girl in a miniskirt reading the Bible outside my window
face of a political candidate on a street billboard
a love poem for all the women I have known
and a horse with greenblue eyes walks on the sun
the history of a tough motherfucker
we ain’t got no money, honey, but we got rain
the soldier, his wife and the bum
With more than twenty Charles Bukowski poetry books now available in print and dozens of first-rate unpublished poems on file, an essential collection has been long overdue. The task at hand was titanic: A prolific author by any measure, with some five thousand poems on record written over a span of fifty years, Bukowski famously wrote almost every night in an alcoholic stupor, trashing most of the gibberish the morning after. Picking Bukowski’s best poems out of this massive heap was daunting, to say the least.
“The bluebird,” “the genius of the crowd,” “roll the dice,” “the crunch,” and other popular poems were strong contenders even before I put together a tentative list. As I pored over both the published and the unpublished work, some relatively obscure gems, such as “when Hugo Wolf went mad,” “sparks,” “the loser,” and “another academy” came back to life for me. I also included poems that were pivotal in Bukowski’s career, like “swastika star buttoned to my ass,” which moved longtime German translator, agent, and friend Carl Weissner to become a fervent Bukowski enthusiast after reading