Oh, no. This Guy Again.

Of course, since it’s late at night, and I’ve successfully procrastinated until now to start doing my work(I swear it gets later every time I start). Once again, I’m gonna use my favorite poet, Charles Bukowski, as a reference for well done free-verse poetry(I looked into rap lyrics but that’s too intricate for me to replicate at 11:20). 

For some background, most, if not all, of Bukowski’s poetry revolves around how much his life sucks, mainly cause it did. Like, it really really really sucked. Growing up with an alcoholic father who regularly beat his mother, little Charles had no role models at home. He couldn’t even look up to his mother, as she regularly enabled his father to continue his alcoholism, along with a splatter of other character defects.

So, now, to get to the point. Charles, after all this hardship(which still continued till he died), decided to get into poetry and writing, never becoming as successful as he did until after he died(basically posthumously).

One of my biggest gripes about said poetry is that I believe Charles was an amazing writer, yet his critics and even his publishers never believed it so, and in a way, their POV can be right as well. Nothing Charles did was exceptional, but it didn’t have to be. 

For example, I give you this poem: And The Moon And The Stars And The World

“Long walks at night–

that’s what good for the soul:

peeking into windows

watching tired housewives

trying to fight off

their beer-maddened husbands.”

It’s just a free verse poem, with almost no real embellishments. No eye rhymes, or alliteration. Just a poem phrased like a single sentence, yet for some reason, I think it resonates with all of us, and it also adds a bit of complexity to Charles’s character. We’re all aware of the feeling of being wrenched back into reality. We want to believe that the world can be looked at as a sheet of stars, and we can jump between the clouds in the sky, made of cotton; but we can’t, for every moment we spend up there something happens down here as well. 

For the complexity of Bukowski's character, it’s actually quite humorous in multiple ways that he would begin the poem with a dreamland scenario, considering most of works are raw and revel in the debauchery of humanity. Yet for all he does in his books, even his characters preach of a better world and see something glorious in the disgusting things they do. 

I believe the words themselves are images, and decided not to put images in this blog post. I know, it seems low effort to call it creative direction, but what do you want, another picture of Charles’s aged face or more poetry analysis?

My attempt at recreating his work would go something like this:

I put your blue hands in mine,

Cold and soft, 

And I think of the fireplace

We used to sit at

“How did we get here?”, I think

As I see your eyes close one final time