Bukowski

Life is funny. One minute you are feeling like the party started without you and the next you realize the party was planned just for you. I have lived a full life with alot of adventure, pain, happiness, tears of sadness, and unending smiles for living. Alot of cliches, more than I can stand, but a life all the same.
I read an interesting poetic statement by Margaret Atwood the other day. It describes her journey to the writer in her. The inevitable pull to the wine drinking, cigarette smoking, paris seeking writers of her time and time passed. The desire to mingle with the risk takers and create the voice of a poet that would shock and portray an interesting 'writer's life'. Well, she found it, in the details of her life after the delayering of personalities acquired through the search for the writer in her. It is the presentation and perspective of the writer that entices the reader to continue reading. Bukowski presented the world with a dirty old man with a crude mouthful at every spit of drunken philosphy. Yet...it was interesting to experience his perspective of the world through the eyes of one in the middle of what most tried to avoid. It was no risk to him it seemed just his way and perspective and it caught on. I speak of Bukowski because he seems to surface in the work of new emerging poets where ever I go. I do admit I went through a time when he intrigued me to the point of purchasing all his books where ever I could. It was the feeling of raw truth...albeit his truth...that kept me wanting more at the time. I was pulled into his madness with a desire to find my own madness. This is where I found the writer in me. I projected all my filth, misery, and sweetness into lines that projected my reality. For a short while i experienced a freedom. Then I realized the journey was just in its infant stage. There would be more to come as my memory replayed forgotten or buried remnants of madness that just wouldn't be served best without continued maturing in the craft. I continue. I venture into the perspectives of writers to remind myself of that freedom....to be mad....my madness is a safe place for me. There is no good to it nor is there bad to it...it just is for me. I need it to be the writer I am. My words thrive on the madness around me. I write to live in the madness around me.

So Bukowski, the dirty old man spitting drunken philosphy, knew what he was doing in his own mad way.