So, what other poets get you like Bukowski does?

[justine]

i'm curious as to why you think all poetry is worthless. i used to think poetry was crap until i realised i just hadn't been reading any good stuff.

 

[dogdice]

oh, I just like to make these sweeping generalistions every now and then. I would exchange every poem ever written for a regular supply of running water. it's all about marginal utility, as the economists say, and because we take so much for granted we think that poetry has some worth beyond the paper and ink used up to make it.

pulp the lot of it & recycle it into something useful, especially those signed first editions !

 

[mjp]

Ooh, you're so controversial and wild!

Yawn.

Troll.

 

[jmoshea]

"sweeping generalistions (sp)" should be shoved back down the speaker's throat with a sprinkling of cow-pie chips.

 

[bospress.net]

oh, I just like to make these sweeping generalistions every now and then. I would exchange every poem ever written for a regular supply of running water. it's all about marginal utility, as the economists say, and because we take so much for granted we think that poetry has some worth beyond the paper and ink used up to make it.

pulp the lot of it & recycle it into something useful, especially those signed first editions !

You don't seem to like poetry, so why do you like Bukowski? Or do you like Bukowski?

Bill

 

[dogdice]

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.


Mjp, I don't know what a troll is but I suspect it's meant as a derogatory term. I don't go in for personal attacks and I'll leave it to your imagination as to what I think of those that do.

 

[bospress.net]

Mjp, I don't know what a troll is but I suspect it's meant as a derogatory term. I don't go in for personal attacks and I'll leave it to your imagination as to what I think of those that do.

A troll is someone that posts derrogatory and inflammatory subjects and responses on forums with the purpose of causing trouble.

Imagine someone going on a forum that discusses the Holocaust and pretending to be a neo-nazi and posting things just to upset the group. A troll would just make up whatever suited the cause, which is causing trouble and laughing at the havoc that they caused.

Troll seem odd to me, as they seem to like to just enjoy causing other people discomfort and don't seem to have interests other that chaos.

I'm not accusing you of being a troll, only explaining what one is since you asked.

Bill

 

[dogdice]

so on a Bukowski forum it's "out of bounds" to call poetry worthless ? or to say that the idea of "inspiration" or "influence" has created the situation in American writing that I mentioned in the other thread & which you ignored completely ? even if I think it's true ?

I am quite amazed.

 

[Father Luke]

Ed Galing

 

[Father Luke]

Henry Denander

 

[rjwink666]

poetry is worthless until you stick a barcode on it

 

[Father Luke]

Henry Denander

 

[pig ear press]

I ran that through a barcode reader and apparently it's worthless ;)

 

[Gerard K H Love]

Yes that barcode may be worthless, but the poetry is nice. Easy the way I need it.

 

[Sean Maher]

Amiri Baraka gets lost in his own ass sometimes, and a lot of his performance-style poems don't work on paper when he's trying to write how jazz music sounds, but when he gets down and dirty he's got a death-grip on your guts like Buk at his angry best:

An Agony, As Now

I am inside someone
who hates me. I look
out from his eyes. Smell
what fouled tunes come in
to his breath. Love his
wretched women.

Slits in the metal, for sun. Where
my eyes sit turning, at the cool air
the glance of light, or hard flesh
rubbed against me, a woman, a man
without shadow, or voice, or meaning.

This is the enclosure (flesh,
where innocence is a weapon. An
abstraction. Touch. (Not mine.
Or yours, if you are the soul I had
and abandoned when I was blind and had
my enemies carry me as a dead man
(if he is beautiful or pitied.

It can be pain. (As now, as all his
flesh hurts me.) It can be that. Or
pain. As when she ran from me into
that forest
Or pain, the mind
silver spiraled whirled against the
sun, higher than even old men thought
God would be. Or pain. And the other. The
yes. (Inside his books, his fingers. They
are withered yellow flowers and were never
beautiful.) The yes. You will, lost soul, say
'beauty.' Beauty, practiced, as the tree. The
slow river. A white sun in its wet sentences.

Or, the cold men in their gale. Ecstasy. Flesh
or soul. The yes. (Their robes blown. Their bowls
empty. They chant at my heels, not at yours.) Flesh
or soul, as corrupt. Where the answer moves too quickly.
Where the God is a self, after all.)

