Artbound presents a KCET flashback episode offering a rare, intimate look at iconoclastic writer and poet Charles Bukowski, whose gritty works have become an integral part of California's literary canon.

This episode features exclusive insights from the writer himself, including Bukowski performing passages that would be part of his work Mockingbird Wish Me Luck, and driving through 1970s Los Angeles, while he discusses the city's influence on his writing. In Southern California's liquor stores and sun-bleached streets, the documentary follows a day in the life of Bukowski, whose gnarled appearance and biting wit collides with unassuming Angelenos he encounters along the way. We meet the characters in his neighborhood, whose lives he chronicled in his uncompromising prose and poetry. Bukowski was a champion for the every man, the working class heroes that are the spine of the city. Bukowski knew them well, as he once worked as a mailman, pounding the pavement and exploring post-war Los Angeles, where homogeneity spread as suburbanization unrolled vast fields of houses.

He was a barfly on the wall, observing life, filtering it through his cantankerous worldview, then distilling it into his direct and evocative poems. His writing shed light on the darkened contours of the metropolis, revealing that life in the shadows is a life worth living, where beauty lies in imperfection and deferred dreams can yield unexpected opportunities. In the generations that bookended his life, America's manifest destiny spread across the West and into space, but for Bukowski, the unexplored territory was our own interior worlds.

In this episode, Bukowski recites a few poems to a San Francisco audience. Read them here:

the rat

with one punch, at the age of 16 and 1/2,

I knocked out my father,

a cruel shiny bastard with bad breath,

and I didn't go home for some time, only now and then

to try to get a dollar from

dear momma.

it was 1937 in Los Angeles and it was a hell of a

Vienna.

I ran with these older guys

but for them it was the same:

mostly breathing gasps of hard air

and robbing gas stations that didn't have any

money, and a few lucky among us

worked part-time as Western Union messenger

boys.

we slept in rented rooms that weren't rented

and we drank ale and wine

with the shades down

being quiet quiet

and then awakening the whole building

with a fistfight

breaking mirrors and chairs and lamps

and then running down the stairway

just before the police arrived

some of us soldiers of the future

running through the empty starving streets and alleys of

Los Angeles

and all of us

getting together later

in Pete's room

a small cube of space under a stairway, there we were,

packed in there

without women

without cigarettes

without anything to drink,

while the rich pawed away at their many

choices and the young girls let

them,

the same girls who spit at our shadows as we

walked past.

it was a hell of a

Vienna.

3 of us under that stairway

were killed in World War II.

another one is now manager of a mattress

company.

me? I'm 30 years older,

the town is 4 or 5 times as big

but just as rotten

and the girls still spit on my

shadow, another war is building for another

reason, and I can hardly get a job now

for the same reason I couldn't then:

I don't know anything, I can't do

anything.

sex? well, just the old ones knock on my door after

midnight. I can't sleep and they see the lights and are

curious.

the old ones. their husbands no longer want them,

their children are gone, and if they show me enough good

leg (the legs go last)

I go to bed with

them.

so the old women bring me love and I smoke their cigarettes

as they

talk talk talk

and then we go to bed again and

I bring them love

and they feel good and

talk

until the sun comes

up, then we

sleep.

it's a hell of a Paris.

Law

"Look," he told me,

"all those little children dying in the trees."

And I said, "What?"

He said, "look."

And I went to the window and sure enough, there they were hanging in the trees,

dead and dying.

And I said, "What does it mean?"

He said, "I don't know it's authorized."

The next day I got up and they had dogs in the trees,

hanging, dead, and dying.

I turned to my friend and I said, "What does it mean?"

And he said,

"Don't worry about it, it's the way of things. They took a vote. It was decided."

The next day it was cats.

I don't see how they caught all those cats so fast and hung them in the trees, but they did.

The next day it was horses,

and that wasn't so good because many bad branches broke.

And after bacon and eggs the next day,

my friend pulled his pistol on me across the coffee

and said,

"Let's go,"

and we went outside.

And here were all these men and women in the trees,

most of them dead or dying.

And he got the rope ready and I said,

"What does it mean?"

And he said, "It's authorized, constitutional, it past the majority,"

And he tied my hands behind my back then opened the noose.

"I don't know who's going to hang me," he said,

"When I get done with you.

I suppose when it finally works down

there will be just one left and he'll have to hang himself."

"Suppose he doesn't," I ask.

"He has to," he said,

"It's authorized."

"Oh," I said, "Well,

let's get on with it."

man mowing the lawn across the way from me

I watch you walking with your machine.

ah, you're too stupid to be cut like grass,

you're too stupid to let anything violate you-- the girls won't use their knives on you

they don't want to

their sharp edge is wasted on you,

you are interested only in baseball games and

western movies and grass blades.

can't you take just one of my knives?

here's an old one -- stuck into me in 1955,

she's dead now, it wouldn't hurt much.

I can't give you this last one--I can't pull it out yet,

but here's one from 1964, how about taking

this 1964 one from me?

man mowing the lawn across the way from me

don't you have a knife somewhere in your gut

where love left?

man mowing the lawn across the way from me

don't you have a knife somewhere deep in your heart

where love left?

man mowing the lawn across the way from me

don't you see the young girls walking down the sidewalks now

with knives in their purses?

don't you see their beautiful eyes and dresses and

hair?

don't you see their beautiful asses and knees and

ankles?

man mowing the lawn across the way from me

is that all you see-- those grass blades?

is that all you hear--the drone of the mower?

I can see all the way to Italy

to Japan

to the Honduras

I can see the young girls sharpening their knives

in the morning and at noon and at night, and

especially at night, oh,

especially at night.

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