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A review of War All the Time and Horses Don't Bet on People & Neither Do I

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SOURCE: A review of War All the Time and Horses Don't Bet on People & Neither Do I, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. V, No. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 34–6.

[Here, Locklin claims that, in his mid-sixties, Bukowski is reaching his prime, composing narratives comparable to those of Ernest Hemingway.]

I felt that Bukowski returned to top form as a poet in Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981)…. . These two recent collections [War All the Time and Horses Don't Bet on People & Neither Do I] do not represent a falling off; on the contrary they present numerous examples of Bukowski at work in what has always been his strongest mode: the scenic or dramatic narrative (or more simply, the story poem with lots of setting and dialogue), but added to his achievements of the past is a diversity that should confound those who would parody the "typical" Bukowski poem of booze, horses, and sex.

In War All the Time there are poems of the working class, poems of the aspiring writer, poems of the aging writer, antiwar poems, antinuke poems, poems that move in and out of the bourgeois world, sports poems, television poems, European poems, and elegies for a cat and for the Los Angeles writer, John Fante. Of course there are still track poems, but why shouldn't there be? It's a world Bukowski knows intimately, one he can treat as a microcosm, one where stories offer themselves—it is a world of inherent narrative tensions. And of course there are still poems about women, but they range from the aroused to the satiric and culminate in a moving remembrance of a loved woman dead twenty-eight years. There are still poems of intoxication and withdrawal, but even here there is something new in the investigation of the current cocaine epidemic.

It is not that Bukowski is trying to placate any critics in these poems. It is, I think, that his affluence and fame of recent years have widened the world about which he can write firsthand. He may still prefer Hollywood Park to Hollywood premieres but he has been to the latter now as well. While this book contains some withering attacks on turncoat friends and lovers, his greater security also allows him to laugh at himself and to let bygones be bygones. Many if not most poets do their best work young (e. e. cummings is a case in point), but it may be that Bukowski, in his mid-sixties, is indeed, as he keeps insisting, just reaching his prime.

I'll draw examples from Horses Don't Bet on People of the narratives that abound in both volumes. Anyone who has ever owned a home can identify with "Locks," a five-page saga of the tribulations of getting the house locks changed. In "Fight" the narrator tries to convince his woman that he was made late by stopping to watch a vicious street fight. Those who would insist that there are not significant differences between men and women, or that there shouldn't be, may not like "Fight" or a good deal of Bukowski. But a poem's not catering to a current ideology does not by itself mark it as a bad poem in the long run, or even now. "Independence Day" provides an object lesson in dealing with juvenile delinquents. The "Token Drunk" negotiates a media party in Marina del Rey.

"There Are So Many Houses and Dark Streets without Help" is unfortunate title for an otherwise likable poem psychoanalyzing the poet's penchant for getting wildly lost in his car. All his women have the same explanation: "You're just a fool." The title character of "A Boor" wins no laurels from waitresses.

Just to make sure no one is left with the impression that Bukowski has gone soft, the final poem, about the predictable advice given by a talk-show psychologist to a cuckolded husband, is entitled "In My Day We Used to Call It Pussy-Whipped."

It is, however, the penultimate poem in the volume, "Kenyon Review, After the Sandstorm," that quietly assesses Bukowski's place in, and importance to, contemporary American poetry:

coming off that park bench after that all night
sandstorm in El Paso
and walking into the library
I felt fairly safe even though I had less than
two dollars
was alone in the world
and was 40 pounds underweight.
it still felt normal and almost pleasant to
open that copy of the Kenyon Review
1940


and marvel at the most brilliant way those
professors used the language to criticize each
other for the way they criticized literature.
I even felt that they were humorous about it,
but not quite: the bitterness was rancid and
red steel hot, but at the same time I felt the
leisurely and safe places that language had
evolved from: places and cultures centuries
soft and institutionalized.
I knew I would never be able to write
in that manner, yet I almost wanted to be
one of them or any of them: being guarded,
fierce and witty, having fun
in that way.

I put the magazine back and walked outside,
looked south north east west.

each direction was wrong.
I started to walk along

what I did know was that overeffusive language
properly used
could be bright and beautiful.

I also sensed that there might be
something else.

The astounding thing about this revelatory poem is that Bukowski demonstrates a more objective, fair, and sensitive appraisal of his place in relation to the literary establishment than the rest of us, with our supposed aesthetic distance, have been able to articulate on his behalf. Of course poetry today, as then, abounds with the bright and beautiful, but what is Bukowski's "something else"? It is to an extent a matter of the vernacular (as Professor Julian Smith of Hull, England, is elaborating in a dissertation-in-progress), and it has a lot to do with his freedom, but it is perhaps primarily a matter of his having gone ahead and told stories in free verse while the "serious" poets continued their decades-long debates upon the best ways of returning the narrative and dramatic modes to poetry.

Readers are still surprised to find Bukowski employing the same stories in poems, short stories, and novels. They seem to feel there is a law against this, and maybe such a prohibition is taught in some creative writing classes, but I have yet to see it written down. And those readers who do not really like Bukowski's work, but who bend over backwards to appreciate him, go on praising his occasional attempts to be bright and beautiful, which generally result in his most parodied efforts. It is interesting that there are few such poems in these two volumes: Bukowski has always said that he has no quarrel with critics of his work, that those who have bothered to write about him at all have generally written sympathetically. He seems now to have heeded a valuable message from his parodists and unsuccessful imitators. Or else, since he has written me that these poems represent only about a sixth of his poems composed during this time period, the credit may be due to his editors, John Martin and Marvin Malone. (I can attest to the acuity of Malone's editing in relation to my own work.)

Even the poem quoted above, while not an obvious narrative in the manner of the classic Fire Station or so many of the poems of horses, violence, and women, is certainly a story reminiscent of the most icebergian of Hemingway's. In less than forty lines we find scene, characterization, conflict, irony, meditation, resolution, retrospective. It is a short story of a young writer, down and out, who reads a literary magazine and experiences a quiet epiphany of what he will never be and who he will be as a writer in the postmodern world. There is emotional complexity and emotional change. Why is it, although it has but a single character, no dialogue or waiters, and the setting is not a café, that this story/poem reminds me of "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"?

The answer might begin with the observation that not a word is wrong or wasted or misplaced, and that an entire lifetime, world, and literary career are left to our inferring.

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