Charles Bukowski

 Here's a selection of recordings by the great Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

70 Minutes in Hell- A home recording of Bukowski reading (1969) 

At Terror Street And Agony Way- CB recorded at home- (1969)

King of Poets -  A home recording of Bukowski reading (1970)

Poems and Insults - Live recording (1973)

 Solid Citizen- Live in Hamburg (1978)

Hostage - Rowdy poetry reading in San Pedro, CA (1980)

The Life And Hazardous Times Of Charles Bukowski: Neither Bought For Gold Nor To The Devil Sold. Essentially a biography of CB. (1999)

Do You Use A Notebook? Radio interview. (1986)

 Bukowski Lives! Poems over a musical back track. (2003)  

Run With The Hunted- a compilation.

Scroobius Pip - No Commercial Breaks (2006)

 Here's a rare solo work by Scroobius Pip from before he teamed up with Dan  Le Sac.

 Pip explained how he chose his name (from a poem by Edward Lear) in an interview for Beatdom (issue 6):

I loved the story. It's about a creature that doesn't know what it is ...By the end [of the poem] he realises that he is simply The Scroobious Pip. He doesn't fit into any one category and can just be his own creature.

American Poets...

Here is a selection of recordings by American poets of the 20th century (Walt Whitman being the exception; the collection kicks off with a wax-cylinder recording of Whitman reading in about 1890!) The poems are not arranged by date of composition or recording, but in order of the poet's birth.  And it's not supposed to be any all inclusive best of sort of deal, and it doesn't reflect my 'taste'. It's just a few files I lifted. 

Walt Whitman (1819 –1892)

America.

William Carlos Williams (1883 –1963)

The Red Wheelbarrow

To Elsie 

e.e. cummings (1894 –1962)

Next of Course God America

Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town

Ogden Nash (1902 –1971)

Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man

Langston Hughes (1902 –1967)

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Theodore Roethke (1908 –1963)

Elegy for Jane

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b.1919)

See It Was Like This When..

Underwear 

Charles Bukowski (1920- 1994) 

The Secret of My Endurance

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

American Haikus [Excerpt]

 Allen Ginsberg (1926 –1997)

America

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

The Truth the Dead Know

All My Pretty Ones

Maya Angelou (b.1928)

Phenomenal Woman

Gary Snyder (b.1930)

The Song of the Taste

How Poetry Comes to Me

Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh Computer

The Defective Record

The Defective Record (1938)

Cut the bank for the fill.
Dump sand
pumped out of the river
into the old swale

killing whatever was
there before—including
even the muskrats. Who did it?
There's the guy.

Him in the blue shirt and
turquoise skullcap.
Level it down
for him to build a house

on to build a
house on to build a house on
to build a house
on to build a house on to . . .


William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)




















Visit to W.C.W. circa 1957, poets Kerouac Corso Orlovsky on sofa in living room inquired wise words, stricken Williams pointed thru window curtained on Main Street: "There's a lot of bastards out there!" Allen Ginsberg- Death News (1963)

Melancholia

The venerable Highlander regularly features poetry on his excellent blog ,Cactus Mouth Informer .

I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I'm not going to have regular poetry posts. It's just that I chanced on this poem by Charles Bukowski, and it pressed some button. Read more of his verse here...
Bukowski's novels, by the way, are well worth a read.


Melancholia

the history of melancholia
includes all of us.