Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way

by Charles Bukowski

Overview

One of the most recognizable poets of the last century, Charles Bukowski is simultaneously a common man and an icon of urban depravity. He uses strong, blunt language to describe life as he lives it, and through it all charts the mutations of morality in modern America.

Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way is a treasure trove of confessional poetry written towards then end of Bukowski’s life.  With the overhang of failing health and waning fame, he reflects on his travels, his gambling and drinking, working, not working, sex and love, eating, cats, and more.

Sifting Through is Bukowski at his most meditative – published posthumously, it’s completely non-performative, and gets to the heart of Bukowski’s lifelong pursuit of natural language and raw honesty.

We recommend you read this as Bukowski wrote: by sifting through the madness for what hits you as the word, the line, the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060568238
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/06/2004
Edition description:	1st Ecco Paperback Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.35(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.

Date of Birth:

August 16, 1920

Date of Death:

March 9, 1994

Place of Birth:

Andernach, Germany

Place of Death:

San Pedro, California

Education:

Los Angeles City College, 2 years

Read an Excerpt

sifting through the madness for the Word, the line, the way
new poems

so you want to be a writer?

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don'tdo it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

sifting through the madness for the Word, the line, the way
new poems. Copyright © by Charles Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

By the time he died in 1994, Charles Bukowski had achieved international fame and notoriety as a postmodern Villon, a troubadour of the down-and-out and the misbegotten. "I have compassion for almost all the individuals of the world," he once said; "at the same time, they repulse me." The poems and short stories of this German-born Los Angeleno rendered the lives of flophouse friends, prostitutes, and hopeless alcoholics with warts-and-all precision. This 400-page collection presents the last great batch of Bukowski's poetic work.

bn.com

When HarperCollins and Ecco Press acquired part of the Black Sparrow imprint early this year, one big prize was the sprawling, long-popular oeuvre of Charles Bukowski (Barfly; Ham on Rye; Love Is a Dog from Hell). Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems, Bukowski's 10th posthumous volume (with several more planned), collects yet more verse about the troubled, garrulous poet's traveling, gambling, thinking, aging, working, not working, romancing, drinking, self-mythologizing and even eating ("I opened a can of roastbeef hash/ and some pickled beets") as he fought through his blue-collar, beer-hall L.A.

Publishers Weekly

Yet another collection of unpublished poems by the prolific Bukowski (who died in 1994), this is the first volume to appear since the demise of his longtime publisher, Black Sparrow Press. Yet it feels more like a transitional collection than a posthumous one. Readers are introduced to a gentler, mellower "Hank" (his longtime narrator), who admits that "you can't know how good it feels driving in for a wash-/ and wax with nothing to do but light a cigarette and/ wait in the sun with no overdue rent, no troubles to speak of." His bar stool has been replaced by a Jacuzzi, and he mingles with the rich and famous, sitting in the clubhouse at the racetrack. Of course, as he admits in another poem, "old habits often die/ as slowly/ as do/ old men." So we still find the whores, the drunks, and the memories of nights on bar stools and in cheap hotel rooms. This volume is essential for Bukowski fans and an excellent introduction for new readers.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

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