Charles Bukowski, “The Last Night of the Earth Poems”
The fact that this book has the word “Poems” in the title meant that I should avoid it like the plague. I think it’s due to my complete-ist nature, slogging through every thing an author writes, for good or for ill. Witness my problem with people like Kerouac, Steinbeck, Chomsky, DeLillo, and a host of other authors you can identify by last name alone.
And I’ve finished all the Bukowski stuff that was fiction so I should be home free, as I avoid poetry. But I noticed that a lot of his poetry books tend to have short story works in them as well, and so I keep purchasing through his other works. And looking at the list of “Other works by the author,” I’m afraid I’m going to be doing this for a while.
So I suppose it’s fortunate that this wasn’t that horrible stinky poetry that I can’t stand. First of all, there’s no semblance of a structure here.
He just
decides
that he’s going
to
put
a break in the
words
here
and perhaps
here.
And so, if I adjust to the non-uniform spacing (easier to do if you drink while you read, and is there any other way to read Bukowski?), it’s like reading one of his short stories, only they’re really, really short. In the meantime, the pages fly by, and more often than not, the “stories” are kind of neat. Or neat enough to not make me rip the fucking thing into a million pieces.
