Not a fan, this evening I sat through a whole documentary about Charles Bukowski. As was to be expected most of the film indulged his heavy drinking and it’s influence on his poetic quest. Coincidentally it focussed on his time working as an Indefinite Substitute Carrier at a postal sorting office in Los Angeles. Early mornings, drink and poetry didn’t mix well. He couldn’t cope with the drudgery, quitting in a drunken flourish with a really scathing and abusive resignation letter to his bosses. With a family, an extravagant way of overcoming his own melancholia and in desperate personal neglect he was eventually forced to beg for his job back again. Now relegated to the role of Temporary Substitute Distribution Clerk, he worked there for the next twelve years. By the late sixties he was becoming a nationally recognised poet, traveling across the US to read his work. In 1970 a publisher persuaded him to take up poetry full time, to leave the job that had given him at least a small portion of security. Bukowski sat down and wrote ‘Post Office’, a two hundred page description of his experiences and the characters around him at the sorting office. It was this novel that led to him gaining wider literary appreciation.
