Defend the Poet (Charles Bukowski)

        When it comes to Charles Bukowski, people either seem to love him or hate him. In my opinion, although he might be somewhat of a nut case, I do lean more towards the liking him than hating him. The stories and poems he write are not written out of complete randomness. In fact, Bukowski himself has mentioned that when writing you “don’t try”. He is trying to say that when you are trying to write whatever it may be, you have to just wait for it. All of Bukowski’s writing is therefore written based off his experiences and knowledge. He does not seem to write a lot on happiness as we saw when reading “Dinosauria, We”. He writes the crude truth, well at least version of it. We might be able to assume that he has such a pessimistic view on life due to his pretty depressing life which consisted of an abusive father, continuous love affairs, and no real sense of what he wanted to do. He thought of writing as a way to keep himself from going insane at his post office job. Overall, while the views that Bukowski has are certainly different and odd, they do contain a sort of truth in them. Sometimes, in fact most of the time, the people who think and see outside the box, are the ones who tend to more knowledgeable and educated than the ones who stay stuck thinking inside the box.