LUCK by CHARLES BUKOWSKI

One of the great advantages of having just received some larger mini-chairs through "Ebay 30" is the ability to include some larger mini-books.  Specifically, I refer to a fabulous gift by Senor Jim who gifted me with a collector's item: LUCK, a 1987 4" x 4" chap publication by Charles Bukowski (!) and released by Black Sparrow Press (BSP).

I believe Senor Jim got LUCK when BSP was still in Santa Rosa and Senor Jim, too, was living in that fair city.  If I got the story right, Senor Jim would sometimes drop by BSP's offices hoping to cadge a publication or two ...

Anyway, here is the text of this wonderful chap which is modest in design but POWERFUL in effect due to Bukowski's poem (picture each stanza below as being centered on its own page):

LUCK


once
we were young
at this
machine ...
drinking
smoking
typing.


it was a most
splendid
miraculous
time


still
is


only now
instead of
moving toward
time
it
moves toward
us


makes each word
drill
into the
paper


clear

            fast


            hard

feeding a
closing
space.

Ach: that sense of mortality.  That looming, predictable, inevitable you-know ...

I don't need to talk about this poem.  Read it for yourself again and again.  Bukowski's depth is accessible (not to be confused, please, with just being accessible) -- one of the reasons he achieves what's rare among poets, even good poets: popularity.

And so we are honored to "shelve" Charles Bukowski's luck on HIS OWN CHAIR!

UPDATE (3/19/13):  Moi was recently e-conversing with Jim McCrary and S.S. Prasad over how LUCK contains pages that are folded loose, not stapled, within its chap format.  This means that the pages could be shuffled like a card deck for the stanzas to be ordered differently.  Initially, I thought this may have a relationship with what I'm calling "cubist poetics."  But Prasad also noted that Bukowski was a gambler and believer in chance.  So, chance, was probably the underlying "poetics" vs cubism. Because of its non-fixed binding, the pages can move over time, changing the order of the text.  How nifty that the lack of a staple can have such significance.