Poetry best sellers for the week of August 7-15, 2010

Charles Bukowski would have been 90 last week. Unfortunately, he died. His would-be birthday did cause his posthumous collections to surge on the contemporary best seller list, though, which may be some consolation. Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems squeaks in at number 30; The People Look Like Flowers At Last is at number 20; and The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 rises up to number 2. It was a week in which readers seemed to celebrate the idea of poet as debauched bruiser. But wait! We also have Maged Zaher’s Portrait of the Poet as Engineer making its debut at number 19, which may round out our idea of what a poet can be. Zaher, a sometime member of Seattle’s Subtext Collective, may enjoy a beer or three on occasion like the laureate of American lowlife, but one can hardly imagine Buk putting something like this in his bio (as Zaher does): “He has worked at many large software companies, and participated in building products such as AutoCad, Hotmail, Windows Presentation Foundations, and Microsoft Student. His main areas of interest are API (Application Programming Interface) design and building scalable and flexible SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) systems.” But there’s always a chance Ecco will put out another posthumous Bukowski titled Flower, Fist, and Firewall, or that Zaher will join a fight club.