teaearlgreyhot asked: Are you fond of any of the other "Beats"? Bukowski is my biggest influence as well, but DiPrima gives me the female edge and I've read Ginsberg's "Howl" so many times I can recite it upon request.
I do enjoy Beat writes, although Bukowski was not a beat by any means. Not even close. And I don’t mean this to be offensive but if he’s your biggest influence you should probably be as frustrated with that comment as I am. I’ve done plenty or research as to what the Beat movement entailed. I mean even just read Kerouac or Ginsberg and you know it’s nothing like Bukowski. They weren’t even writing much during the same time period, so I don’t get why people throw Bukowski into the beats. Bukowski didn’t really gain fame (at least for this fiction) until about the 1980s, On the Road was written and published in 1957 and gained it’s fame as soon as it was published. Style, aesthetics, mysticism, tone, all of it, Bukowski doesn’t match up with the Beats at all. He met Neal Cassady once, was pretentious enough to say he wrote the only possibly last chapter to On the Road,(you can find this story in Notes of a Dirty Old Man) but that’s the only way he gets crossed with the Beats.
I’m not trying to be offensive, I’m just trying to set things straight. Bukowski was never a Beat.
That aside, I do enjoy Beats. I aspire to be somewhat of a Beat scholar, in my opinion its one of the most, if not the most, important movements in literature.
