Popularly called the Poet Laureate of Skid Row, Charles Bukowski was the voice of the Working Class poor. Calling them prissy and worthless,he tossed the conventions of traditional poetry and wrote about life in the rundown white neighborhoods using the coarse language and stark images he absorbed while growing up in East Los Angeles. .
You never knew what was going to come out of Charles Bukowski’s mouth. Most of the time neither did he. When you spend sixty percent of your days smashed, your brain gets scrambled like a computer with a virus. You’re talking while your retrieval system is still scanning for the right words to zip to your mouth. And “Buk” (rhymes with “puke”) was easily three sheets to the wind sixty percent of the time.
If you’ve never heard of Charles Bukowski, the brightest star out of the “Meat School” or “Dirty Realist” poets, steel yourself with a shot and a beer before settling in with a book of his poems or one of his novels.
Bukowski’s writing isn’t quite the stuff you find on men’s room walls, but it is peppered with profanity, explicit sex and images of life in the poor lane. His language isn’t gratuitously obscene, though it can seem so, but his choice of words is most apt for an unflinching take on what it’s like to scrape by on the lowest rung of society.
If you know Buk’s work, then slam down two boilermakers just to get a touch of the groove he was in while slamming away at his typewriter. A shot of alcohol is the perfect prelude to a night with Bukowski.
He speaks from his gut, using the coarse language he soaked up as a kid on the streets of Los Angeles, the bare knuckled jargon of working class people and the down and outers who spend their days and nights lost in workingmen’s bars.
Bukowski was one of them, having been a day laborer, dishwasher, factory worker, warehouseman, parking lot attendant and guard. He worked in a slaughterhouse, on loading docks, and in a dog biscuit factory. Once he held a “job” in a Philadelphia bar where he sat from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. earning drinks by allowing the bartender to beat him up for the entertainment of patrons. 
Sure, other writers have escorted us through the bleak streets of white urban ghettos with their beaten-down houses, cheap hotels, flophouses, skid rows, tough-guy bars, lonely diners and dim corner restaurants. But none of them endured the squalor and hopelessness of life in those environs from childhood into their fifties. None knew the lay of the land as well as Bukowski did.
Charles Bukowski was the archetypal outsider, not an outcast, but a man who chose singularity. He belonged to no literary movement or circle and railed against the literary elite, especially poetry’s traditionalists. He believed that poetry had wasted a couple of hundred years wallowing around in adherence to forms and technicalities—“We’re all tired of the turned subtle phrase and the riddle in the middle line.” Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me,” he told one interviewer. “That upper-crust shit bored me. I couldn’t relate to it.”
The formality of traditional poetry, with its stilted diction and affectations,
was “prissy” and emasculating. As the unique voice of working class people, Bukoswski sought to strip poetry down to its bare bones to keep it accessible to the average Joe.
He used “free verse in a series of declarative sentences broken up into a long, narrow column giving an impression of speed and terseness even when the
language is sentimental or cliched. “Smashed, The pulp poetry of Charles Bukowski,” Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, (March 14, 2005). For example,
you’re a beast, she said
your big white belly
and those hairy feet.
you never cut your nails. . . .
beast beast beast,
she kissed me,
what do you want for
breakfast?
When he became a living legend with the release of the 1987 largely biopic film Barfly starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, he made a solid connection with the young disaffected post-Beat generation, many of whom felt comfortable enough with his image to seek him out to talk about his writing and theirs. 
And he made himself surprisingly available, leaving his address and phone number listed, so it wasn’t unusual for fans knock on their cult hero’s door, at 5124 De Longpre Ave in East Hollywood, Los Angeles, to chat with him. A few were welcomed in, offered a seat and even a beer. He thought nothing of answering his phone to commiserate with a young writer or to banter about his life on the road as a wandering bum and full-time drunk.
Knock or ring him up at the wrong time, and you might meet the other Buk, the one his one-time friend poet Hal Norse wrote about in the Small Press Review: “Hateful as he can be—and God, he can be so detestable you want to shove him up a camel’s ass—somehow the warmth and snotty charm of the bastard comes through so powerfully that he remains an attractive personality, ugliness and all.”
His readers can sense when he’s joshing, poking a friendly elbow to their ribs right after he’s jolted them with another outlandish line of his. At the same time he could be, well . . . poetic and serious, about writing as in this poem:
Writing
often it is the only
thing
between you and
impossibility.
no drink,
no woman’s love,
no wealth
can match it,
nothing can save
you
except
writing.
it keeps the walls
from
failing.
the hordes from
closing in.
it blasts the
darkness.
writing is the
ultimate
psychiatrist,
the kindliest
god of all the
gods.
writing stalks
death.
it knows no
quit.
and writing
laughs
at itself,
at pain.
it is the last
expectation,
the last
explanation.
that’s
what it
is.
from Blank Gun Silencer
Charles Henry Bukowski, Jr. was born in Germany to a couple of brutish child beaters in August, 1920. The family immigrated here when Buk was about three and settled in East Los Angeles. His parents were sadistic people who, in today’s world, would be pulling hard time for felony child abuse. The slightest infraction drew discipline in the form of ten or more lashes across the kid’s bare buttocks with a leather razor strop.
The parents were nasty in ways that obliterate the line between mean and evil. From childhood through his high school years they remained callous and indifferent toward him. At his high school graduation neither one was in the audience.
