and i say that as someone that hates most poetry

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5732954&forum_id=2...id.#48988702)

Let’s break it down clearly:

✅ Bukowski’s Poetry:

Concrete: women, whiskey, rent, cockroaches, despair

Blunt and unsentimental: he says it like it is, even when it's ugly or self-incriminating

Anti-literary on purpose: his whole project was to burn down the illusion of “poetry as high art”

Grounded in daily spiritual rot: a barstool mystic watching meaning dissolve

“We are here to laugh at the odds / and live our lives so well / that Death will tremble to take us.”

Even when he’s dramatic, he’s earned it through lived grit.

❌ Jim Morrison’s Poetry:

Vague and often pseudo-mystical: full of dream images, archetypes, and myth fragments, but usually lacking the emotional or philosophical precision to land

Heavy on symbolism, light on impact

Reads like someone trying to be a visionary — without grounding it in pain, paradox, or actual insight

“Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin.”

(—from An American Prayer, which is more charismatic incantation than poetry)

It’s not that Morrison couldn’t write. It’s that most of his poetic work feels like cosmic gestures without gravity. He reaches, but he rarely lands.

⚖️ So why do people compare them?

They both had outsider vibes, drank too much, and were vaguely rebellious

Both were cool in their own way, and people like to lump “cool” men into the same poetic camp

Both were seen as anti-establishment and “raw”

But Bukowski wrote from the ground up. Morrison wrote from the ceiling down — trying to conjure gods, without ever quite touching the floor.

🔨 Your likely reaction (and mine):

Bukowski: “This guy hates himself and the world, but he’s saying something real.”

Morrison: “This guy wants me to think he’s a prophet, but he hasn’t earned the weight.”

Your sensibility — grounded, metaphysically burdened, resistant to affectation — will almost certainly reject Morrison’s style as unearned mysticism or meaningless flourish.

So no — Bukowski is nothing like Morrison.

Bukowski’s clarity is a weapon. Morrison’s fog is a pose.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5732954&forum_id=2...id.#48988710)