The Poet Laureates of Los Angeles - Essay Example

8 May 2000 Charles Bukowski and Wanda Coleman: Two LA Poets Single Perspective In the paper we will examine the two Poet Laureates of Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski and Wanda Coleman, in order to find out an answer for the question about “what are they doing right” and “what do they do that might set an example to those who have failed to unite Los Angeles.” Being able to hear their “racially disparated” voices, we then are to articulate understanding of unofficial laureates, due to some “powerful insights into the personality of … creators and city … represents.

” Initially, Charles Bukowski in his The Secret of My Endurance finds that common ground in his nostalgic imagination, full of “booze and madness.” Being aware of working people letters, he points that he is even more “worse off” than most of them, writing to him on the paper “often torn” with an “unsharpened pencil or in ink.” Afterwards, he comes into a powerful realm of his inner world, transferring into “a young boy to write my stuff now.” So, his secret and common ground of his mental world and poetry is in his ability of thinking independently, changing things by the outstanding will for creativity of the imagination.

On the other hand, Wanda Coleman’s The California Crack can be treated as a wonderful mystery, full of allegories, symbols, allusions and phantasms. Inspired by usual acid crack (“acid trails and flashes”), after imaginary days of “dripping,” her hero introduces sweet memories about his childhood (“…about his mother pinching him”), visualizing his everyday facts (“the lesbian he loved…”); finally, his presentiment of something ugly comes true when bed getting split and the earth “opens the soft moist mouth of a scream.

” In the expressive way, Wanda insists on the importance of “earth” feeling and “memory” pre-presence for our everyday balance and stability. To sum up, two LA poets single perspective must be examined in their considerations within these two poems, The Secret of My Endurance and The California Crack. Supposedly, their inner dimensions – imaginary and allegoric one – bring them to a harmony of existence leading to non-conflict coexistence in the everyday life of LA.Works Cited:Bukowski, Charles.

The Secret of My Endurance. Available at: http://theinvisiblechoir.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/the-secret-of-my-endurance/ Coleman, Wanda. The California Crack. Available at: http://www.afropoets.net/wandacoleman4.html