John Martin – DaneCobain.com

Charles Bukowski – Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way | Review

February 14, 2018 danecobain

Authors A-E (By Surname)Poetry

Title: Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way

Author: Charles Bukowski

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 402

Rating: 5*/5

Charles Bukowski – Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way

This book is one of several poetry collections that were edited together by John Martin, Bukowski’s long-term editor, from a ream of material that he left behind to be published after his death. I actually like most of this more recently published stuff the most, in part because I think he got better with age and in part because I think he left some of his most personal stuff to be published after he was gone.

For the first time ever, I actually tabbed this collection with sticky labels so that I could go back to some of the poems for my video review. That also means that I can spend the rest of this review telling you about some of my favourites. Right off the bat, it kicks things off with So You Want To Be A Writer?, a poem that I’ve seen quoted to death elsewhere by people who’ve searched for “writing quotes” and ended up finding a random Bukowski poem. But it’s a good one.

The Great Escape was another good one, which was about crabs escaping from a bucket and which reflected Bukowski’s own employment at the post office. One Step Removed was about famous writers and the groupies they attract, and A Mechanical Lazarus is about his trusty IBM typewriter which refused to die. A Sickness was also about writers, but it focused more on how they always seem to end up going insane or committing suicide.

Charles Bukowski Quote

Later we have poems about women (Dream Girl) and drinking (Who Needs It?), both of which are pretty much required subjects for a Bukowski collection, but there are plenty of other subject matters on offer too. It’s also split up into sections, which mainly act as dividers to keep the flow of the book going rather than as any official categorisations, but they do somehow add a little something to the feel of the book by highlighting specific lines.

All in all, if you’ve read Bukowski’s work before then you pretty much know what to expect, and if you haven’t then you ought to get started. And this could be just the book to help you with that. Go ahead and buy it.

Charles Bukowski

Click here to buy Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way.

Charles Bukowski – What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire | Review

September 1, 2013 danecobain

Authors A-E (By Surname)Poetry

Title: What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

Author: Charles Bukowski

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 409

Rating: 8/10

Charles Bukowski – What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

Bukowski is back with another epic collection of idiosyncratic poetry. The poems published in the collection were written between 1970 and 1990, and they were part of an archive that the great poet left behind to be published after his death.

As always, it’s fascinating to see the way in which Bukowski used simple (and often profane) language in such a powerful way – his poems don’t read like Shakespeare, they read like Bukowski talked, and that’s what gives them their power. Bukowski wasn’t a poet or a novelist – he was a storyteller, and it barely matters whether you’re reading his prose or his poetry.

Take the first poem in the collection, for example – ‘my father and the bum‘. Bukowski had a troubled relationship with his father, who used to bully him as a child – here, we see his father’s pride, and the way in which the opinions of his friends weighed heavy on him. Bukowski says: “My father believed in work. He was proud to have a job. Sometimes he didn’t have a job and then he was very ashamed. He’d be so ashamed that he’d leave the house in the morning and then come back in the evening so the neighbours wouldn’t know.”

Charles Bukowski

Of course, it’s no secret that Bukowski hated his father – you would have too, the man, by all accounts, was a bastard. Just how extreme that hatred was is shown by his depiction of his father’s cruelty: “My father caught the baby mice – they were still alive and he flung them in to the flaming incinerator, one by one. The flames leaped out and I wanted to throw my father in there, but my being 10 years old made that impossible.”

But let’s get back to the book as a whole. It was published by Black Sparrow Press, the legendary poetry firm that was formed by John Martin, ostensibly to publish Bukowski’s work. According to Wikipedia (and Born in to This, a documentary about the poet), John Martin offered Bukowski $100 per month for life on the condition that he’d stop working for the post office and write full time. Bukowski agreed, and shortly afterwards started work on Post Office, his first novel which was inspired by his time with the company.