Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Bukowski A Life by Neeli Cherkovski Bukowski: A Life by Neeli Cherkovski. Neeli Cherkovski’s new collection of poems, Hang On To the Yangtze River , will be published by Lithic Press in the fall of 2020. The life of Charles Bukowski, laureate of lowlife Los Angeles, written by close friend and collaborator, Neeli Cherkovski. Forthcoming from Black Sparrow Press 2020. This year marks Charles Bukowski’s centennial year and this one-of-a-kind biography is the closest readers will come to meeting the man himself —an unforgettable encounter no one should miss. Cherkovski shares intimate stories from his decades of personal experiences with Bukowski and brings the life—and complexities—of a great American writer into focus. As an additional feature, Cherkovski has written a new preface, “This Thing Upon Me Is Not Death: Reflections on the Centennial of Charles Bukowski”. Coolidge & Cherkovski: In Conversation Edited by Kyle Harvey Introduction by Patrick James Dunagan Forthcoming from Lithic Press 2020. Coolidge & Cherkovski listens in on an intimate conversation between two legendary American poets, Clark Coolidge and Neeli Cherkovski. Swapping personal stories and anecdotes, Coolidge and Cherkovski offer insight into a wide range of topics including the New York School, the San Francisco poetry scene of the 60s/70s/80s, the Language School, the Vancouver Poetry Conference, the Berkeley Poetry Conference, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Charles Olson, Bernadette Mayer, Philip Whalen, David Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, Gertrude Stein, Philip Whalen, William de Kooning, Philip Guston and more. Supplemental materials include Clark Coolidge’s Arrangement lecture from Naropa in 1977, as well as Neeli Cherkovski’s Random Poetics . It’s Nice To Be With You Always: A Film About Neeli Cherkovski Directed by Kyle Harvey Premieres March 8th, 2020 at the Omaha Film Festival 48 min 31 sec. It’s Nice To Be With You Always blends together Cinéma-vérité style footage and conversations to create an intimate portrait of the poet Neeli Cherkovski. Imagine being dropped into the middle of a poem. Bukowski, A Life. The definitive life of Charles Bukowski: literary legend and outlaw. Neeli Cherkoski is a poet, as well as an editor, memoirist, and biographer. In his early 20s, he and Charles Bukowski launched a short-lived mimeographed literary magazine, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns . Mr. Cherkovski is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Elegy For My Beat Generation , and Ferlinghetti: A Biography -the first published biography of the internationally revered poet and founder of City Lights Books. In 2019, Mr. Cherkovski co-edited Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman and he is currently the subject of a forthcoming independent documentary feature It's Nice To Be With You Always . Mr. Cherkovski lives in San Francisco. Produktdetails. Einband Taschenbuch Seitenzahl 376 Erscheinungsdatum 13.08.2020 Sprache Englisch. ISBN 978-1-57423-241-7 Verlag Black Sparrow Press Maße (L/B/H) 22.8/15.1/2.8 cm Gewicht 570 g. Produktdetails. Einband Taschenbuch Seitenzahl 376 Erscheinungsdatum 13.08.2020 Sprache Englisch. ISBN 978-1-57423-241-7 Verlag Black Sparrow Press Maße (L/B/H) 22.8/15.1/2.8 cm Gewicht 570 g. Beschreibung. The definitive life of Charles Bukowski: literary legend and outlaw. Neeli Cherkoski is a poet, as well as an editor, memoirist, and biographer. In his early 20s, he and Charles Bukowski launched a short-lived mimeographed literary magazine, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns . Mr. Cherkovski is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Elegy For My Beat Generation , and Ferlinghetti: A Biography -the first published biography of the internationally revered poet and founder of City Lights Books. In 2019, Mr. Cherkovski co-edited Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman and he is currently the subject of a forthcoming independent documentary feature It's Nice To Be With You Always . Mr. Cherkovski lives in San Francisco. Kundenbewertungen. Bilder. Vorheriges Vorschaubild Nächstes Vorschaubild. Haben Sie Fragen? Kontakt per Telefon +41 848 849 848 Kontakt per E-Mail [email protected] Fragen zu eBook & eReader [email protected] Montag bis Freitag von 08:00 bis 18:30 Uhr Samstag von 09:00 bis 16:00 Uhr Festnetz: max. Fr. 0.08/Min. Mobile: Abhängig vom Anbieter. Das Unternehmen Management Medienstelle Geschichte Orell Füssli vor Ort Karriere Veranstaltungen Impressum Datenschutzerklärung AGB Online-Hilfe Newsletter abbestellen Geschenkkarte per Post Geschenkkarte per Mail Download-Code einlösen Service Premium Card Bonnachtrag Information Corona-Virus Benutzerdaten Bestellen Kaufen Bezahlen Versand und Lieferung Rücksendungen Gutschein einlösen Orell Füssli App Geschäftskunden Premium Card Student Card Young Circle Kinderclub Miles & More Partnerprogramm (Affiliate) Book Circle Community. Der Orell-Füssli-Newsletter. 