I've recently been introduced to Charles Bukowski via YouTube recommended and I've been watching all these interviews...

this is a toxic ideology on lit. Just because a bunch of retards read something and treat it as their bible doesn't mean that you can't rationally enjoy said work.

His books are fictionalized accounts of his real life, so the bullshit/truth distinction is essentially irrelevant to enjoying them. give em a read OP, he's a very simple author and it's easy to burn through his stuff quickly

What books of his should I read? I like his poetry, and I hate poetry.

Same. I think the jews are trying to schill bukowski for some reason?

>the tennage redditors defending bukowski itt
he is literally the same as rupi kapur. they both have one gimmick thatthey borrowed from someone else and made worse

Bukowski "DUDE LIQUOR AND WHORES LMAO"

kapur "DUDE PATRIARCHY LMAO"

he's absolute trash.
>dude I'm such a tough guy i drink and pretend not to care all the time but inside my heart is like a bird and i'm so sad hahah

worthless garbage with no literary merit. and his style never evolved. he would peddle the same shit with no introspection or tempt at challenging himself every time he needed rent money. and millennials who romanticize hedonism eat it up like pigs at a trough

So you don't read Nietzsche

Just read Celine instead.

You've never read Bukowski.

Hey it's OP, even though no ones is defending anyone in here, this is what I was looking for, I need to hear the reasons why people don't fuck with this guy to make sense of it all so thanks for this

Just look at this, every Bukowski thread brings these people out. So he has to have done something right.

neither do his teenage fans

Women & Hollywood were my favorites.

Lesson he was trying to teach? Like fight people and get drunk 24 / 7 ?

have a (You)

Can you refute him though?

His books get even more fictionalized, and his ego grows, as his books go on. I jumped the train around Ham on Rye, because what I like about him is that he's just a drunk loser, but he seems to make himself some sort of profound superman the more he writes.

(((THEY))) WANT TO SPREAD DEGENERACY OBVIOUSLY, THEY WANT TO MAKE US ALL DRUNK NIHILISTS

He gets a lot of stick for being a sort of Coelho-esque normie-tier pseudo-profound edgelord, or a lowbrow Kerouac slash Burroughs or something, but I like his stuff, it's simple, articulate, honest and humorous. His whole "bro I was so friggin drunk ;)" thing gets annoying in the same way Lovecraft's "bro it was soooo f-ing scary, like wow :D" kind of jars after a while, but I like Bukowski. He's a big softie who ended up living a life that threatened to make him a deadbeat hardass, but he stayed true to his sensitivity.

Read the Post Office about a year ago. Can relate to the mind numbing monotony.

Ham on Rye and Post Office for his fiction

This is the important takeaway more folks should get.

i was also recommended them. why does youtube do that?

I'll dump a couple

Bluebird

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

3:16 and One Half

here I’m supposed to be a great poet
and I’m sleepy in the afternoon
here I am aware of death like a giant bull
charging at me and I’m sleep in the afternoon
here I’m aware of wars and men fighting in the ring
and I’m aware of good food and wine and good women
and I’m sleepy in the afternoon
I’m aware of a woman’s love
and I’m sleepy in the afternoon
I lean into the sunlight behind a yellow curtain
I wonder where the summer flies have gone
I remember the most bloody death of Hemingway
and I’m sleepy in the afternoon.

some day I won’t be sleepy in the afternoon
some day I’ll write a poem that will bring volcanoes
to the hills out there
but right now I’m sleepy in the afternoon
and somebody asks me “Bukowski, what time is it?”
and I say 3:16 and a half
I feel very guilty, I feel obnoxious, useless,
demented, I feel
sleepy in the afternoon
they are bombing churches, o.k., that’s o.k.,
the children ride ponies in the park, o.k., that’s o.k.,
the libraries are filled with thousands of books of knowledge,
great music sits inside the nearby radio
and I am sleepy in the afternoon,
I have this tomb within myself that says,
ah, let the others do it, let them win
let me sleep,
wisdom is in the dark
sweeping through the dark like brooms,
I’m going where the summer flies have gone,
try to catch me.

Dinosauria, We

Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.

So You Want To Be A Writer

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

The Shower

we like to shower afterwards
(I like the water hotter than she)
and her face is always soft and peaceful
and she’ll watch me first
spread the soap over my balls
lift the balls
squeeze them,
then wash the cock:
“hey, this thing is still hard!”
then get all the hair down there,-
the belly, the back, the neck, the legs,
I grin grin grin,
and then I wash her. . .
first the cunt, I
stand behind her, my cock in the cheeks of her ass
I gently soap up the cunt hairs,
wash there with a soothing motion,
I linger perhaps longer than necessary,
then I get the backs of the legs, the ass,
the back, the neck, I turn her, kiss her,
soap up the breasts, get them and the belly, the neck,
the fronts of the legs, the ankles, the feet,
and then the cunt, once more, for luck. . .
another kiss, and she gets out first,
toweling, sometimes singing while I stay in
turn the water on hotter
feeling the good times of love’s miracle
I then get out. . .
it is usually mid-afternoon and quiet,
and getting dressed we talk about what else
there might be to do,
but being together solves most of it
for as long as those things stay solved
in the history of women and
man, it’s different for each-
for me, it’s splendid enough to remember
past the memories of pain and defeat and unhappiness:
when you take it away
do it slowly and easily
make it as if I were dying in my sleep instead of in
my life, amen.

>but he seems to make himself some sort of profound superman the more he writes.
Explain. I read Ham on Rye.

This one is a favorite of mine and I think its a good guideline when writing poetry.
If you don't feel it, don't do it.

He's a fucking degenerate
The poetry is shit also
He should've died sooner so he wouldn't have time to create the diarrhea he did

this 2bh

>He's a fucking degenerate
irrelevant outside of /pol/

It's relevant because he has nothing to say other than what anons before me posted, such AS LOL WHORE LOL BOOZE

You like his poetry because you hate poetry.

The ignorance, stating this on a literature board. Do you really think the next classic won't be anti-degenerate, Christian and /pol/-approved?

There's some truth to this in that they're both vapid and talentless, but I would just barely put him over Roopi Kow if only because wasting a good chunk of your life being a dysfunctional alcoholic postal worker happens to be a slightly more compelling gimmick than being just another internet "feminist" splitting sentences into """""poems""""" and trying to get people to pay attention to her rancid bleeding snatch on instagram.

>Do you really think the next classic won't be anti-degenerate, Christian and /pol/-approved?
Yes.

that's really ok, I think I'm gonna buy some of his books, where should I start if I enjoyed Kerouac and Burroughs (cause Bukowski is also a beatnik r-right?)
I guess we must have similar taste in yt videos

>youtube.com/watch?v=047rxy5nYeo
here he is losing his shit and kicking a woman in camera.

Meanwhile, from an actual poet:

youtube.com/watch?v=mL5CG3Sq158