Charles Bukowski: "Don't try."

External Since: Oct 16, 2003 Posts: 25

In article <47fc49bd.0406110857.28f9e2a6.DeleteThis@posting.google.com>, Will Dockery
says...
>
>From: Dale Houstman <dmh7.DeleteThis@citilink.com>
>
  >> why do you insist on constantly embarrassing yourself?
  >>
  >> ------------------------------------------------------------------
  >> "I walked with a Zombie, I walked with a Zombie, I walked with a
  >> Zombie last night."
  >> Roky Erikson
  >> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Good song. But I must tell you that the reason Will keeps
>"embarrassing"
>himself is because so many of us keep giving him the only thing he
>wants, attention that cannot be otherwise gained.
>dmh
>
>*** No, Dale. I'm here, first and formost, to post my poetry.

if only you'd post some.

love and kisses,

j r sherman

------------------------------------------------------------------
"I walked with a Zombie, I walked with a Zombie, I walked with a
Zombie last night."
Roky Erikson
------------------------------------------------------------------

External Since: May 28, 2004 Posts: 65

From: j r sherman <jrst.RemoveThis@earthlink.net>

you do not catch ME promoting the idiotic idea that Bukowski is
the best poet of the 20th century.

**** Promote what you like, JRS. You *know* by now that I'll continue
to do what *I* like: post my poetry, and damn the jeering philistines
like yourself.

>But, they'll
>also notice that's *all* you do... it seems doubtful they'll ever see
>a poem by you here. Right?

i post more poetry in this newsgroup than you do.

**** Same old song and dance from the JRSherman. Just when *was* the
last time you posted a poem here? Had to've been at least a year or
two. I posted one about a half hour ago. Repeating the same tired lie
over and over will not make it so, kid. I write and post poetry. You
do not.

it's something we smart people NEED to do.