15%-Willkommensgutschein zur Erstanmeldung. Rechtliche Hinweise. Mit dem Abschicken dieser Anmeldung erlauben Sie uns, Sie regelmässig und kostenlos per E-Mail und/oder per personalisierter Anzeige auf fremden Kanälen (z.B. über soziale Medien) über Themen rund um Orell Füssli (z.B. Produkte, Aktionen, Veranstaltungen, Gewinnspiele) sowie Partnerangebote (Ihre Daten werden nicht an diese Partner weitergegeben) zu informieren, und Sie im Rahmen von Kundenzufriedenheitsumfragen zu kontaktieren. Informationen zum jederzeitigen Abmelden vom Newsletter sowie zum Abmelden der personalisierten Anzeigen finden Sie in unserer Datenschutzerklärung. Mit der Anmeldung erklären Sie sich mit den Bestimmungen zur Missbrauchs- und Betrugsverhinderung gemäss unserer Datenschutzerklärung einverstanden. Bei der Übermittlung Ihrer Eingabe ist ein Fehler aufgetreten. Bitte versuchen Sie es später erneut. About. Neeli Cherkovski (born Nelson Cherry; July 1, 1945) is an American poet and memoirist, who has resided since 1975 in San Francisco. Born in Santa Monica, California, Cherkovski grew up in San Bernardino, California. In the 1970s he was a political consultant in the Riverside area, who came to San Francisco to work on the staff of then-State Senator George Moscone. Cherkovski has written biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Charles Bukowski, with whom he co-edited the Los Angeles zine Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns . Cherkovski produced the first San Francisco Poetry Festival, and in the early-1990s helped to found Café Arts Month, a yearly event celebrating San Francisco’s café culture. Cherkovski is the author of Whitman’s Wild Children , a collection of essays about twelve poets he has known: Michael McClure, Charles Bukowski, John Wieners, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, William Everson, Gregory Corso, Harold Norse, Jack Micheline, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This book combines biography, personal stories, and poetry analyses. Cherkovski was a writer-in-residence at the New College of California in San Francisco. He taught literature and philosophy there until the school closed in 2008. His body of poetry includes Animal , Elegy for Bob Kaufman and Leaning Against Time , for which he was awarded the 15th Annual PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2005. In 2017 he was awarded the Jack Mueller Poetry Prize by Lithic Press. Cherkovski’s papers are housed at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Cherkovski is the subject of the documentary film, It’s Nice To Be With You Always. Poems for the Wailing Wall, (San Bernardino, CA: Black. Pre-Rabbinic Poems, ( San Bernardino, CA: Tecumseh Press, 1969). Don’t Make a Move, (Big Bear Lake, CA: Tecumseh Press, 1973). The Waters Reborn, (Los Angeles, CA: Red Hill Press, 1975). Public Notice, (San Francisco: Beatitude Press, 1975). The Be Attitude, (San Francisco: Beatitude Press, 1976). The Summer Palace, (San Francisco: Twenty-Two Press, 1976). Notes from Syropa, (San Francisco: Klean Karma Press, 1976). Ferlinghetti: A biography. Garden City, (NY: Doubleday, 1979). Love Proof: Book of poems and drawings, (North Beach, San Francisco: Green Light Press, 1980). Home American: Section 1, (Alexandria, VA: Deep Forest, 1983). Juggler Within, (San Francisco: Harwood Alley Monographs, 1983). Clear Wind, (San Diego, CA: Avant Books, 1984). Animal, (Berkeley, CA: Pantograph Press, 1996). Elegy for Bob Kaufman, (Northville, MI: Sun Dog Press, 1996). Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski, (New York: Random House, 1991. and also published as Bukowski: A life. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1997). Whitman’s Wild Children: Portraits of twelve poets, (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1988; South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1999). Leaning Against Time: Poems, (Penn Valley, CA: R.L. Crow, 2004). Naming the Nameless: Poem, (San Francisco: Sore Dove Press, 2004). Einstein Alive, (San Francisco: Solo Zone, 2005). A Packet of Love Poems, (Santa Rosa, CA: Word Temple, 2008). From the Canyon Outward: Poems, (Penn Valley, CA: R.L. Crow, 2009). Grotesque Empire, (Dover, DE: Bottle of Smoke Press, 2010). From the Middle Woods, (Cullowhee, NC: New Native Press, 2011). Manila Poems, (Dover, DE: Bottle of Smoke Press, 2013). The Crow and I, (Penn Valley, CA: R.L. Crow Publications, 2015). Elegy for My Beat Generation, (Fruita, CO: Lithic Press, 2018). In The Odes, (Los Angeles, CA / Bagnone, ITL: Magra Books, 2018). Coolidge & Cherkovski: In Conversation, (Fruita, CO: Lithic Press, 2020). Bukowski, A Life: The Centennial Edition, (Boston, MA: Black Sparrow Press, 2020). Anthology of LA Poets, (Laugh Literary / Red Hill Press, 1972). Off the Tongues of Sinners: A poetry anthology, (San Clemente, CA: 12 Guage Press, 2002). Cross Strokes: Poetry Between Los Angeles and San Francisco, (Otis Books, 2015). Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2019). Book Review: “Bukowski, A Life” — The Poet of Skid Row. Bukowski, A Life: The Centennial Edition by Neeli Cherkovski. Black Sparrow Press, 376 pages, $18.95 (softcover). When Ernest Hemingway was once asked to describe the best preparation for being a writer, he cracked, “an unhappy childhood.” Charles Bukowski stands as a testament to that truism. “Fear made me a writer,” he said, “fear and a lack of confidence.” This year marks the centennial of Bukowski’s birth and, along with a new documentary film ( Arts Fuse review) and reissues of some of his numerous books, comes this illuminating biography. Henry Charles Bukowski was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany to a German mother and American G.I. father who’d met in WW I. When he was three, the family returned to live in Los Angeles. A sullen and lonely child, Bukowski was teased in grammar school for the slight German accent he hadn’t lost yet. His father, a strict perfectionist, beat him for minor childhood failings. As an adolescent he was afflicted with severe acne, which ravaged his face and upper torso with boils; these scars, both inner and outer, never left him. He had few friends and, as with many a sensitive kid, rebellion ensued. He became defiant, a scrapper, very much the rebel. Decades later he chronicled these pained, cruel years in his novel Ham on Rye . His discovery of the local library is probably what saved him. “The library was another world,” Bukowski said, “another people. It roared and leaped.” There he discovered writers like John Fante, Dostoevsky, and Hemingway, who showed how one could use words to make order of life’s pain, prompting him to undertake his own nascent efforts at writing. It was a long quest, full of deprivation; but once embarked upon, although he often feared Skid Row would his final destination, he went at it with determination. He left his unhappy homelife, traveling around the U.S., living on the cheap in New Orleans, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, working at odd jobs to pay rent, and all the while writing, collecting piles of rejection slips. Ultimately, he returned to Los Angeles, and it was there that he staked the literary turf that would be his for the next forty-plus years. Bukowski’s L.A. is not palmy La La Land. He and his characters inhabit the dilapidated, seedy districts that Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe knew: old stucco rooming houses, dive bars, and the broken-down denizens they attract. Failure continued; but, believing in himself, so did he. Because they came more easily, he turned from stories to poetry. His poems had a direct, street quality, hyperbolic narratives of drunkenness and harlotry told in a language that often transcended its subject. His verse began to find a home in the little magazines that proliferated around the county during the ’50s; many were simple mimeographed & stapled affairs, often sloppily edited. By the late ’60s Bukowski had garnered a growing renown in underground circles. This was how I first came to read him, when a fellow student at the University of Oregon told me about his newspaper column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man , in an L.A. weekly newspaper. “You’d like him,” he said, “he’s no b.s.” Over the ensuing years I read a lot by the man dubbed the poet of Skid Row, admiring his tough, deadpan style, but seeing, too, that his spirited celebration of the ordinary was in the lineage of Whitman and Sandburg. Bukowski, A Life paints a rich portrait of its flavorful subject, who chose to be an outsider, living in furnished rooms, driving worn-out cars, working at dead-end jobs that he’d invariably quit or be fired from. He eventually settled into the tedious routines of the Post Office. But, as he proclaimed early on, “When I decided on this writing game, it meant blood on the line.” He persevered. He believed that writers are made, not born, and so, with beer and smokes and classical music on the radio, he would sit down at his “typer” and work, taking all his hard luck days as the building blocks for his art and producing prodigious amounts of work. Eventually, he attracted enough readers; in the early ’70s he could finally quit the Post Office. As with the death of his father years before, he experienced a sense of freedom, of a two-ton weight taken off his shoulders. Bukowski’s most inspired creation is himself — often in the form of his alter ego, Henry Chinaski, protagonist of most of his stories and novels. Cynic, lover, fighter, loser, survivor, Chinaski has heart. Charles Bukowski — nothing if not determined. Photo: Wiki Commons. The themes of Bukowski’s writing break along natural fault lines and clashing power differentials: landlord/renter, boss/worker, man/woman. He saw it as his cultural role to be on the margins, an underdog, a voice for the dispossessed. His ethos, if he can be said to have one, is a rejection of the grinding forces of conformity and middle-class values that he’d witnessed as a youth. Biographer Neeli Cherkovski does justice to this commitment to rebellion. A well-regarded California poet and critic, he brings an insider’s familiarity, having been Bukowski’s