A radio broadcast with guts: Richard Schave and Joan Jobe Smith talk Bukowski on WGN

On a recent WGN radio broadcast, host Nick Digilio discussed Charles Bukowski’s life and legacy with social historian Richard Schave (Bukowski tour “Haunts of a Dirty Old Man”) and Buk’s close friend and confidante Joan Jobe Smith (author of the memoir Charles Bukowski Epic Glottis). Listen to the program at wgnradio.com.

A RADIO WITH GUTS (Excerpt)
by Charles Bukowski

it was on the 2nd floor on Coronado Street
I used to get drunk
and throw the radio through the window
while it was playing, and, of course,
it would break the glass in the window
and the radio would sit there on the roof
still playing
and I’d tell my woman,
“Ah, what a marvelous radio!”

Photo: Charles Bukowski’s typewriter, radio, glass, and glasses

A Radio with Guts, poem by Charles Bukowski

A RADIO WITH GUTS (Excerpt)
by Charles Bukowski

it was on the 2nd floor on Coronado Street
I used to get drunk
and throw the radio through the window
while it was playing, and, of course,
it would break the glass in the window
and the radio would sit there on the roof
still playing
and I’d tell my woman,
“Ah, what a marvelous radio!”

Photo: Charles Bukowski’s typewriter, radio, glass, and glasses

Car Radio, poem by Donald Revell

CAR RADIO
by Donald Revell

An in-joke and the long days faltering
at the edge of fields just visible as we
drive on, the windows shuddering in twilight,
are parts of the songs. And we are traveling
faster all the time, no way to keep
up with them. Between ourselves and the night
coming on to uneasy towns like smoke
the songs are a commitment we do not make 
that gets made for us. Our own words reshaped
into the reliable, broken speech of the next
town and all those after it. As we
drive on, we see each one of them escape
us, certain that it will reappear in the context 
of another song, the in-joke of the whole country.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Donald Revell, born in New York City in 1954, is a poet, essayist, translator, and professor. He has won numerous honors and awards for his work, beginning with his first book, From the Abandoned Cities, a National Poetry Series winner. Other honors include the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award, two PEN Center USA Awards in poetry, the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He has taught at the Universities of Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa, Alabama, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, served as editor of Denver Quarterly from 1988–94, and has been a poetry editor of Colorado Review since 1996. (Source: Wikipedia)