Cold air blown through narrow blind eyes. Flesh,
white hot metal. Glows as the day with its sun.
It is a human love. I live inside. A bony skeleton
you recognize as words or simple feeling.

But it has no feeling. As the metal is hot, it is not, given to love.

It burns the thing
inside it. And that thing
screams.

Of course, I'm a great lover of the Triumvirate of American Lyricists, that of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.

Take Cohen's Democracy, for example:

It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

--or Waits' 9th and Hennepin:

Well it's 9th and Hennepin
And all the donuts have
Names that sound like prostitutes
And the moon's teeth marks are
On the sky like a tarp thrown over all this
And the broken umbrellas like
Dead birds and the steam
Comes out of the grill like
The whole goddamned town is ready to blow.
And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos
And everyone is behaving like dogs.
And the horses are coming down Violin Road
And Dutch is dead on his feet
And the rooms all smell like diesel
And you take on the
Dreams of the ones who have slept here.
And I'm lost in the window
I hide on the stairway
I hang in the curtain
I sleep in your hat
And no one brings anything
Small into a bar around here.
They all started out with bad directions
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear,
One for every year he's away she said, such
A crumbling beauty, but there's
Nothing wrong with her that
$100 won't fix, she has that razor sadness
That only gets worse
With the clang and thunder of the
Southern Pacific going by
As the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
Till you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out
Over the side to anyone who'll listen
And I've seen it
All through the yellow windows
Of the evening train.

I'm not gonna pull a Bob Dylan song 'cause it'd be a little cliche, but you know what I'm talkin' about.

Another favorite is the deceased Seattle poet Steven Jesse Bernstein. His stuff generally works best spoken, but here's a wee sample:

The Difference

There are poets stuck
to the underside of the chair
by their fingers. If you
give them string they will
put it in their mouth and
it will come out sticky.
That is as close to being
spiders as they can get.
And, there are bugs
under my fingers, bouncing
them across the keys
like Mexican jumping beans.
That's as close to being
a poet as I can get.
The difference between me
and most insects is that I approach
the truly sexless, while
they approach the truly heartless.
The difference between
me and most poets
is I am really a spider.

 

[hoochmonkey9]

Albert Huffstickler

 

[Bukfan]

I just read his poems, "The Void" and "One Life". I liked them. There was a bit of a Buk feel to them...

 

[the only good poet]

god, yes, albert huffstickler. i encountered his poems in a long defunct small press mag. named, Rustic Rub, and loved them.

 

[bospress.net]

if that Denander barcode is mine, then it is a good chance that it will not read. I have had quite a time with barcodes and isbns...

Bill

 

[Father Luke]

 

[bospress.net]

It may be mine, then. Still, I stand by my last comment that I am not so good at the whole barcode/isbn thing. In fact, when my current isbns run out I will not renew them. $250 for 10 of them and I have never found any benefit in using them.

Bill

 

[Father Luke]

Plain and Simple

it's photo shop, Bill.

 

[mjp]

In fact, when my current isbns run out I will not renew them. $250 for 10 of them and I have never found any benefit in using them.

You can get Library of Congress catalog numbers for free (you just have to send them a copy of the book). These numbers are used as a unique identifier by librarians, same as ISBN. I agree; for small press/small run, ISBN is way too expensive.

 

[slimedog]

In defense of Dogdice I would say that even though I love some poetry dearly, the vast majority of it I could care less for.

It's like with music lovers, like myself, I really believe that the vast majority of it I could live without.

Remember, Bukowski hated most poetry, too.

 

[jose leitao]

I know this will mean very little to anyone here, but one of my favourite poets, possibly even more than Buk, was a Portuguese born poet called Sebastião Alba.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastião_Alba

He was an extremely marginal poet who lived many years in Mozambique, and who ended up living in the streets when he returned to Portugal, by his own choice; walking the country on foot or hitchhiking, writing his papers in napkins and small notebooks which he then offered to his friends and relatives. He claimed he had to unlearned everything he had been taught, and that society was a fixed game - when it gave you something, there was something else stolen from you.

So in 2000, after offering so much poetry and art to the world, his life was finally stolen by some anonymous coward, in a hit and run accident. A few days before, he had written a paper to his daughters, where he said: (and I'm paraphrasing)

"When they find me some day, the spoils will be easy to check: 2 shoes, my clothes and a few papers which the police will not understand."

