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Overview
Neeli Cherkovski began a deep friendship with Bukowski in the 1960s while guzzling beer at wrestling matches or during quieter evenings discussing life and literature in Bukowski’s East Hollywood apartment. Over the decades, those hundreds of conversations took shape as this biography—now with a new preface, “This Thing Upon Me Is Not Death: Reflections on the Centennial of Charles Bukowski.”
Bukowski, author of Ham on Rye, Post Office, and other bestselling novels, short stories, and poetry collections only ever wanted to be a writer. Maybe that’s why Bukowski’s voice is so real and immediate that readers felt included in a conversation. “In his written work, he’s a hero, a fall guy, a comic character, a womanizing lush, a wise old dog,” biographer Neeli Cherkovski writes. “His readers do more than glimpse his many-sidedness. For some, it’s a deep experience. They feel as if his writing opens places inside of themselves they might never have seen otherwise. Often a reader comes away feeling heroic, because the poet has shown them that their ordinary lives are imbued with drama.”
Full of anecdotes, wisdom, humor, and insight, this is an essential companion to the work of a great American writer. Long-time Bukowski fans will come away with fresh insights while readers new to his work will find this an exhilarating introduction. “In his death, I hear him clearly,” Cherkovski writes. “His voice comes to me resonant, full of unforced authority, a message of endurance, self-reliance, and honesty of expression. At the same time, he is also saying, ‘Poetry is a dirty dishrag. Keep laughing at yourself on the way out the door.’ ”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781574232417 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | David R. Godine, Publisher |
| Publication date: | 07/28/2020 |
| Pages: | 376 |
| Sales rank: | 1,054,724 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Preface
In early my adolescence in the 1950s, Los Angeles was a kind of Xanadu, a foreboding grid of long boulevards, aging palm trees, and Hollywood glitz. My family used to drive into town on a route that passed the long-gone Brew 102 brewery, Union Station, and City Hall, one of the lone skyscrapers in the downtown back then. I was already a poet myself by 1959 when I began reading the yet-undiscovered bard of that mythical metropolis, Charles Bukowski.
Hidden from mainstream literary life, Bukowski could only be found if you sought out the little magazines published in tiny print runs around the country, often in small towns, and with little to no financial resources. They had names like Quicksilver, Epos, and Midwest. These journals seemed to have existed forever and were a cottage industry of their own. Some were mimeographed, others done with low-cost photo offset. They published poetry of all kinds, but Bukowski stood out.
From the mid-1950s he emerged, offering images of the sprawling Los Angeles basin. His poems were characterized as hard-edged and desperate. Many of the editors sensed that they had hit upon an entirely new voice. Positive reviews were posted, and profiles published. Early critics dubbed him “a poet of skid row,” which he was not, a hard-drinking bard, also not true; nor was he the usual proletarian writer shackled to left-wing ideologies. Bukowski’s original impulse to write came largely from the usual suspects: John Dos Passos, John Fante, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, and William Saroyan. Robinson Jeffers left a lasting impression on him, as he was drawn to that poet’s sense of isolation from the literary scene.
What did I feel when Bukowski’s poetry came into my possession? He spoke directly to me. It felt like listening to one of my father’s old pals, that straight-shooting manner: an ace is an ace, a spade a spade. The work was tough, but there was an underlying sense that the man who wrote these poems had compassion for the world at large. I could feel the rented rooms he described and the dead-end neighborhoods he walked. Truth was spoken, unvarnished and realistic. I had been reading the poems of Carl Sandburg, which had the same earthy quality, and Walt Whitman, who had prepared the way with his wide-open poetics.
Bukowski’s books in the early 1960s, published off dining room tables and in cramped workspaces, had appealing titles, such as Flower Fist, and Bestial Wail, Longshot Pomes for Broke Players and Run with the Hunted. These were done in simple, saddle-stapled editions of 300 copies or less. I still remember my high school English teacher reacting in horror to the title Longshot Pomes for Broke Players. She was offended by the word “pomes,” quick to assume it was a typo, the glaring mistake of all mistakes. It was no use explaining that the word choice was a statement about poetry itself....