Nick Cave has referred to as late poet and novelist Charles Bukowski “the bukkake of bad poetry.”
Cave was responding to a touch upon his Red Hand Files weblog, through which a fan wrote: “No question, a statement instead. In my opinion you are one of the bonzerist geezers around, like Bukowski with a geetar. Thank you Mr. Cave.”
The Bad Seeds singer responded by saying that he doesn’t like being in comparison with Bukowski: “I appreciate you were trying to be kind and make me feel good and everything but I don’t like the man. This a well known fact.”
He continued: “Now, if you had called me, say, the ‘Philip Larkin of the Joanna’ or the ‘Stevie Smith of the Ivories’ or the ‘All Singing, All Dancing John Berryman’ or ‘Langston Hughes of the Banger’, I’d be lot happier. But, I don’t know, Simon, I just don’t like Charles Bukowski. In my opinion, Charles Bukowski is the ‘Bukkake of Bad Poetry’, just blowing his junk around. I don’t like him. I just don’t. Not even a bit. No, not at all.”
In the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds observe ‘We Call Upon The Author’, Cave famously sings: “Prolix! Prolix! / Something a pair of scissors can fix / Bukowski was a jerk! / Berryman was best!”
Aside from the lyrics to ‘We Call Upon The Author’, Cave has made his emotions on Bukowski clear over time. In one other Red Hand Files put up from 2021, a fan wrote: “In a Rolling Stone interview I read you said ‘They should stop reading Bukowski, and they should stop listening to people who tell them to read Bukowski’…I always wonder why you consider him like that.”
Cave replied, noting that he didn’t have an issue with Bukowski, “other than I think his poetry sucks”.
He added: “He as soon as mentioned, poetry was ‘like taking a shit, you smell it and then flush it away … writing is all about leaving behind as much a stink as possible’, which is all very properly, besides I believe he was making use of this to all poetry when he ought to have been making use of it to his personal poetry completely.
“His poems are indeed do-do – silly shit – and cloyingly sentimental about his own place in a world he held in absolute contempt. His is a particular view of humanity as abjection which I find difficult to stomach, especially in poetry, beautiful poetry, lover of life and the world that I am.”
Elsewhere, Cave was contacted final month by 13-year-old Ruben from Melbourne, Australia, who requested him for steerage on the Red Hand Files weblog on easy methods to “live life to the absolute fullest” when there’s “so much hate and disconnect” on this planet.
“Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude,” he mentioned.
“A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world – that will be you, my young friend, the earth shaking at your feet. Love, Nick.”