By Mattie Bamman

Bucky Sinister, a San Francisco poet, is a large man with a big belly who wears a wife-beater to disguise his intelligence.  He has written three books of poetry — King of the Road Kills, Whiskey and Robots, and All Blacked Out And Nowhere To Go.  Sinister recently gave a reading at Delirium, a neighborhood bar in San Francisco’s Mission District.

“Bucky Sinister,” of course, is a pen name. Asked about its origin in an interview with ugtv.org, Sinister explained that when he began to write, he had already been called “Bucky” for some time.  He did not want to use his real last name, so, instead, he picked an adjective to go along with “Bucky” that would convey a Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious type of feel, “a totally silly, non threatening first name, with a super villain type adjective for the second.”

Sinister prefaced his reading at Delirium with a brief story of an encounter he’d had moments before.  An inebriated teen, holding a paper cup full of Jameson Irish Whiskey, had asked him why more people weren’t out partying.  Sinister told him that it was only 7:30. The teen was astonished that it was so early.  Sinister confided to the audience that “I used to be that kid."  

Sinister’s poems are filled with dunks, prostitutes, punks, and rednecks — all with stories to tell, many of them true.  You get the feeling that most of the characters in his poems are now dead.

Though Sinister’s poems tell sad stories, he twists them around with a strange humor that eventually beats the sorrow.  One of his finest poems is "Elegy for the Old Hunts," which is about an old doughnut shop in the Mission.  The poem begins with urban lore:

        There’s a legend in the Mission:
        If you write your wishes
        really small on a piece of paper,
        and stick it into a fresh bullet hole,
        all your dreams will come true.

and quickly moves to classic street talk:

        She stole my heart,
        he told me,
        and nine months later,
        she stole the rest of my shit.

The Mission District of today is not the Mission it was when Sinister moved there in 1990.  "Everything was twenty times worse.  Take every drug dealer you see and every act of violence and multiply it by twenty," he said at Delirium.  But Sinister finds inspiration in all of this: "You’re surrounded by drugs, prostitutes, and you don’t have any money . . ., so what do you do?  You tell stories."  And Sinister believes that the stories should be accessible to everyone.  So he writes in a way that is similar to the way we speak.  When I asked him about books that take a lot of hard work to understand but are worth the effort, he responded, "Sure, I’m a big Faulkner fan, but if I were to ever meet him I’d say: why can’t you use some punctuation in The Sound and The Fury?"

Some might define Sinister’s poetry as "Spoken Word."  Spoken-word poets emphasize performance.  Their poems are meant to be read aloud with intensity, to be, as it were, performed, often with music playing in the background.  But Sinister is more than a spoken-word poet.  His words are capable of standing on their own.  How they sound rolling off his tongue, how he performs them, is not necessarily what counts.  They need only be spoken (or even read in solitude), and not “performed,” to achieve their impact.

The main danger of "Spoken Word" is that performance will drown out meaning.  Sinister’s spoken poetry does not fall victim to this danger because his words do all the work.  In “Elegy for the Old Hunts,” the man whose heart has been stolen enters the doughnut shop and finds that all of his possessions are being sold.  He has no choice but to buy them back.  The words themselves convey the emotion:

        I bought back
        my eight track
        my hi fi
        […]

        and then would you believe it,
        I saw my own motherfuckin heart
        lying there on the Formica.

        I said, Slow Charlie,
        now I’m cool buyin this shit back
        but you got to cut me a break
        on this here heart now baby.
        I can’t pay you full price
        cuz I know for a fact
        this heart is broke AND stolen.

Sinister doesn’t drink on stage, nor does he shout or jump around.  He uses language itself, not theatrics, to grab his audience.  He takes the cliché of a broken heart, for example, and objectifies it so it can be bought and sold in a neighborhood shop, converting the cliché into something that is fresh and gets your attention.  In the words of Ezra Pound, he “makes it new.”

Sinister still lives in the Mission District, and that only seems right.