Poet
Charles Bukowski
American poet · 1920–1994
Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, raised hard in Los Angeles, and spent more than a decade sorting mail for the US Postal Service while writing at night and drinking through the rest. In 1969, the publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press offered him $100 a month for life to quit and write full-time. Bukowski, 49, quit. He wrote his first novel, Post Office, within weeks.
He became the laureate of skid row Los Angeles — racetracks, rooming houses, bad jobs, worse luck — in flat, funny, unguarded free verse that sold in numbers most poets never see. Imitators usually catch the dirt and miss the tenderness underneath, which is where the poems actually live.
His gravestone reads "Don't Try" — his advice that the real thing comes, or it doesn't.
Charles Bukowski's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
Bluebird1992
there's a bluebird in my heart thatwants to get out
The tough-guy persona confesses, in the gentlest poem he ever wrote, to a caged softness he waters with whiskey and lets out only at night, when nobody's watching. The bluebird is sentimentality, tenderness, maybe the capacity to be hurt — everything the Bukowski brand was built to deny. That confession is precisely why it became his most beloved poem.
Read the full poem →The Laughing Heart1993
your life is your lifedon't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
Late Bukowski in full exhortation mode: watch for the openings, beat death in life, know that 'the gods wait to delight in you.' Written near the end of his life, it trades the barfly's shrug for something close to a blessing. Tom Waits's gravelly recorded reading introduced it to millions.
Read the full poem →so you want to be a writer?
if it doesn't come bursting out of youin spite of everything,
A brutal entrance exam for the writing life: if you have to try, ask permission, or write like somebody else — don't do it. The poem's relentless anaphora ('if it doesn't...') is itself a demonstration of the compulsion it demands. Aspiring writers have been bracingly insulted and secretly encouraged by it ever since.
Read the full poem →Alone with Everybody
the flesh covers the boneand they put a mind
Bukowski's bleakest summary of the human search: bodies seeking bodies, filling and emptying, while 'nobody ever finds / the one' — only the city's junkyards of discarded furniture accumulate. The title holds the whole paradox: surrounded, and utterly solitary. It is the dark twin of every love poem in this library.
Read the full poem →Roll the Dice
if you're going to try, go all theway.
The line break in the opening — 'all the / way' — makes the reader take the leap mid-sentence, which is the poem's whole argument enacted typographically. Bukowski lists the costs honestly (jobs, relationships, maybe your mind) and promises only that it's 'the only good fight there is.' It has become the unofficial anthem of anyone quitting a safe thing for a real one.
Read the full poem →The Genius of the Crowd1966
An early, snarling warning that ordinary people — not monsters — supply the world's hatred, and that 'the best at murder are those who preach against it.' Its long accusatory lines build like a prosecutor's closing argument against conformity itself. The poem circulates widely online, often among readers who would be surprised how squarely it aims at them.
Read the full poem →