**** Indeed, answering trolls like you is what *we* need to do. You'll
be gone again soon enough, though, either way.
> [A good article from the archives]:
>
> On a San Pedro, Calif. hillside opposite the Pacific, dirt covers the man
> whose once-expressive appetite for life continues to sustain his cult hero
> status beyond this grave where movie stars and drinkers laid him three years
> ago this month.
>
> The simple headstone of Henry Charles Bukowski, 1920-1994, tells those who
> visit him: ``Don't try.''
>
> Good advice rarely followed, that ambiguous message from his grave is a
> challenge outlasting the man whose life and art compels thousands to try,
> try, try to understand, analyze and even emulate the illegitimate father of
> poetic intemperance.
>
> In more than 60 books of poetry, short stories, novels and a screenplay
> (``Barfly'') about a brief but remarkable period of his life, Charles`Hank''
> Bukowski wrote from the twisted guts of his own incredible life,
> fashioning those experiences into provocative shapes for our amusement.
>
> Since his death, Bukowski has become something of a worldwide industry, with
> copies of his work multiplying in value, new fans finding him on dozens of
> Bukowski-related Internet sites and old ones sporting Team Bukowski
> sweatshirts. His publishers plan at least one book of unpublished work a
> year for the next five years.
>
> Bukowski gave the finger to poetry as effete intellectualism and replaced
> adorned sentiment with naked, disturbing, compelling, repulsive, vicious
> truth.
>
> He was a drunk and a genius, and he beat life to hell and lived longer than
> most expected and better than most knew. These years after his death, the
> legend grows, sustained by a body of work
> so deep that books of poetry are planned through 2001.
>
> He was a Southern California god, but even before this country acknowledged
> him, Europeans were already treating Bukowski with the pop iconoclasm of
> movie stars. Now, his work is translated into at least 21 languages, with
> his newest fans building a Bukowski movement in Japan.
>
> An Orange County, Calif., college professor claims Bukowski as an influence.
> So does an Irish rock star.
>
> To his fans, the mythic man who settled with a view of the grimy harbor of
> San Pedro is an adorable bastard, a voice that rumbled from a blue collar to
> offend, challenge, stimulate the complacent, and to console the
> disenfranchised for whom labor was survival.
>
> To Linda Lee Bukowski, he is the man whose passing left a bottomless hole in
> her heart.
>
> There are women who dismiss Bukowski as chauvinistic, as misogynistic.
>
> The woman who loved him for many years and was married to him for the last
> nine says this:
>
> ``To you,'' Linda Lee Bukowski says, ``he is the great writer. But to me,
> first, he is the great man.
>
> ``I cry every day and night. It's horrible, horrible, horrible. Right down
> in the human gut level, it's terrible. I miss him like, boy, half of me is
> gone.''
>
> There is little middle ground with Charles Bukowski.
>
> Critics dismissed his writing as abusive and indulgent, about which he wrote
> to a friend:
>
> ``We don't write to be judged, we write to get it out of us so we don't do
> something worse.''
>
> And those who loved him became disciples.
>
> Bono of U2 dedicated a Los Angeles show to Hank and Linda and sent a limo to
> bring them to the concert, along with other devotees, actors Harry Dean
> Stanton and Sean Penn, whom the Bukowskis referred to as their ``surrogate
> son.''
>
> He was gentle to animals, mean to those who crossed him, encouraging to
> younger talents and never too far from an immigrant child whose father beat
> him with a razor strap.
>
> At 13 Bukowski discovered alcohol; he said it saved his life.
>
> To his friend Gerald Locklin, a writer and professor at California State
> University, Long Beach, Bukowski (in one of a volume of letters over two
> decades) wrote:
>
> ``I don't trust men who don't drink. There is something about drinking which
> opens a man to extraordinary disaster: you meet all the wrong women and you
> step out into alleys to duke it with all the wrong men. It's kind of a lesson
> in stupidity but you learn more in that kind of life than most men
> who live 10 lives.''
>
> That life, glorified by the Mickey Rourke-Faye Dunaway characters of
> ``Barfly,'' is as much a part of the Bukowski legacy as are his poems,
> novels, recordings and even paintings.
>
> But those who focus on his love of drink, his tolerance for abuse, and his
> impulse toward denigration of the cognoscenti _ without considering the
> effect of these things on his sizable contribution to literature _ miss,
> sadly, a greater part of Charles Bukowski.
>
> In one of his several books of poetry, Locklin writes a poem to address the
> single-minded Bukowski reader:
>
> those who would write like bukowski
>
> know that he, as a young man, loved
>
> classical music, wrote every day,
>
> read world literature, supported himself
>
> without parental or government assistance,
>
> and drank a lot.
>
> but when it comes to modeling themselves
>
> on him as writers
>
> they tend to forget everything
>
> except the drinking.
>
> In his novel ``Ham on Rye'' Bukowski chronicles a childhood full of severe
> and capricious punishment by his father.
>
> A central element of the Bukowski house in an L.A. neighborhood was his
> father's razor strap, which hung above the bathroom sink area where young
> Charles Bukowski would be forced to disrobe and be lashed, often for minor
> childish indiscretions.
>
> The stress of his life caused a nervous reaction that resulted in boils over
> his body, leaving his skin pockmarked for life. His rough appearance
> contributed to his aloofness from other kids, which in
> later years would become a general distaste for people whose allegiance to
> mainstream existence Bukowski saw as a betrayal of the soul.
>
> His legend as a barroom fighter, as a drinker, a womanizer and a proud
> maverick who rejected self-restraint was well earned.
>
> But even when he was flopping in dirtbag hotels and working day labor for
> liquor, Bukowski was no bum.
>
> His life was a notebook in which he documented experiences few could survive
> but millions found meaningful.
>
> ``People like to ask me, `Did that really happen to you?''' he wrote to
