(1920-1994)

Charles Bukowski, Hank pour les amis, est né en 1920, à Andernach, en Allemagne.

Il ne découvre l'Amérique qu'à deux ans, lorsque ses parents émigrent à Los Angeles, avec l'espoir de faire fortune.
De gifles en coups de lanière, son enfance n'en est pas moins réglée à la prussienne et son adolescence s'achèvera, raconte-t-il, lorsque, complètement ivre, il mettra son père K.O.

Postier, magasinier, employé de bureau, Hank exercera une foule de petits métiers dont il se fait en général virer très vite. Misère et médiocrité, taule à l'occasion.

Pour échapper à un univers qu'il refuse autant qu'il le fascine, il boit et court les filles. Il écrit aussi, des poèmes d'abord qui l'imposeront comme le successeur de Kerouac et de Ginsberg, mais encore un roman puis des chroniques et des nouvelles. Il ne s'arrête d'écrire que pour boire et chercher une fille.

Ses oeuvres traduites en français sont :

Les contes de la folie ordinaire, portés à l'écran par Marco Ferrerri avec Ben Gazzara et Ornella Mutti
Les nouveaux contes de la folie ordinaire
L'amour est un chien de l'enfer
Women
Au sud de nulle part
Factotum
Souvenirs d'un pas grand chose
Le Postier
Mémoires d'un vieux dégueulasse
Je t'aime, Albert et les autres nouvelles de " Hot Water Music".
 
 

"... Believe you're good when they tell you you are good and you are thereby dead, dead, dead. dead forever. Art is a day by day game of living and dying and if you live a little more than you die you are going to continue to create some pretty fair stuff, but if you die a little more than you live, you know the answer."
 

These poems are taken from the book, "Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame."

Sway with Me

sway with me, everything sad --
madmen in stone houses
without doors,
lepers streaming love and song
frogs trying to figure
the sky;
sway with me, sad things --
fingers split on a forge
old age like breakfast shells
used books, used people
used flowers, used love
I need you
I need you
I need you:
it has run away
like a horse or a dog,
dead or lost
or unforgiving.
 

true story

they found him walking along the freeway
all red in
front
he had taken a rusty tin can
and cut off his sexual
machinery
as if to say --
see what you've done to
me? you might as well have the rest.

and he put part of him
in one pocket and
part of him in
another
and that's how they found him,
walking
along.

they gave him over to the
doctors
who tried to sew the parts
back
on
but the parts were
quite contented
they way they
were.

I think sometimes of all the good
ass
turned over to the
monsters of the
world.

Maybe it was his protest against
this or
his protest
against everything.
a one man
Freedom March
that never squeezed in
between
the concert reviews and the
baseball scores.

God, or somebody,
bless him.

to the whore who took my poems

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there'll always be mony and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

"to the whore who took my poems"
Copyright© 1974 by Charles Bukowski.
Reprinted from Burning in Water Drowning in Flame : Selected Poems 1955-1973 with permission of Black Sparrow Press.

This excerpt is from a collection of Bukowski's letters.

"... ah, Steve, the FEMALE. there is no way. don't wait for the good woman. she doesn't exist. there are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts. the female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. the male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. the female is skilled at betrayal. and torture and damnation. never envy a man his lady. behind it all lays a living hell. I know you're not going to quit the chase, but when you go into it, for Christ's sake, realize that you are going to be burned ahead of time. never go in totally open. the madhouses and skidrows are full of those. remember, the female is any man's woman at any time. the choice is her's. and she's going to rip the son of a bitch she goes to like she ripped you. but never hate the woman. understand that she is channeled this way and let her go. solitude too brings a love as tall as the mountains. f*** the skies. amen." (Nov. 5, 1971)

a threat to my immortality

she undressed in front of me
keeping her pussy to the front
while I layed in bed with a bottle of
beer.

where'd you get that wart on
your ass? I asked.

that's no wart, she said,
that's a mole, a kind of
birthmark.

that thing scares me, I said,
let's call
it off.

I got out of bed and
walked into the other room and
sat on the rocker
and rocked.

she walked out. now, listen, you
old fart. you've got warts and scars and
all kinds of things all over
you. I do believe you're the ugliest
old man
I've ever seen.

forget that, I said, tell me some more
about that
mole on your butt.

she walked into the other room
and got dressed and then ran past me
slammed the door
and was
gone.

and to think,
she'd read all my books of
poetry too.

