READING ALOUD - Bluebird by Charles Buckowski

 

I think the most disarming thing about the sort of man Charles Buckowski was, is that he liked to let you know he really didn't need your approval of him, nor the life he led, nor like the poetry he wrote.  He wrote because he needed to. For a large part of his life he worked for the Post Office, he came home, started drinking and wrote into the early hours of the following day. Underneath his carefully maintained bar fly reputation, bad temper and fights, lay this deeply damaged man. Read his autobiographical book Ham on Rye, and you are shown what having fucked up parents in your childhood can do to you.

Buchowski was frequently defensive or guarded, but in his poetry something wiser and kinder would occasionally be allowed to blossom. In the rough hewn conversational style of them, a perceptive insightfulness catches you unawares.  Here in this poem Bluebird he lets you glimpse one fragment of the sensitive fragile bird of the man, held captive by the controlling, alcoholic, life coarsened persona.  It shows you something, not just about the psychology of Buckowski, but of most men.