I don’t know how I came across Charles Bukowski, but he was the first prose poet I read, and it was a revelation. Here was a guy that was just talking—no meter, no rhyme, no hifalutin language. Just talking and often telling wild stories about his depraved life in the city. I had never read anything like this, and to this day Bukowski remains something of a curiosity—a morbid curiosity perhaps—in the world of poetry.
To say his poems are raw or gritty would be an understatement. Many of them are disgusting. I don’t like most of Bukowski’s poems, and I can’t even say most are good. But now and then, like a guy playing darts in a bar, he hits the bullseye. So I can’t exactly recommend Bukowski but I have to mention him as his poems completely changed my perception of poetry and how I wrote from then on.
Being the poster boy of morbid curiosity, Bukowski has never fit in any poetic school. So people formed a “school” (if you can call it that) around him. He and those of similar aesthetic are known as “Meat Poets,” a moniker chosen to contrast the blunt, toughness of these poets with the wimpier, artsy-fartsy Beat poets.
Below is a poem of Bukowski’s called “Going Out.” It appears in one of his later books, The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992).
going out the sweet slide of the luger toward your temple, a flight of birds winging northward, the clicking sound of the safety catch being released, the eclipse of the sun, the sound of something being shut hard, pal.
A Wandering Minstrel 