Charles Bukowski goes cabaret

Last year, German singer Ute Lemper included a Charles Bukowski poem between songs in her otherwise poetry-free cabaret show. One thing then led to another as it so often does with Bukowski, and now Lemper is slated to perform "The Bukowski Project" at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York next weekend. The show journeys through 24 Bukowski poems set to Lemper's own music, and, needless to say, Lemper has a unique take on Buk. In this article in Capital New York, she compares him to Bertolt Brecht and suggests that the characterization of the poet as a vitriolic misogynist who loved to hit the sauce only offers a slice of his emotional complexity:

Much of the hurt of Bukowski's poems comes from his vicious, infamous rage, often directed towards women. It's one of the reasons that his work has remained, to a surprising degree for a famous poet, marginal, if divisive on college campuses.

"Of course, it's very sexist stuff," Lemper admitted, "but it's part of his legacy and part of his life story, this disdain for everything, including himself, including men and women. ... I am a woman performing this, [but] I want to try to get away from the gender-specific rage in this poetry and in his body of work. I try to get a little bit more philosophical, to the analysis of the world, to emotion, to the analysis of his own life and soul and heart and mind. It's pretty deep sometimes, and hurtful, but it gets to the point that it's actually very beautiful, what he wrote..."

And if you want more about Bukowski as a soft, gentle dude, read Molly Young's "Charles Bukowski, Family Guy."