He slept in church doors, shopping malls and barns. Occasionally he'd be picked up by the police and they'd beat him up. He drank a lot, had serious health problems by the time he finally died. But his mind stayed sharp as a knife; his wit was flawless, his art and his latter days sarcasm about Literature and the estabilished 'writers' was impeccably accurate and merciless.

Living in the streets, he had his name in the encyclopedias. I knew about him only after his death, in 2000. for over a year I searched his rare books and gathered a huge quantity of material on him. I even met his family, at one point had the passion to write a biography which I started and sketched.

But it would never be enough to sketch this man, who was so complex that no book especially by an amateur could ever do him justice. I limited myself to treasuring his Art.

I'm sorry for not posting any poetry, but he wrote in Portuguese, and there is very little if any translations of the poems in english, and his craft did not benefit from translation I'm afraid. His wordplay and poem construction was complex and unique. Maybe some spanish members can try to look up some of his Portuguese poems though if they can understand it enough.

Heh here I am ranting again...

 

[Father Luke]

Sebastião Alba.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastião_Alba

I'll look into him.

Thanks much-o

 

[jose leitao]

Here's a quick translation I did of a few short prose texts, most of them written on the street, for the benefit of anyone looking to know more. He always carried a small pocket radio tuned to a 24 hour classical music station (he had trouble getting batteries sometimes), and occasionally a canary (or a nightingale, which he quickly offered to some close friend) or a dog.

"Só anjos (estou a pensar em Mozart) suportam a mediocridade sem se matarem. Eu sou uma forma híbrida; tenho um pacto com a terra e já não posso mais.
Aquela flauta no "Requiem" de Mozart não nos dá uma ideia de deus, mas da nossa escalada (infinita) para, enfim, deparar com a sua ausência."
Albas, pag.159

Only angels (I'm thinking of Mozart) can stand mediocrity without killing themselves. I am a hybrid form; I have a pact with the earth, and I can't stand any more.
That flute in the Rquiem of Mozart does not give us an idea of God, mas of our (infinite) climb, to finally discover His absence.

"Eu fico do lado de fora da porta, enquanto outros entram passando por mim, a ver-me ali. Sorriem; vocês acolhem-nos, a porta fecha-se mas eu sei ler desde os 19 anos. Sei o que eles valem, basta-me, hoje, passar uma vista de olhos pelos poemas que escreveram, no auge, entre os 20 e 30 anos. Não conseguem ir além disso, apesar da escola do auto-elogio, do elogio mútuo, e das publicações que não sei por que vias conseguem.
Do lado de fora da porta é que eu estou bem."
Albas, pag.94

I remain on the other side of the door, while others go in, passing me by, watching me there.
They smile; you take them in, the door closes, but I can read ever since I was 19. I know what they are worth, I just have to pass my eyes over the poems they wrote, in their prime, in their 20s and 30s. They can't move beyond that, despite the school of self-praise, of mutual praise, and the publishing, they manage, I don't know how.

Outside the door is where I feel good.

 

[Marjan v.d. Meulen]

Apart from his beautifull songs, I think Leonard Cohen's poetry is hovering around the skies, once in a while touching someone's heart. 30 years ago I was allowed to sit on my brother's bed while he studied his books. He had a record player and 2 records. Pink Floyd's Dark side of the moon and Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate, which struck me. I kept switching and switching them. Ever since then I cannot enough of Cohen. A wizzard in poetry I think. Love his books too. Hate to discuss it really, like you cannot discuss wine not excitement. You can only drink the words and feel utter satisfaction.

Kind regards,
Marjan v.d. Meulen (Holland)

 

[Tiff]

If you like Bukowski ..

you'll LOVE My Husband....His poetry speaks with power and intelligence. I am a huge fan of Bukowski and Fante and My Husband's writing is eloquently amongst the realms of such great writers ...his words ebb and flow thick and sweet as syrup. I have read both My Husband's books . . .

[ruthless edit by mjp]
[further edit, by popular demand, by Father Luke]

 

[Father Luke]

If you like Bukowski ..

Hey there, Tiff! Welcome to Bukowski dot net!

I guess you may find one or two people here that enjoy Bukowski.

- -
Okay,
Father Luke