Nick Cave has called late poet and novelist Charles Bukowski “the bukkake of bad poetry.”
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Cave was responding to a comment on his Red Hand Files blog, in 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 compared to 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 track ‘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 feelings on Bukowski clear over the years. In another Red Hand Files post 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 a problem with Bukowski, “other than I think his poetry sucks”.
He added: “He once said, 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 well, except I think he was applying this to all poetry when he should have been applying it to his own poetry exclusively.
“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 last month by 13-year-old Ruben from Melbourne, Australia, who asked him for guidance on the Red Hand Files blog on how to “live life to the absolute fullest” when there is “so much hate and disconnect” in the world.
“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 said.
“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.”
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