One day a friend invited Buk down to the cellar of his home where he pointed to two huge wine barrels. His father, he told Buk, made wine. They took turns slurping mouthfuls of the dry red liquid from the spigots until both of them were nicely buzzed. Recalling his introduction to alcohol in his autobiographical novel, Ham On Rye ( Black Sparrow Press, 1982), Bukowski wrote: “Never had I felt so good. It was better than masturbating.” The warm, anesthetizing effects of the wine made a lasting impression on him: “. . . I thought, well, now I have found something, I have found something that is going to help me, for a long long time to come.”
The summer before ninth grade his face exploded with a heinous form of acne. Boils “the size of apples” covered his face, traveled to his neck and crawled down his back. As they broke, the watery contents streamed down Buk’s face and neck, sometimes soaking through his shirt. All ready an economic outcast, the acne made him a social leper.
He related the condition to his life agonizing: “The poisoned life had finally exploded out of me. There they were—all the withheld screams—sprouting out in another form.”
There was one advantage to being an ignored teenager. Bukowski could roam about Los Angeles, doing as he pleased. He ambled into the Los Angeles Central Library one day and the event transformed his life. Reading had been one of his great pleasures. Now, any book he wanted was a few feet away in the stacks. The library stirred his innate intelligence and awakened a deep curiosity about life in him. The house of books became his retreat and place of learning. It was a frequent destination where he read widely—history, biography, philosophy, poetry and novels.
He enjoyed T. S. Eliot, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Hemingway, McCullers and D.H. Lawrence, among many others. But his favorite was John Fante, author of the hard-to-find minor classic Ask the Dust. Commenting on these golden days Bukowski exclaimed, “I must have read a whole library!”
Following high school he attended Los Angeles City College with plans to launch a literary career. He took courses in art, journalism and literature. He wrote furiously throughout his time there, but not well. Two years later, he chucked it all and headed for New York City to try his luck.
His time in the city got him nowhere. He’d slave away at menial jobs and write nightly, but five years later all he had to show for it was lint in his pockets and a bag full of rejection slips. Buk left New York and meandered west, partly by bus, partly thumbing, sipping pints of booze and stopping off in big cities to enjoy a few days bed rest, earn some money, meet a few floozies and get wasted in the local bars. That’s how he spent the next ten years after his bus pulled into L.A. -- wandering cross country and staying drunk.
Bukowski described his creative process as fighting it out with his typewriter,
not calling out his muse, but banging on the keys and demanding the machine cough up his poems. His muse was beer after beer through the night with classical music—the big guns Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms—playing on the radio. 
Back in Los Angeles, the anarchistic Bukowski signed on with the United States Postal Service, starting as a part-time letter carrier and working his way up to clerk. It wasn’t a likely choice for a man of his political stripe, but the money was enough for an apartment, a few groceries and all the beer and wine necessary to fuel his raging bouts with his typewriter as he punched out poem after poem.
Buk boasted he could turn out ten or fifteen poems a night. It sounds unlikely, but with over 50 books published—even though there are several short stories and novels in the mix—it ‘s possible. He claimed to have hundreds of poems stashed in a suitcase he kept hidden and ready for a quick exit if footsteps on the staircase signaled the approach of police or his unpaid landlord. 
By 1969 Bukowski succumbed to the petty rules and suffocating bureaucracy of the postal service and resigned. Within nineteen days of calling it quits he started and finished his first novel Post Office (1971) (first Ecco edition 2002), a sardonic look back at his years within the ultimate conformist institution, before “going postal” became an a figure of speech. The book became a best seller.
The labor of all those nights pounding out poems and stories started paying off
for Buk about the same time. His poetry, with all its proletarian grittiness, had been appearing with growing frequency in Los Angeles’ underground journals while his column, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” was featured in the subversive OPEN CITY newspaper. The weekly dissemination of his writing in OPEN CITY pumped up Buk’s reputation among the counterculture through his earthy social commentary:
I don’t go with the Dos--CRIME AND PUNISHMENT—that no man has the right to take another man’s life. but it might take a bit of thinking first. Of course, the gall is that they have been taking our lives without firing a bullet. I too have worked for dismal wages while some fat boy has raped fourteen-year-old virgins in Beverly Hills. I’ve seen men fired for taking five minutes too long in the crapper. I’ve seen things I don’t even want to talk about. But before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with; something better than political opportunist slamming hate horseshit in the public park.(From Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski, City Lights, 1969.)
Bukowski was a man pissed off at the inexplicable randomness of life and death. He wrestled with the possibility that there is something more to life other than the ceaseless turn of the wheel from good to evil, a cosmic view that allows us to see our existence as logical and meaningful afterall. His poems and stories are an extension of a quest to see if there is more to life than drinking, fucking, gambling, fighting and shitting. Bukowski didn’t find the answer before dying of leukemia, in 1994, but riding shotgun for him vicariously through his work is worth the ride. He’s often hilarious and he takes you places you’d be afraid to go alone and he shows you things you’ve only heard about.
To get a better angle on Charles Bukowski make a trip to a bookstore. His books fill more shelf space than any American poet. The lurid titles are intriguing: Love is a Dog from Hell, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, The Days Run away like Wild Horses over the Hills, To Kiss the Worms Goodnight, At Terror Street and Agony Way. An unusually good anthology of fiction and poetry is Run With the Hunted a Charles Bukowski Reader (Harper Collins, 1993). Bookstores report that at a time when most poetry books can’t be given away, Bukowski’s are the most frequently stolen. 
Of his novels, start with Post Office (1971), Women (Black Sparrow Press, 1971), Hollywood (Black Sparrow Press, 1989) or Pulp (Black Sparrow Press, 1994), a noir style detective story.
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