The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over t... by Charles Bukowski

An excerpt from “listening to the radio at 1:35 a.m.” captures this neatly: Practically all of the poems in “The Continual Condition” are built on a foundation of malaise. Then again, our culture’s tremendous appetite for Bukowski’s favorite vices - sex, booze, and gambling - suggests his take on the human experience resonates with more of us than a Norman Rockwell painting might imply. The jacket of “The Continual Condition” calls him “America’s most imitated and influential poet,” an evaluation that surprised me, given the apparent gap between Bukowksi’s gritty, often depressing subject matter and the prim, positive posture so many Americans maintain, at least in public. If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably familiar with Bukowski. The book was published in 2009, 15 years after the legend from Los Angeles passed away. For example, this week, I introduced myself to Charles Bukowski via “The Continual Condition,” which contains more than 60 previously uncollected poems. Today, I’m still a newbie who has barely scratched the surface when it comes to all the great poetry out there. I began to realize that the world of poetry offers much more than “My little horse must think it queer / to stop without a farmhouse near.” I ran out and picked up a Levis collection called “Elegy,” and read it with delight. Their subject matter was somber, their voice brooding. They were written in English as we speak it today. Something was different about Levis’s poems.

Then a few years ago, I stumbled across a few poems by the late Larry Levis in an issue of The San Diego Reader. In fact, like so much of the literature I remember reading in English classes, many of the poems we were assigned felt like they were written solely to make teenagers hate reading. In high school, the standard stuff they foisted on us - Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Keats, Byron, Shelley, and so on - struck me as dull, dated, and often incomprehensible. At age 33, I’m a relative newcomer to reading poetry.

The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over t... by Charles Bukowski