CHARLES BUKOWSKI is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of
poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated
poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany to an American soilder father and
a German mother in 1920, and brought to the United States at the age of
three. he was raised in los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. he
published his first story in 1944 when he was twenty-four and began writing
poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California on Mach
9. 1994 at the age of seventy three, shortly after completeing his last
novel, Pulp (1994) During his lifetime he published more than forty-five
books of poetry and prose, including the novels Post Office (1971) Factodum
(1975) Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982), and Hollywood (1989). His most recent
books are the posthumouseditions of Bone Pallace ballet: New poems (1997)
; the Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship (1998)
which is illustrated by Robert Crumb; reach For The Sun:Selected Letters
1978-1994 (1999); and What Matters Most Is How Well you Walk through The
Fire (1999). All of his books have been published in translations\ in over
a dozen languages and his worldwide popularity remains undiminished. In
the years to come Black Sparrow Press will publish additional volumes of
previously uncollected poetry.
-Black Sparrow Press Bio
Taken from the liner notes
of the "Hostage" Spoken Word CD:
If You've got your hand on this album, you undoubtedly know something about
Charles Bukowski. Most likely to do with drinking, fornicating, or gambling.
Mabye all three. Mabye you heard how he inhabited Skid Row bars and tenement
flophouses, for years "vomiting into plugged toilets/in rented rooms full
of roaches and mice." Or how he once worked in a dog buscuit factory or
that his hobby is horses. Mabye you heard about his disorderly poetry readings
on college campuses around the country during the 1970's, "a man of obscene
personal habits, a viscious drunk who vomited and urinated over professors'
wives and tried to goose them with a calloused index finger." Mabye you
heard he worked at the post office. Rumor has been good to old Hank. But
Whatever you've heard or have not heard, whatever Bukowski is, was, or might
have done, the man remains first and foremost a writer. And he comes away
from his desk only for a price. For you, that means the "price" of this
album. For others, it meant the price of a poetry reading. For that price,
Bukowski is held hostage. A low-life drifter whose face is to ugliness and
abuse what Paul Bunyan's body was to size and strength, German-born Bukowski
didn't even start writing poetry until he was 35, when a 10-year-long party
with alchohol and pills concluded with severe eternal hemorrhaging at the
Los Angeles County Hospital Charity Ward. Surviving his brush with death,
Bukowski made the dirty beds and sleazy bars, Los Angeles' urban ditch,
into landscapes, for free-verse stories and poems. He deluged literary magazine
editors with his work. He began collecting innumerable disciples. During
the mid-'60's, Bukowski had a column called "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" in
various underground newspapers. He distrupted any party he was invited to
and many he wasn't. In Los Angeles especially, his poetry readings became
parties themselves, with "poet and audience both drunk." As you'll hear
on this album, fans and poet come to these readings prepared to compete.
"Is there anybody tough enough here to try me?" Bukowski taunts the crowd.
"try some shit, do some anger." As long as his influence seemed centered
in L.A., Bukowski was easy to dismiss as nothing more than a flamboyant
provincial, a throwback to a simpler, mortgage-free way of life, a poet
firmly in the tradition of California low-brow. But Bukowski's adherants
have grown beyond the city, beyond the state. Indeed Charles Bukowski is
now one of the most influential poets writing in America- the other being
his diametrical opposite, the abstract expressionist John Ashbury. And between
you and me, in pure numbers, Bukowski has been winning this race "going
away". Imitators across the country adapt his attitudes, aethetics, and
techniques now. Urban wastelands of wasted individuals are seen through
the sentimental eyes of sympathetic, half-cultured thoughts- Philip Marlowes,
Humphrey Bogarts, Hank Chinaskis- who maintain their heroic integrity and
chivalric humanity in a mean, stinking world. Bukowski has become the prophet
of the underemployed, those students of the 70's who didn't take MBA's but
became the educated factory workers and tecnicians of the 80's. The security
guard who works out chess problems in his spare time, the computer programmer
who can whistle Beethoven, the assembly-line worker who reads poetry nightly-
all are fans who adapt Bukowski's prose of low-brow sophistication as one
defense against the meaninglessness of mindless labor. Hank Chinaski, Bukowski's
character in the poems and prose, is also an influence. He's a Philip Marlowe
type who is perfectly capable of beating up three men and cradling a stray
dog the same night. Like Chandler's famous detective, Bukowski's hard-boiled
anti-hero paradoxically mixes cynicism and honor, brutality and pathos,
failure and sucess. But mabye Charles Bukowski knows his real achievements
best: "My contribution", he wrote in 1974, "was to loosen and simplify poetry,
to make it more human... I taught them that you can write a poem the same
way you can write a letter, that a poem can even be entertaining, and that
there need not be anything necessarily holy about it."
