Was he a good poet?

Pretty good.

my father and the bum

my father believed in work.
he was proud to have a
job.
sometimes he didn’t have a
job and then he was very
ashamed.
he’d be so ashamed that he’d
leave the house in the morning
and then come back in the evening
so the neighbors wouldn’t
know.

me,
I liked the man next door:
he just sat in a chair in
his back yard and threw darts
at some circles he had painted
on the side of his garage.
in Los Angeles in 1930
he had a wisdom that
Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Freud,
Jaspers, Heidegger and
Toynbee would find hard
to deny.

>without a righteous reason to be angry
most of his life was pretty shitty

this.

also...

this

He was okay. Not great, but I wnjoy him for light reading.

Bukowski is blunt in a way I'll never be, and just as much an animal as a man. He refused to be tamed, even when it was for his own good.

This is why I like his work. I do not think he is necessarily a good writer. He is merely a straightforward man.

He only good works are poetry:

blue bird has a meme status but it is actually reasonable.

melancholia has good lines as: "This is what I get for kicking religion in the ass"

my father and the bum is good and was already posted.

I always liked this one.

The Tragedy of the Leaves

I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,
the potted plants yellow as corn;
my woman was gone
and the empty bottles like bled corpses
surrounded me with their uselessness;
the sun was still good, though,
and my landlady’s note cracked in fine and
undemanding yellowness; what was needed now
was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester
with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd
because it exists, nothing more;
I shaved carefully with an old razor
the man who had once been young and
said to have genius; but
that’s the tragedy of the leaves,
the dead ferns, the dead plants;
and I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world has failed us
both

And this one.

burned

the kid went back to New York City to live with a woman
he met in a kibbutz.
he left his mother at the age of
32, a well-kept fellow, sense of humor and never
wore the same pair of shorts
more than one day. there he was
in the Puerto Rican section, she had a
job. he wanted iron bars on the windows and
ate too much fried chicken at 10 a.m.
in the morning after she went to
work. he had some money saved out of the
years and he fucked but he was really
afraid of
pussy.

I was sitting with Eileen in Hollywood
and I said:
I ought to warn the kid
so that when she turns on him
he'll be
ready.

no, she said, let him be happy.
I let him be
happy.
now he's back living with his
mother, he weighs three hundred and ten pounds
and eats all the time
and laughs all the time
but you ought to see his
eyes ...
the eyes are sitting in the center of all that
flesh ...
he bites into a chicken leg:
I loved her, he says to me,
I loved her.

I think he has some beautiful poems. I like the earlier poetry more, before he kind of got way too into the character of being "Bukowski"

even if he wasn't, he inspired masterpieces like this

youtube.com/watch?v=JaLjwSpZ6Cs

I like Bukowski for the characters he attracts

If you're in a new town (larger the better) that has a large university library, check out the copies of Bukowski they have in the stacks

It's fun to read the marginalia and to see what's been stolen. For instance
- A copy of You Get So Alone in Carleton had "AND YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET------!" scrawled on the inside cover
- U of Ottawa (IIRC) had most of its novels stolen but no one touched the poetry
- McGill's copy of Post Office had a grocery note written in the margins. The prices for milk and beer date it to the early 2000s

His best work is poetry. And also his worst work is poetry. They vary wildly.