Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) was born in Andernach, Germany, and grew up in Los Angeles, the city he wrote about for the rest of his life. He spent more than a decade working for the US Postal Service while publishing poems in small magazines; in 1969 John Martin of Black Sparrow Press offered him a monthly stipend to quit and write full time, and his first novel, Post Office, followed in 1971. He went on to write six novels and thousands of poems in a flat, blunt voice about drink, work, the racetrack and loneliness.
That reputation hides how often the poems turn tender. “Bluebird”, collected in The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992), is the clearest case: a hard man admitting to the soft thing he keeps hidden. His work is still in copyright, so this site quotes only short passages.