I just hoped she wouldn't tell
anybody that
I wasn't pretty.

from "Mockingbird Wish Me Luck" - 1972 Black Sparrow Press

These poems were taken from the book, "Dangling in the Tournefortia"

ladies' man

there were knocks at my door at 3 or 4 a.m.

my getting up to let in some drunk and crazy
woman

that always charmed me somehow, even though
those women were drugged or drunk and had
little feeling for me

it was low-level action, going to the
refrigerator for beer, drinking with them
until 5 or 6 a.m.

then going to bed with them, those vicious
children of the night

I hated daylight and to be awakened by them
at noon as they stood before the mirror
putting on their monstrously red mouths:
"hey, can I use your phone?"

they came and they left and they came again

the mailman used to see some of them leaving

he watched those buttocks swing down the lane

those high heels crashing through the sunlight
flooding the cement

"Jesus, man," he'd say, "where do you get all
those women?"

"you just gotta be around night and day,"
I told him.

and that was it, that was half of being a
ladies' man.

the other half was letting it happen.
 

let it go

pissing drunk
in the middle of the night
on the second floor of somewhere
symphony music on --
quite a good boy working out.

it's good to have the arts
to let it go on.

I flush.
shake it.
wash my hands.

the symphony music is exceptional --
large emotional cartwheels
of glory.

it's good to have the arts
to let it go on.
suppose we didn't have that
to let it go on?
we'd jump off buildings or
murder our lovers.

I go naked down the stairway,
she is there watching an old movie on tv.

"you ought to put something on,"
she says,
"you'll catch cold."

you see, it's nice that we have
somebody who doesn't want us
to get sick,
and also after pissing in the
middle of the night it's nice
to be recognized.

"how long are you going to stay up?"
you ask her.

"this thing is terrible," she says,
"but I have to find out how it ends."

I go into the kitchen
open the refrigerator and
stare inside.

I don't know what I want there

somehow it looks more like a
clothes closet.

I close the refrigerator door
admire the fat click
it makes
then I go to the stairway
walk up.

pissing can be quite an adventure.

The following was taken from the book, "The Roominghouse Madrigals"

Layover

Making love in the sun, in the morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
making love in the sun
making love by a carpet redder than our blood,
making love while the boys sell headlines
and Cadillacs,
making love by a photograph of Paris
and an open pack of Chesterfields,
making love while other men -- poor fools --
work.

That moment -- to this ...
may be years in the way they measure,
but it's only one sentence back in my mind --
there are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
I pass the hotel at 8
and at 5; there are cats in the alleys
and bottles and bums,
and I look up at the window and think,
I no longer know where you are,
and I walk on and wonder where
he living goes
when it stops.
 

Sleep

she was a short one
getting fat and she had once been
beautiful and
she drank the wine
she drank the wine in bed and
talked and screamed and cursed at me
and I told her
please, I need some sleep.

-- sleep? sleep? you son of
a bitch, you never sleep, you
don't need any sleep!

I buried her one morning early
I carried her down the sides of the
Hollywood Hills
brambles and rabbits and rocks
running in front of me
and by the time I'd dug the ditch
and stuck her in
belly down
and put the dirt back on
the sun was up and it was warm
and the flies were lazy and
I could hardly see anything
out of my eyes
everything was so
warm and yellow.

I managed to drive home
and I got into bed and I
slept for 5 days and 4 nights.
 

I Kneel

these legs need to run
but I kneel
before female flowers
catch the scent of
forgetfulness
and grab it
sure
and evenings
hours of evenings
grey-headed evenings
nod
and afterwards
fall asleep.

The following was taken from the book, "You Get So Alone Sometimes that it Just Makes Sense"

oh yes

I've been so
down in the mouth
lately
that sometimes when I
bend over to
lace my shoes
there are
three tongues.
 

to the concerned:

if you get married, they think you're
finished
and if you are without a woman they think you're
incomplete.

a large portion of my readers want me to
keep writing about bedding down with madwomen and
streetwalkers --
also, about being in jails and hospitals, or
starving or
puking my guts
out.

I agree that complacency hardly engenders an
immortal literature
but neither does
repetition.

for those readers now
sick at heart
believing that I'm a contented
man --
please have some
cheer: agony sometimes changes
form
but
it never ceases for
anybody.
 

no help for that

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
a space

and even during the
best moments
and
the greatest
times

we will know it
we will know it
more than
ever

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled

and
we will wait
and
wait

in that
space.

© 1999 - neal.