advice

‘so you want to be a writer?’

By Charles Bukowski
from sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way

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The Madness of Art presents Reading Buk—nightly readings of selected works of Charles Bukowski—as a special series during the month of April in celebration of National Poetry Month 2009.

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”—Charles Bukowski

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
—Herman Melville

‘fame’

By Charles Bukowski
from Open All Night

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The Madness of Art presents Reading Buk—nightly readings of selected works of Charles Bukowski—as a special series during the month of April in celebration of National Poetry Month 2009.

‘the barometer’

By Charles Bukowski
from The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain

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The Madness of Art presents Reading Buk—nightly readings of selected works of Charles Bukowski—as a special series during the month of April in celebration of National Poetry Month 2009.

‘the laughing heart’

By Charles Bukowski
from Betting on the Muse

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The Madness of Art presents Reading Buk—nightly readings of selected works of Charles Bukowski—as a special series during the month of April in celebration of National Poetry Month 2009.

‘nobody but you’

By Charles Bukowski
from sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Madness of Art presents Reading Buk—nightly readings of selected works of Charles Bukowski—as a special series during the month of April in celebration of National Poetry Month 2009.

“You can’t give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside—so be it. But at least you know you’ve tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.”—Robert Plant

There’s no worse feeling for a writer: opening the mailbox to discover an envelope addressed to you, written by you.

The news is never good. There’s no need, really, to even open the damn thing. But you’re a writer, ergo a bit of  a masochist. A voice inside your head whispers, “Hey, you never know.”

So, despite the urge to burn before reading, you rip it open. “Dear Author,” it typically begins, if you’re lucky enough to get that personal of a greeting. The rest of what is usually a short note can be reduced to one disemboweling, blood-soaked word: REJECTED! Read more…

You’re sitting in front of your computer on just another average day. For reasons not fully realized, a song pops into you head—one that you haven’t heard, or even thought of, in a very long time. Before long, your mind’s shuffling through the tracks of the entire album.

For the love of music

It’s one you had on a cassette tape as a teenager (you played it so much, eventually the audio was no longer audible), or on CD as a college student (which disappeared after a party, which you replaced, only to disappear a few weeks later after the next party). Now here you are, in the middle of the night/morning, as part of your brain reminds you that the memory of sound and song is no match for sound and song, wishing it were part of your 12,000-song digital music library. Read more…