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A review of Poems and Drawings

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SOURCE: A review of Poems and Drawings, in Polish American Studies, Vol. XX, No. 1, January-June, 1963, pp. 55–6.

[In the essay below, Swastek finds Bukowski's poetry eccentric but honest and authentic]

Polish-American poetry, written in English, has had a variety of male and female voices pitched in different keys. The masculine contingent includes Uriel Joseph Piduch (Autumn Leaves, 1920), Raymond Kresensky (Emmaus, 1931), Edmond Kowalewski (Deaf Walls, 1933), Alan Edward Symanski (Against Death in Spring, 1934), John H. Drechney (Nature Smiles, 1947), Joseph Cherwinski (No Blue Tomorrow, 1952), Zygmunt Kurowski (A Collection of Thoughts, 1953), and Conrad Lancucki (The House by the Sea, 1958)—to mention only the more notable writers and their earliest published collections of poems and verses.

Recently a new voice has joined this male poetic chorus, and it sings not only in a different pitch but also a melody distinctively its own. It is the voice of Charles Bukowski, poem-maker, convention-breaker, and presently the only Polish-American literary beatnik.

If this sounds wild, listen to what's coming. Bukowski was born August 16, 1920, in Andornach, Germany, but was brought to the United States at the age of two. His family had lived in Germany for some time back, but was originally Polish. In any event, Bukowski speaks neither German nor Polish, but has no objection to being classified as a Polish-American: "I am not ashamed of Poland. It is a small nation caught between big nations and this, in history, makes it a loser. The people cannot help this, must only bear it while Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow, Washington, D. C. look good. Poland has poets and Poland has heroes, and, if you want to count me on your side, good."

Bukowski, who began writing at thirty-five, has thus far published three collections of poetry: Flower, First and Bestial Wail, Longshot Pomes for Brave Players, and Run with the Hunted. The volume under review [Poems and Drawings] is his fourth book of poems. A fifth collection is in preparation by The Outsider, a poetry magazine.

[The present] collection of Bukowski's work, a "one-man show", contains three ink drawings and fourteen poems. The poems are unlike anything so far written by Polish-Americans. The titles only faintly suggest the distinctive character of the poems they head: "With Vengeance Like a Tiger Crawls," "The Kings are Gone," "I Have Lived in England," "Goldfish," "On Going Back to the Street after Viewing an Art Show," "Suicide," "Rose, Rose," "Bull," "Where They So Fondly Go," "Spite," "Love & Fame & Death," "The Gift," "A Word on the Quick and Modern Poem-Makers," and "The Miracle."

When you open this volume, you enter a new dimension of Polish-American poetry, not a twilight zone of makebelieve or poetic fantasy, but a hard, concrete corner of contemporary reality—a corner which at times appears to be on the brink of things, of conventions, of traditions, of belief, of everything—just way out, man! Bukowski is no stranger to Shakespeare (whose grandeur does not come through to him), or to Milton (on whom he is wasted), or Frost ("licking the boots of politicians, / telling the pretty lies / of an addled mind), or to Ernie ("tagging himself when the time was ready"). He knows "Brahms / stole his First from Beethoven's / 9th"; "Rabelais out of his wits / chasing a rabbit / through the Brahms of my mind"; "Greco / or even a watersnake"; and that "the bull burned within me / my candle of / Jesus."

Bukowski feels contempt for the classics (which he has read) and for conventions (both literary and societary). He applies the mechanics of rhetoric with the abandon and eccentricity of e. e. cummings. His free-wheeling use of invective and profanity almost equals his personalized approach to metric and poesy, to punctuation and capitalization.

Yet some of these poems, which Bukowski has "pulled out of his head", have the authentic ring of reality, not so much because their language is racy and their imagery modern and flip, but because basically they reflect "an honesty of self born…. that will not allow me to pretend to be something which I am quite not." One thing for sure, Bukowski is "not cluttering up the exits" of Polish-American poetry, as he sits in his Los Angeles "apt. no. 303", disecting life and literature with his poetic scalpel, sometimes glumly, sometimes gleefully.

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