The Canonical Legacy of Anthologies: Reading and Being Read by Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski’s very popularity as a poet has undermined his literary legacy by forestalling a critical assessment of which specific poems most deserve to be accorded canonical status. As an initial sieve in this necessary winnowing, this paper proposes a review of the Bukowski poems editors selected for the anthologies appearing while Bukowski was living, and had at least some direct control of the choices made by those editors. That anthologies have not been employed as a primary filter up to this point proves not to be as surprising as one might first suspect, once one considers the regional affiliation of the small presses that produced these anthologies, and the demonstrable exclusion of these anthologies from canonical discussion (due to the cultural capital accorded to anthologies produced by mainstream East Coast publishers and universities aligned with their preferences). The West Coast anthologies do more than allow readers to gauge the candidates for Bukowski’s most enduring poems, they also permit us to reflect upon the work that Bukowski read of those poets, such as Gerald Locklin, Ron Koertge, and Linda King, who appear alongside his work.