Wandering through the bookstore of City Lights, it is difficult not to notice a poster of a haggard looking man staring from hollow eye sockets, with circular rings running along his deep lined face. It is the wrinkled heavy face of Charles Bukowski; one of the most notorious participants of the Beat movement. His popularity had its' beginnings in humble origins. He became a legend, an accidental success story, who rose to popularity through stubborn determination. Known for his fights and reputation as a heavy drinker, who wrote of his sexual exploits in a humorous unique fashion, Charles Bukowski lived the life of the adventure-ridden poet to the extreme of decadence. He was sustained by an inner wave of anguish fueled by an innate sense of despair underlined by a deep cutting feeling for humor, that led to his ever-growing popularity through-out the seventies, until his early premature death in 1999. Embraced by the growing hippie movement that arose from the late 1960's subculture, Bukowski like Richard Brautigan never saw himself as a leader of such a broad literary movement, and became and un- willing participant in what would later be termed the "Beat Movement."
There is something haunting about that picture; some mysterious presence that seems to grab an observer, pulling him or or downwards into some undefinable depths of hidden consousness.
"It is only a silly old picture.", my girlfriend said to me one day, as we stood in City Lights Bookstore looking at the old cardboard poster.
"Just a simple piece of cardboard." True, in reality the faded black piece of cardboard is nothing but a flyer with a date, time, and place for a poetry reading; but when gazing at those strong black letter: Poetry Reading Tonight, visitors to City Lights can suddenly find themselves transported to another time just around the corner, for once upon a time, poetry using the simplest of meter was still heard in North Beach. Poets took their listeners onto a journey through the mysticism of the soul. Such journeys carried their audience into some of the most intriguing lands, ferrying them into the most complex of meanings of sights and sounds. Such posters carry a reader back to those distant lands of time and place, when youth waited just around the corner, and fairy tales became real as the imagination.
Charles Bukowski first came to notoriety with his created characterization of Henry Chinaski. In the novel Factotum, the reader is given a view into the surreal netherworld of a writer living on the edge of skid row; attempting
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