As you may well know if you’ve been reading regularly, I’ve been putting many videos into “visual” form. Find them all on the YouTube channel I started last month (please subscribe - if anything hits home).
I’m enjoying the format. It began as a question I asked myself - how can I get people more interested in poetry, and perhaps, my poetry? I remembered loving some of Billy Collin’s poetry put into visual, video form. I shared them with teachers and made lesson resources with many of them. So then, I was off to the races, could I do the same myself? Maybe touch and find a few more readers, in search of something?
Dinosauria, We is for me, an experience not just words on paper. Bukowski gets labelled unfairly as dark (that’s another post) and yes, this one is dark. It is about how corrupt the world is. It is about man’s basic impulses and how we aren’t anywhere near conquering them. We aren’t above any animals, we are worse. I highly recommend the Bukowski documentary sharing the same title and in which this poem opens the film.
This poem, it reads well, the voice of Bukowski himself. Not always the case, Bukowski wasn’t great reading his own poems and not just because he was always 3 or 4 in …
It’s not ever expressed much but I love Bukowski less for the mythology, or even his plainspokenness and directness with the reader … I love him most for how diverse is his subjects, his mind, his thoughts. He covers the gambit of all we experience - longing, loneliness, happiness, tenderness, handling adversity, being positive. If you read him regularly, you’ll have a very cheap psychologist as your friend. I read him on the shitter, our divan and he always has an answer for me, me, born into this …
Here is his original draft on his typewriter, of the poem.
Born Into This