friend for many years. With that access, including hours of their taped drinking sessions, he does a skillful job with the background details, the years of struggle, growth, and success. Some of the most insightful and moving parts of the narrative are Cherkovski’s personal recounting of his on-again off again relationship with the writer, which has the poignancy of personal memoir. To his credit, Cherkovski doesn’t spare us the writer’s dark parts, noting Bukowski’s sometimes loutish behavior: exposing himself outside a theater in LA’s tony Westwood Village, abusing friends, being possessive and jealous with lovers, and the hangovers and the puking. One important element the book is missing is a photo section with views of the key characters in Bukowski’s life. Bukowski’s last novel, Pulp , was published in 1994, the year of his death. By that point Bukowski had enjoyed ever-growing acclaim and readership. He had begun to mellow. He never won any major literary awards, and wasn’t formally canonized, but the very fact of his being subject of a half dozen biographies suggests how his work still has the power to engage readers across generations. There is something very American in the arc of his story. Still, it begs the longer-term question: will he endure? I think so. In his novel Factotum , Bukowski observes that: when you’re in a bar, drinking, the world doesn’t go away. It’s still out there, but for the moment at least, it doesn’t have you by the throat. His books will offer future readers this hardscrabble vision, with its bittersweet solace, its sympathetic understanding of just how much survival takes out of you. “When people read me,” he said, “I want to think of them as not reading literature but actually participating in life.” Almost forty years after my classmate recommended Bukowski to me, telling me he was “no b.s.” I used almost the exact same line when I gave my copy of Post Office to a Viet Nam vet postal worker I know. A few days later, he told me he’d loved the novel and had already ordered more of Bukowski’s titles. It’s the kind of working class homage Bukowski would have loved. David Daniel is the author of more than a dozen books, including White Rabbit , a novel set in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, and four entries in the prize-winning Alex Rasmussen mystery series. His most recent book is Inflections & Innuendos , a collection of flash fiction. He has been the Jack Kerouac visiting writer in residence at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Bukowski: A Life by Neeli Cherkovski. "When I first met Neeli, he was 16 and I was Bukowski." "Fear made me a writer, fear and lack of confidence." "I am not primarily a poet." "A lot of people look at Bukowski superficially. They cannot understand why so many women flock to him. He has the magical appeal of a very solid person underneath lots of bluster, a father figure. Everybody's father." Guest Reviewer Jack Foley. Neeli Cherkovski's Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski appeared in 1991, while Charles Bukowski was still alive. Bukowski died in 1994, at the age of seventy-three. At the urging of Steerforth Press, Cherkovski revised his biography, adding new material and tightening the book in various ways. The result�now called Bukowski: A Life�is a masterful story of a complex, compelling man who was also a powerful writer. "When I published Hank, the life of a then still living author, I felt constrained by certain conventions," writes Cherkovski. "Just how personal should I be. This revised edition retains a history of Bukowski's coming of age as a writer, as well as providing a more expansive account of our life and times together. It is what I wanted it to be initially, an interweaving of biography and memoir." [ Click to Order Neeli Cherkovski's Bukowski: A Life (soft $) ] Cherkovski is a considerable poet, but for this book he chooses a deliberately plain style: the point is the story as it reveals itself. Quotations from Bukowski, both from his writing and from conversations with the author, are sprinkled throughout. Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr. -- "Hank" -- was born August 16, 1920 in Andernach, Germany, though the family moved to the United States when he was quite young. At one point in his literary career, Bukowski was given the "Outsider of the Year Award." Cherkovski traces the poet's "outsider" status to early childhood, when children teased him about his German accent and called him "Heinie": "Heinie' followed him on up through the fourth grade." His parents were little comfort. Bukowski himself remarks, "I had some pretty terrible parents, and your parents are pretty much your world. That's all there is." Bukowski's father was extremely strict and frequently beat the child. A milk delivery man who was horrified by his own father's drinking -- "My father yelled, -- He drinks!" -- he was a great believer in the American work ethic, about which he frequently lectured his son. Reconstructing this "sullen and lonely" child's frame of mind, Cherkovski writes, Could