a different time
had wandered through cities and towns
living among the common folk
in shabby hotels and rooming houses
wandering the back streets and alleys
drunks and whores, house wives
and factory workers

it was the drink that made him strong
but it was also the pay day candy bars
that he lived on in his early writer days
before anything got published

he had a knack for writing because
he wrote about real life as a thinker
as a poet as a human being in this world
he was able to see clearly because
it was just before the culture shifted
Bukuwski was not a beatnik

I don't think he ever read Kerouac
or if he did he did not talk about it
he did not listen to jazz he liked classical
he sharpened his mind on Mozart
and he read a little Pound
and some others maybe some Hemingway
his favorite was an almost unknown L.A. writer

but he was there when the beatniks were
but it was before the hippies and the LSD
Buk did not want to take psychedelics
he did not need to, alcohol was his mind fuel
poetry was his best bet on reality

he was from that just after the world war time
so he did not believe that running around
saying peace and love was really going to change
things, so he just wrote through the late sixties
and seeing beyond the rock and roll and drugs
but his writing some how fit with the changes
he really got his start in a hippie newspaper
called the free press, the hippies loved him

Hank did not talk about religion and politics
he never talked about God or the Kennedy
assassination, he just saw the real world
he was rough and rude but he was honest
and he really had a heart when it came
down to it, read his poem on style
but he also saw how messed up our modern
world is, his poem, born into this

he was wise not to talk about the news
but I don't think he watched television much
but he saw like a kind of drunk Buddha poet
and sometimes barfed on his typewriter
or a bum on the street living on a park bench
this is the real world, Bukowski did say he
hated Micky Mouse, and I think that was his
comment on the state of our society

he liked to go to the horse races, and place bets
on the horses, but I think he really liked seeing
those beautiful animals running, and the names
of the horses poetic, like watching a poem run
the world has gotten much more crazy since
Hank was writing, and he was writing before
computers came along, when you went to a Bukowski
reading it was a real event, his poems were killer
you really got your money's worth and you could yell
at the poet and he would yell back, a group action

[mnaz]

If you're gonna write,
then spill it..

[stilltrucking]

Fente? the l.a. writer


you did it
yes indeed
thanks for posting this poem

[revolutionR]

John Fante

[stilltrucking]

Fante yes you ever see the movie kind of a documentary on Ask The Dusk?

I have not but I have listened to the sound track a couple of times, interesting imo

[creativesoul]

He was a better candidate for
A new liver
So many dead artists
I used to get offended when people compared my shit to him
Oh to young and dumb

[revolutionR]

My point is that Bukowski was a certain phase

it represented a certain poetic moment
coming out the fifies into the sixties
a kind of mirror between the beat poets
and the other poets, it's just that Bukowski
had cornered a whole area between
the beatniks and the hippie movement
and he could deliver, it's not the booze
it's not his personal history
it is that he was a writer/poet
in impossible odds, that is what is means to be a poet
and we still don't understand that because
the circumstances that created a Bukowski
were a very strange moment, between
then and now, computers changed all of that
the landscape that Bukowski inhabited
no longer exists, just as the landscape
of the late sixties and the hippies no longer does
beatniks no longer, but we still have their writing
but where is it going now, who are the poets
in this weird momemt between here and there.

[creativesoul]

He had a lucky star... not all poet writers are read or discovered-
Losing interest on the edit
There must be a place where all poems and stories go
When the artist is preoccupied with survival
He had a bright light that shone
I just am not a huge fan
I took a writing class on Ginsberg and kerowac
Still applying many writers ideas to my life
Without critics
Poetry still lives on....