How To Cope With the Monotony of Life

I haven’t read a lot of poetry recently, but, yes, Bukowski is probably still my dude. It’s partly because he had almost no formal education, lived a life of extraordinary hardship, carried his share of crosses (including a life-long addiction to the bottle), and yet, despite all that, he became a poet. He’s the sort one would least likely associate with poetry. He was hard, coarse, ugly, disturbed, but he wrote poetry that turned average folks onto poetry. He was the poet to ordinary folks. He befriended gamblers, renegades, prostitutes, the crazed, and he told their stories. Thoreau once said something like most people lead lives of quiet desperation. Bukowski knew that truism better than most. He turned that desperation into beautiful works of art and became world famous, a type of cult figure. When was the last time a poet became as famous as “Hank”? Plus, he was amazingly prolific in the last forty years of his life–believe it or not, he didn’t publish his first poem until he was 35. During that last period, he put out thousands of poems and published something like 50 or more big volumes of work.

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