these two people really be his parents? Their voices didn't sound right. Their mouths didn't move properly. Their hands were false and awkward. Their arms were like afterthoughts to the rest of their bodies. He repeated such observations often. Far from aggravating him, they offered Hank comfort, making him feel ever more self-reliant, more able to face himself comfortably. Many things remained a mystery, but he was beginning to know himself through his rejection of others. [ Click to Order Bukowski's The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966 (soft $) ] "Knowing himself through his rejection of others" remained an important element in Bukowski's mental make-up throughout his life. An intense sense of his own superiority resonates throughout the poet's work -- and is in fact one of his primary themes. "Most people did fall short of his expectations," Cherkovski remarks. "Irony, silence, and sarcasm were three weapons he put to good use." Bukowski himself says, "There was nothing wrong with me. It was other people who fell short, who didn't have true humanity." He began drinking -- a lifelong habit -- in 1937, "during the last semester of the school year." Another problem which alienated the young man, Cherkovski writes, was what one doctor called "the worst case of acne vulgaris he had ever seen." "Hank often stood before the bathroom mirror, imagining how he must look to others. I felt as if no woman would ever want to be with me. I saw myself as some kind of freak.'" Like other troubled adolescents, Bukowski took refuge in books. The local library provided him with "the only heaven I had ever felt." "The books he read taught him that he had not given in to the norms of society," Cherkovski remarks, "and was not diminished by his father's cruelty. An inner revolt had taken hold of him, ideas that would later surface in his writing, about how the entire structure of society was populated by smooth- talking phonies. he knew that his isolation would become his strenth. he envisioned himself as the singular self,' forging his own destiny." If that sounds a bit like William Ernest Henley, one hastens to add that Bukowski's "singular self" was considerably chastened by suffering, poverty, and failure. Dreaming of becoming a famous writer, he wrote a great quantity of stories -- mostly fantasies -- and "amassed a huge collection of rejection slips." Despite the acceptance of one of his pieces in Storymagazine, he became discouraged and wrote little. "He had suicidal thoughts quite often," Cherkovski tells us, "and continually got into fights." Indeed, suicide and self-destruction become major themes of Bukowski's work: he referred to himself as "the suicide kid." In 1946 he met a woman with whom he would be involved for nearly a decade: Jane Cooney Baker. Their relationship is the subject of the film, Barfly, and Bukowski says this about her in his novel, Women: "I had been in love only once. She had died of acute alcoholism. She died at 48 when I was 38." It was during their turbulent relationship -- she drank even more than he did -- that he began to write the poetry which was to make him famous during the 1960's. [ Click to Order Bukowski's Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (1983 - soft $) ] Bukowski's first book of poetry, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail -- his titles are always excellent, though he relied on others to edit and shape his books -- appeared at the very beginning of the decade, in 1960. Profiting by the "Mimeo Revolution" of the 60's, Bukowski found his work appearing in all sorts of underground magazines -- the "littles," he called them. One publisher, R. R. Cuscaden, wrote that his own aim was "to find a legitimate response to the Corso/Ginsberg/Ferlinghetti syndrome (and imitators) on one side and the tea- cozy POETRY mag gang on the other side. Buk obviously was the answer." It was during this period that Bukowski discovered that he had, in addition to talent, a real capacity for self-promotion. With help from his editors, the "Bukowski myth" of the hard- drinking, wild man of literature -- the underground man -- began to emerge. This is the kind of myth -- the poet as entertaining suicide -- that Americans are always willing to accept, and Bukowski's name began to be widely known. With Bukowski, as with some of the Beats, poetry began to seem not only "moving" but dangerous. "We were a fairly tough crew," he wrote, "American poetry needed a good going over. Call me a hardhead if you wish, uncultured, drunken, whatever. come here to [the magazine] Ole where you have to squint at what you read and laugh because we can't spell or punctuate." From 1958 to January 2, 1970 Bukowski was a postal worker. He hated the job, and the day after he quit he began his novel, Post Office. The book was finished in nineteen days and quickly became a best-seller. Cherkovski writes, "The novel became a high-water mark not only for the author but for his publisher as well. The edition of two thousand paperback copies quickly sold out, prompting a new printing and eventually