I spent two years living in East Hollywood as a student. Upon leaving, I thought I’d never see the place again. That was until I picked up Love Is A Dog From Hell by Charles Bukowski. This man did with poetry, what James Ellroy did with prose. I could smell the ozone after reading five or six of these poems.

Noir Film and Literature appeal to my sense of irony and ennui. I slam down Raymond Chandler novels in two or three days when I fly places on business. The genre embodies everything that Contemporary American Realism has evolved towards and distills it into its purest form. But I’d never imagined that that would be doable in the stylized rhythmic meter of poetry until I became addicted to Charles Bukowski.

Poems like "Edith Sent Us", "searching for what?", "Eyeless through Space" and "like a movie" made me feel the pavement of Vermont Avenue under the worn soles of dirty shoes. I was back in East LA, the signs were all in Spanish and the weather in hell was a seasonable 82 degrees with only a mild breeze to stir the lazy palm trees.

The foreboding loneliness, the impending loss, and the lone wolf defying desolate odds just didn’t seem to fit into a quatrain; at least not in the poetic universe inhabited by the poets who grace the pages of High School English textbooks. Bukowski is not that type of poet. He fell to Earth head first and struck the unforgiving pavement of Western Boulevard.

He invokes the image of the struggling artist. He is noble like Steven Mallory, from Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. You feel this man suffer for his art while simultaneously indulging his masochism in The Best Men Are Strongest Alone.

"and tonight is a special night
I am alone again
Just like when I started

My fingers rattle the keys
The war has never ended.
I like this fight.

And it dawns on me now that
There is nothing so beautiful and
Pure and perfect as the well
Written line."

Yet while Bukowski suffered for his art and fought to get every line down he could before he expired, he also remained human. He fought despite his weaknesses and human frailties. One could never imagine John Galt from Atlas Shrugged ever described as Bukowski describes himself in Good Times.

"I had been sad and hungover
For several days
And nights
I was in my shorts
Spread across the
Bed"

Bukowski not only lived in the real world, he expected the same of others. He shows his impatience with pretense and fakery. The stereotypical Wordsworth would never have penned the following stanzas from dogfight over LA:

"once at a poetry reading
He told me, ‘you are a confused
Man, probably the victim of an unhappy
Childhood.’

I grabbed him by the collar, ‘listen
buddy, how would you like to eat a
bowl of my s---?’

‘peace’ he said, ‘I’m a pacifist.’

‘weighing 112 pounds and not having any
Guts,’ I informed him, ‘you don’t have
Much choice.’"

Bukowski evokes not just a place but also a time and a genre that reflect a confused America attempting to comprehend the dawn of a new era. The nation has just picked up The Times and read that "God Is Dead." If God has died, what then do we live for? For Bukowski, it was an unending quest to get down what he called "the way, the light and the form."

That quest carried Bukowski through seventy-three years. Seventy-three years of booze, women, menial jobs, horse races, poverty and frustration. It’s his legacy. It’s poetry’s future.

Bukowski built the bridge between the rhythmic pastoral passions of poetry and the asphalt darkness of unforgiving modernity. Charles Bukowski therefore wears the crown as King of The Poets Noir.

Copyright© 2006 Stephen D. Haff

STEPHEN D. HAFF was born on 21 October 1969 in Fairfax, VA, USA.  He has lived in Richmond, VA, Hollywood, CA, Raleigh, NC, Aberdeen, MD, and Killeen, TX.  Currently lives with his wife, Chong, in Alexandria, VA.  He works as an Operations Research Analyst and has for five years.  He has a Master’s Degree in Atmospheric Science and a Bachelor’s in Applied Mathematics.  His hobbies include running, role-playing games, rugby and reading virtually anything he can get his hands on.  He especially likes Noir Fiction.  Some personal favorites include Richard Stark and F. Paul Wilson, creator of “Repair-Man Jack.” He’s published Zine Fiction on the Unknown Armies Website.  Stories include “Fire, Water, Burn” and “The Exterminator.”
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