Reading Korea · Poets · United States & Korea

The Beauty of the Raw: Bukowski and Kim Su-young

Admitting cowardice takes more courage than performing bravery.

4 October 2026 · @Ainsof

Poets Without the Perfume

Some poets write from behind glass. Their poems are wise, balanced, well-read, and somehow never caught in the act. Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) and Kim Su-young (1921–1968) are the opposite. They let you watch them lose their temper, back down, feel petty, and feel ashamed — and they leave all of it on the page.

They were born a year apart, on opposite sides of the Pacific. One was a German-born drifter who spent years sorting mail in Los Angeles. The other was a Seoul-born modernist who came out of a prisoner-of-war camp. Neither smelled much of the study or the lecture hall. What their poems have instead is rough, plain speech, and an honesty that takes a particular kind of courage.

Lives Off the Literary Track

Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, and grew up poor in Los Angeles. After two years at Los Angeles City College and a few early stories, he gave up writing and spent roughly a decade drifting across America. He took whatever work came: dishwasher, factory hand, truck driver, shipping clerk. When he came back to poetry in the mid-1950s, it was through tiny underground presses.

Then came the post office. For the better part of fifteen years, on and off, he carried and sorted mail in Los Angeles. In 1969 John Martin of Black Sparrow Press offered him $100 a month to quit and write full-time. Bukowski was forty-nine. Within weeks he had written his first novel, Post Office (1971), about the job he had just left.

Kim Su-young's detour was darker. Born in Seoul in 1921, he was already a modernist poet when the Korean War broke out. In 1950 he was forcibly conscripted by the North Korean army. He escaped, was captured, and ended up in the Geoje prisoner-of-war camp, where he worked as an interpreter. He was released in late 1952.

The war took his marriage too. While he was a prisoner, his wife went to live with one of his closest friends. She later returned to him, and they stayed together until his death. Kim did not make this a private wound. Its anger and humiliation run through his poems.

He spent the rest of his short life translating, writing, and raising chickens at home in Seoul to make ends meet. In 1968, at forty-seven, he was hit by a bus and killed.

Neither man arrived at poetry by the clean path of school, prize, and post. Both came to it with dirt on their hands — and it shows.

Two Confessions

Two poems show this courage most clearly: Bukowski's “red Mercedes” and Kim Su-young's “Leaving an Old Palace One Day” (어느 날 古宮을 나오면서, 1965).

“red Mercedes” appears in You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (1986). The speaker is driving into the racetrack when a young man in a red Mercedes cuts him off. Instead of letting it go, he follows the car to the valet stand and starts pounding on the door. Then the young man's girlfriend takes a gun out of the glove compartment and hands it over.

And the tough guy walks away. He heads for the clubhouse and starts thinking about the day's race card, as if nothing had happened. There is no heroic stand and no lesson. The poem simply shows a man whose rage was out of all proportion, and whose retreat was just as sudden — and it does not bother to make him look better.

Kim's poem begins with a question aimed straight at himself:

The speaker has just walked out of an old royal palace in Seoul. He is not angry at the palace or what it stands for, nor at the abuses of power of his own time. He is angry that his cheap plate of galbi came out as nothing but fat, and he curses the owner of the restaurant. Line by line, he lists the brave things he did not do and the petty things he did instead. By the end, he is asking the sand, the wind, the dust, and the grass how small he really is.

This is a poet writing in the mid-1960s under an authoritarian government, admitting in public that he lacks the nerve to rage at the things that matter. Few intellectuals of his day would put that on paper.

Different Densities, the Same Nerve

The two poems are not built the same way. Bukowski's is a short story with line breaks: plain, fast, almost a shrug. Its honesty sits in what it shows and refuses to explain. Kim's is denser and more self-lacerating. He turns the same small humiliation over and over, interrogating himself until the question becomes a kind of political act.

Yet the move at the center is the same. Most writers, especially intellectual ones, edit their shame out before it reaches the page. They show us the right anger at the right targets. Bukowski and Kim leave the wrong anger in — the fury at a stranger's car, the fury at a greasy plate — and, worse, the moment they back down.

That is why their roughness never feels careless. Admitting cowardice takes more courage than performing bravery. A poem that confesses a small, unflattering truth earns a trust that a poem of large, correct opinions rarely does.

Perhaps that is also where their lives come back in. A man who has drifted through odd jobs, or sat behind barbed wire and come home to a broken marriage, has fewer illusions left to protect. Both wrote as if the worst had already been seen. What remains is the raw thing itself — and, in their hands, it turns out to be beautiful.