the sale of more than forty thousand copies." More books of prose and poetry followed, as did translations and an international readership. Cherkovski writes that "Hank never knuckled under to his father's belief system, in which a person must achieve material wealth in order to succeed." One of Bukowski's fellow postal workers, an aspiring writer, is described as having "the kind of attitude toward writing that Hank did his best to avoid: he wanted money." But Bukowski is a complicated and in some ways contradictory man. He understood that it was only through prose that he could make enough money to liberate himself from the post office. "Not with poetry," he tells a friend who encourages him to support himself with his writing: "It has to be prose." Later, when he is making a fair sum from his books and readings, Bukowski delights in it ("You have no right! Only I should have a BMW. I paid cash. It's top of the line."). Similarly, Cherkovski describes an incident at L.A. City College when the young Bukowski "pretended sympathy for Nazism purely to stir things up on a campus where most of the other students were espousing a patriotic, anti-Nazi line." But one wonders: Did Bukowski's Germanness move him at least a little in the direction of the Nazis? Later in the book, when Cherkovski fails to make an appointment, the unforgiving Bukowski says, "Listen. You're Jewish, right? We Christians have a lot of shopping and tree buying and tree decorating and gift wrapping to do. So let's just forget the whole thing." Cherkovski tries to apologize but Bukowski "had already hung up the phone." How much of that "pretended sympathy" for the Nazis is in Bukowski's "We Christians"? -- though one should add that many of the poet's strongest friends and supporters were, like Cherkovski, Jews. One can also ask what sort of "outsider" this "outsider of the year" was. For an "outsider," Bukowski was awfully popular with "the mob" -- the very people he disdained. In what way was Bukowski "anti-Establishment"? This is a more complicated question than it seems to be. For many reasons which I can't go into here -- and which perhaps have something to do with our revolutionary past -- in the United States, being "against" the Establishment is precisely our mode of being in the Establishment. American heroes who are solidly on the side of the Establishment, of Law and Order, etc., are frequently represented as "outsiders" of some sort: John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. An important myth of the American Establishment is that everyone in it is an "individual" -- that is, some sort of "outsider." If we make a film about a policeman, he must be a "rogue" policeman, a "dirty Harry." All the same, this "rogue" policeman is finally on the side of law and order and never does anything "really bad." No one would deny Charles Bukowski's poverty and suffering and the ravages his drinking caused him. He was in a way a "wild man." But, at the same time, he was the kind of wild man who never does anything really bad. Partly because of his identification with the working class, Bukowski is very careful to keep his poetry "accessible," available to everyone. But isn't that at some odds with his outsider status? Do outsiders make their work accessible, available to everyone? Lines like these, by Larry Eigner, point to an "outsider" consciousness which goes far beyond anything ever achieved by Charles Bukowski: In saying this, I don't want to deny Bukowski his genuine triumphs and his genuine strengths. I have a tape from the late 1960's in which he is reading his poetry. The reading is private, for friends -- it was only later that he began to read his poetry publicly, and the effect then was quite different. On my tape he sounds like a man from the end of the world; all his isolation and all his suffering (not to mention his fear, his sadomasochism, his self- loathing) are there in his voice. [ Click to Order Bukowski's Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories (1996 - soft $) ] Charles Bukowski undoubtedly wrote too much, and some of what he wrote is slight. But if there was some fakery, there was also genuine pain. And there were always wonderful poems like this: the mockingbird had been following the cat all summer mocking mocking mocking teasing and cocksure; the cat crawled under rockers on porches tail flashing and said something angry to the mockingbird which I didn't understand. yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway with the mockingbird alive in its mouth, wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping, feathers parted like a woman's legs, and the bird was no longer mocking, it was asking, it was praying but the cat striding down through centuries would not listen. I saw it crawl under a yellow car with the bird to bargain it to another place. summer was over. Bukowski: A Life tells it all. Jack Foley's reviews appear weekly in The Alsop Review. Links of Interest: Charles Bukowski This site uses recordings and Bukowski's art to highlight biographical details and publication lists.