> Locklin. ``And I used to tell them. Now, I don't. I think it's good for them
> to wonder. OK. Then most did and what didn't should have.''
>
> Although he drew on experiences beginning with the earliest moments of his
> life, Bukowski, who at times had been a shipping clerk and a postal
> employee, was middle-aged before he was ``discovered.''
>
> Some of Bukowski's earliest published work was for Open City and LA Weekly
> in the late '60s, which later became his book, ``Notes of a Dirty Old Man.''
>
> In the comfortable home where Linda Lee Bukowski's life is a vigil to her
> artist husband, the walls, the bookshelves, the picture frames, the swimming
> pool, the spa, the photo albums and the numerous sketches from the Great
> Man's hand, tell a fuller story than most are privileged to know. He loved
> cats and would sit for hours enticing a stray.
>
> We know from his work, of course, that horseracing was part of his daily
> routine. But who would have known that he enjoyed relaxing, alcohol-free, in
> the whirlpool upon returning from Hollywood Park or Santa Anita?
>
> He is easily pictured, almost boxer-like, pounding the keys of an Underwood
> manual ``typer.'' But his work tripled, say both Linda and his Black Sparrow
> editor, John Martin, when he got a computer.
>
> Near the end of his life, he meditated: twice a day, 20 minutes at a time.
>
> And for all his reputation as a devotee of cheap liquor and easy women, the
> older Bukowski enjoyed good wine and imported beer, and was loyal to the
> woman he loved. There are, in the Bukowski household, relics to mark his
> presence
> everywhere:
>
> ``Linda will ya be my Valentine,'' says one of many child-like paintings
> that reveal a side of the man more capable of common feeling than his
> sandpaper exterior would suggest.
>
> One Bukowski painting _ a poem really _ reveals a man we might have
> suspected but rarely find exposed this way through his writing:
>
> ``Arrange for me this splendid insecurity.''
>
> ``I don't even want to go into that,'' Linda Bukowski says. ```It means what
> it means.'' Bukowski once wrote to his friend Locklin that he liked eating
> at the Glide
> 'er Inn in Seal Beach, where he was a frequent Sunday guest for crab legs.
>
> ``Those booths,'' he wrote, ``with high walls hide me away from the
> humans.''
>
> He was the most human, Hank Bukowksi was.
>
> Whatever misrepresentation ``Barfly'' might have left on the legacy of the
> ``poet laureate of Los Angeles,'' one scene perhaps speaks for all those
> whose devotion made Bukowski a wealthy man, after long years of writing in
> obscure poverty.
>
> During a scene in the Golden Horn bar, a crusty patron says to Jim the
> bartender, regarding the Bukowski character:
>
> ``I don't see what you see in the guy.''
>
> Says the bartender: ``He's as right as any of us.''
>
> And so he was. And so, too, are those who find comfort, acceptance and
> escape from lives of incredible normalcy in the writing of Bukowski.
>
> ``What he taught me is that you can make poetry out of your daily life,''
> Locklin says. ``You don't have to wait for the great moments; it doesn't
> have to be love, death, war.''
>
> It is a lesson learned by the professor, yes, but also by a contract
> painter-turned-poet whose life change was sparked partly by Bukowski's
> influence. Or by a merchant who recognizes her own life in the drastically
> different reference of an artist whose work transcended common experience.
>
> Raindog, a San Pedro housepainter, poet and literary magazine publisher who
> used to follow Bukowski around but was too reverential ever to introduce
> himself to the man, says now: ``I felt like Bukowski was pinning a narrative
> in the back of my head, like, `Ok, I'm not alone. There's someone out there
> like me.'''
>
> Andrea Kuwalski, proprietor of Vinegar Hill Books, where the poet used to
> visit to hang out with Chet, the store cat, now devotes a whole shelf to
> Bukowski.
>
> ``I can't take offense as a woman at any of what he said, because he's
> right; things do get goofy,'' she says. ``And I don't think he painted such
> a rosy picture of his own gender.''
>
> Rancho Santiago College professor and poet Lee Mallory, who used to show up
> at Bukowski's door with a 12-pack of beer and an appetite to learn, says
> Bukowski ``lived his work, and in the sense that he did, the body of work is
> totally authentic. You knew he was writing from a base of experience, which
> is where the best poetry comes from.''
>
> To Mallory, Bukowksi wrote: ``On mornings of doom, have a drink or two and
> wait. Wait on the word. She's more faithful than any woman. It's our final
> love ...''
>
> He was, probably, an alcoholic. He was, decidedly, a workaholic.
>
> ``He was a brilliant machine,'' his widow says. o one knows that better than
> his editor, John Martin at Black Sparrow Press
> in Santa Rosa.
>
> ``A couple or three times a week,'' Martin says, ``(Bukowski) would send me
> a batch of poems. And he did that for 30 years. He's one of the few writers
> who has made substantial money just off royalties.''
>
> Martin says he has enough Bukowski material for four or five more books and
> next month will publish ``Bone Palace Ballet'' a 370-page collection of
> previously unpublished work.
>
> ``His work will always be there and always have an avid readership,''
> Locklin says, ``in the same way of Henry Miller and e.e. cummings and poets
> who are read out of a sense of pleasure rather than a sense of duty.''
>
> `Don't try.''
>
> Linda Lee Bukowski laughs at her husband's epitaph, on the grave that she
> refers to as another room of the house.
>
> ``I think it means, if you spend all your time trying, then all you're doing
> is trying. So, the thing is to do. Don't try. Just do.''
>
> He tried. He did.
>
> And Henry Charles Bukowski left us richer for the effort.
>
> We read him like watching a daredevil, from the safety of complacent
> comfort. We revel in his lifestyle. But we dishonor his powerful voice if we
> leave
> him and his work at the bottom of a bottle.
>
> ``People are always pointing out things about me,'' Bukowski wrote to Gerald
> Locklin. ``I'm a drunk or I'm rich or I'm something else. How about the
> writing? Does it work or doesn't it?''
>
> (c) 1997, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.).
>
> ... Charles Bukowski, the greatest poet of the 20th century. Nobody but nobody
> comes close.