bukowski

“He brought everyone down to earth, even the angels” (Leonard Cohen)

Bukowski managed to keep writing better and better up to his last drink; his best book was always the latest.
He died leaving behind hundreds of unpublished poems that his editor published posthumously in several book collections.

Some of his best poems had remained unpublished during his lifetime, and publishing them posthumously seemed to show how not even death could stop Bukowski from publishing better and better poems.

And then — in a Bukowskian twist — , after Bukowski’s original manuscripts became available, it was discovered that — in all his posthumously poetry collections — his editor had defaced, or tampered with, or raped, many of those poems… which came to reveal how those Bukowski poems were even better than we had previously thought.

“the pages will be found.
not so much that my death will be a tragic or
important thing

I will be out of
it

but the pages themselves will
let them know…

those carping little creeping
critics…

that I was good until the last
drink, and
better.”
(Bukowski, “let them be found…”)

Well Buk,
you’d be amused
writing those magical poems
you’d gathered such tremendous
momentum and inertia
by sheer discipline and
passion that,
even after you died,
your poems kept
getting better and better,
like wild horses over the hill,
running on empty