POETRY #1

1. The poem is "The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski.

2.  The irony lies in the fact that the poem focuses on self expression and individuality ("don't let it be clubbed into submission"), but the commercial is trying to convince the audience to be like everybody else by buying and wearing clothes from the very popular brand of Levi's.

3.  Yes, the poem does represent the author's reputation.  Charles Bukowski was known for his boisterous and opinionated personality in the later years of his life.  This poem encourages readers to take charge of their lives and do what they want to do with them through its repetition of the line "your life is your life."  Consequently, Bukowski was doing what pleased him, without submitting to a milder personality by critics.

4.  For #1, I took the first line of the poem and typed into the search bar "your life is your life" and an optional search came up as "your life is your life bukowski" so I took a chance and searched that one.  The first result was labeled The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski on a website called The Best American Poetry.  After loading this page, I played back the video and went back to the page with the poem to listen to the narrator of the commercial recite the first ten lines of it so I knew it was the right poem.
     For #3, I read the biography given by the same website I found the poem on, but it seemed to do nothing but praise Bukowski and was written by someone with the initials DL.  I decided to type in "bukowski reputation" in the search bar.  The first result of that search was a blog by a man who did nothing but berate Bukowski for not practicing what he preached in his poems.  He kept going on about how drunk Bukowski constantly was.  From there, I wanted to try to find a more unbiased description of his reputation so I looked into the Wikipedia result.  My conclusion was that Wikipedia is available to be edited by anyone, so anything written about his reputation could be that of the general opinion.  It also mentioned the wild behavior of Charles Bukowski, though less severely than the previous source.  With these two negative sources, I concluded enough about Bukowski's reputation to complete #3.