I take the wistfulness of the last stanza to be genuine.
Thumbing through Bukowski’s last poems
April 25, 2013 by at 10:20 pm
I take the wistfulness of the last stanza to be genuine.
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Søren Kierkegaard
Walker Percy
Bob Dylan
Literature & History
Letters from an American
Beau of the Fifth Column
This American Life
The Writer’s Almanac
San Diego Reader
The Stranger
The Inlander
Adoremus
Charlotte was Both
The Onion
From Empty Hands
Ellen Finnigan
America
Commonweal
First Things
National Review
The New Republic
All Manner of Thing
Gerasene Writers Conference
Scrutinies
DarwinCatholic
Catholic and Enjoying It
Bad Catholic
Universalis
Is My Phylactery Showing?
Quotidian Quintilian
En pocas palabras
William Wilson, Guitarist Extraordinaire
Signposts in a Strange Land
Ben Hatke
Daniel Mitsui
Dappled Things
The Fine Delight
Gene Luen Yang
Wiseblood Books
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[emphasis added]
For reading: ‘Death Is Not the End’, at Grand Street Magazine
For listening: ‘Death Is Not the End’, read by the author
First one hundred forty-five words:
Fantastic, thanks. DFW reads well. How about his hook up with Mary Karr?
How about his hook up with Mary Karr?
Oh, man. Where to begin?
Poetophobia and Critogeny
I don’t understand.
I don’t comprehend.
I don’t get it.
Get it?
How does one stand under the substance of this thing?
First, scrape the beer scum from under the bar,
Then the nicotine-ladened gum from under the rostrum…
O, the barroom baedekers bellowed out by Bukowski the balladeer…
Did he not, did he not, did he not do
His lecturing at a bar with his drinking?
So we do not, do we not, do we not, do
Our drinking at a conference with our lecturing?
O, lecturehall lilting of lacivious larnyxes!
It’s really a matter of environment, isn’t it?
It’s really a matter of nuturing the sauce.
It’s really a matter of naturing the kidney.
It’s really a matter of nursing that last and doom-cracked drink until closing time…
It’s really a matter of the company one offends, isn’t it?
Sydney,
Milton,
Pope,
Dryden,
Eliot,
Pound,
Auden,
Justice,
Jarrell,
Heaney,
jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk jerk
A decade of jerks on a string…
Am I sounding strident?
Very well then, I am strident-sounding!
My speedo is large!
I contain egotudes!
I compose!
I drink!
I lecture you all about both!
JOB
Tremendous rejoinder, JOB.
What’s needed here is Flannery O and her lance of transcendence.
Thanks. My speedo is even larger now.
JOB
Interesting. Thanks Jonathan.