Birthday of Another Dead Poet

How that can't be an oxymoron I don't know. Nonetheless, in 1920 on this date, Charles Bukowski was born. I haven't read much of him, but Mme Metro really enjoys his work, and I've liked what I've read.

So, lifted wholesale from the Writer's Almanac for today:

Poem: "Girlfriends," by Charles Bukowski from Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line the Way. © Ecco. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Girlfriends

the women of the past keep
phoning.
there was another yesterday
arrived from out of
state.
she wanted to see
me.
I told her
"no."

I don't want to see
them,
I won't see them.
it would be
awkward
gruesome and
useless.

I know some people who can
watch the same movie
more than
once.

not me.
once I know the
plot
once I know the
ending
whether it's happy or
unhappy or
just plain
dumb,
then

for me
that movie is
finished
forever
and that's why
I refuse
to let
any of my
old movies play
over and over again
for
years.


[...]

It's the birthday of Charles Bukowski, born in Andernach, Germany (1920). His family moved to Los Angeles when he was two years old. His father was a milkman, and so frustrated with his own life that he became very abusive. He once beat Bukowski with a two-by-four because the son hadn't mowed the lawn correctly.

Bukowski studied literature and journalism for a year at Los Angeles City College. His father threw him out of the house after reading some of Bukowski's stories. For the next several years, he lived as a hobo. He made money working at a slaughterhouse and a dog biscuit factory, and for the American Red Cross. While trying to write, he starved much of the time, limiting himself to one candy bar a day, while he wrote up to five short stories a week. Often he had no typewriter and hand printed his work.

He finally got a steady job as a postal clerk in the fifties. In 1960, when he was forty years old, he published his first book of poetry, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960).

He published more than fifteen books of fiction and poetry in the next ten years, including Run With the Hunted (1962) and The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969).

Late in his life he said, "Every day I'll wake up around noon. Then I'll go to the track and I'll play the horses. ... Then I'll come back and I'll swim and ... have dinner and I'll go upstairs and I'll sit at the computer and I'll crack me a bottle [of wine] and I'll listen to some Mahler or Sibelius and I'll write, with this rhythm, like always."

---------

Bukowski was also immortalized in the film Barfly, starring Mickey Rourke. My friend and Nanaimo Bulletin writer Eugene Krebs is fond of quoting the drunken toast of Rouke/Bukowski's rummy: "To all my friends!"

His epitaph was: "Don't Try".

On my own account I wish to ask Mme Metro whether there's not a message in the poem above regarding the increasingly unwieldy and unwatched DVD accumulation occupying serious shelf space in the basement?