Walking Through the Fire With Poet Charles Bukowski
A lot of poetry in recent years is what I like to call "navel gazing" poetry: pontificating on the beauty of a blade of grass, or the rhapsody of a sunset. Don't get me wrong, those kind of subjects in the hands of a good poet can be great.(see Pablo Neruda's book "Odes to Common Things"). But too often these kind of poems are detached from the experience of common life, leaving people to feel disconnected from poetry and their lives.
But this is not the case with Charles Bukowski. He writes with what I characterize as "poems from the streets". The everyday sights and sounds of a city. His home turf was the city of Los Angeles, but there's a lot of common ground with all cities. Some of his poems will make you laugh, and others will make you cringe. But Bukowski manages to walk a fine line with a direct, plain-spoken technique mixed with a gritty lyricism. Pick up a copy of his collection "What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire", and you might look at poetry in a different way; less academic and more connected to everyday life, especially if you live in the city.
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