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Charles Bukowski: Poet in a Ruined Landscape

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SOURCE: "Charles Bukowski: Poet in a Ruined Landscape," in The Outsider, Vol. 1, No. 3, Spring, 1963, pp. 62–5.

[In the following review of Bukowski's first three collections, Cuscaden discusses how the poet attempts to overcome despair through his verse.]

All of Bukowski's major interests and themes are in evidence in his first book, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail: indeed, they are defined in the volume's title. These early poems are not equally successful; too much reliance is placed upon a dated surrealistic technique and in neglecting the use of the first person singular Bukowski fails to employ a strength which gives unity to his later work. Nevertheless, everything is here: the obsession with music (his three books mention Bach, Hugo Wolf, Borodin, Brahms, Chopin, Berlioz, Beethoven) and art (Carot, Daumier, Orozco, Van Gogh), and, most importantly, the sense of a desolate, abandoned world.

In his poem in the first volume entitled "I Cannot Stand Tears," the poet, always the non-participant, watches "several hundred fools / around the goose who broke his leg / trying to decide / what to do." A guard walks up, "pulled out his cannon / and the issue was finished." The details here are interesting. The crowd is composed of "fools", the goose implies the golden egg (poetry?), the (perhaps inevitable) guard has not merely a gun but a "cannon." And the issue is especially finished for the poet: "I folded my canvas / and went further down the road. / and bastards had ruined / my landscape…."

A key poem in this first book is "The Paper on the Floor." The poet meditates on the enforced soap-opera quality of most lives: "The explanation usually comes in the morning / over the breakfast table," and the overwhelming "nothing nothing nothing nothing" of it all "pushes at the back of my eyes / and pulls my nerves taut-thin from toe to hair-line."

Can life grant only bogus emotions, manufactured experiences? "Very well," Bukowski says in "The Twins" (a moving poem about his father's death), but, if so: "grant us this moment: standing before a mirror / in my dead father's suit / waiting also / to die." Grant us, in other words, even occasional moments of meaning. Grant us, at least, the compensatory joy of being ignored….

His second volume, Longshot Pomes for Broke Players, presents a more specific vision and definition of our curious world, as in the poem "Where the Hell Would Chopin Be": "indented most severely in my mind: the working secret / of a universe shot with flares and rockets, / monkeys jammed / with meteoritic registers of love in space." This is, of course, a kind of protest poetry, but Bukowski's protest is hardly political in the way that much of the poetry of Spender and Auden was during the thirties. Nor is it anti-political as much as it is non-political. This, it seems to me, is because Bukowski visualizes the political approach as impotent, as he indicates in "Poem for Personnel Managers": "the world rocks down against us / and we / throw out arms / and we / throw out our legs / like the death kiss of the centipede: / / but they kindly snap our backs / and call our poison 'politics'."

There is a good deal of Jeffers-like pessimism in these poems and Bukowski himself admits this indebtedness: "If I have a god it is Robinson Jeffers, although I realize that I don't write as he does…."

Bukowski rarely gives in completely to utter, hopeless despair, and this, not the variance in style and technique, marks the essential difference between him and Jeffers. The despair of Bukowski exists just because he continually hopes; Jeffers' despair is the result of no hope at all. "I want trumpets and crowing, … I want the whir and tang of a simple living orange / in a simple living tree" Bukowski writes in "Bring Down the Beams." But, as he makes clear in the same poem, art—especially the Wednesday sonnet and the Sunday painting—is no substitute for life: "… we sit and piddle with charcoal / and talk about Picasso / and make collages: we are getting ready / to do nothing unusual, / and I alone am hungry / as I think about the sun clanging against the earth / and all the bones moving / but ours."

Too often, he feels, the world of art and letters is little more than a morass of gossip and back-biting, as in "Letter from the North": "my friend writes of rejection and editors / and how he has visited K. or R. or W. /… write me, he says, /I got the blues. / / write you? about what, my friend? / I'm only interested in / poetry."

Run with the Hunted, his most recently published volume of poems (the title, with its compassionate avowal of siding with those on the "wrong," or Algren side of the street, is significant), finds Bukowski far more mellow, far more mature, than in his first two books. It is not too much, even, to term these poems "late", In any case, his awareness of the world's patently obvious absurdities is here stated without what was previously a sort of surprise; he here looks around at a world grown familiar, and comments thereupon in an almost bemused fashion. There is an enlarged and personal vision of subtle horrors in "The Priest and the Matador"…, in which as always there is the awareness of estrangement, the concern with the failure of response. Although he has not given up hope that response might exist we read in "Wrong Number": "carefully, I call voices on the phone, / measuring their sounds for humanity and laughter, / somewhere I am cut off, contact fails."

Without ceasing to fight, his course of action is now less direct; at times, perhaps, a bit more resigned. In "Sundays Kill More Men than Bombs," a narrative of his divorce, he writes: "but that morning when she left / about 8 o'clock she looked / the same as ever, maybe even better. / I didn't even bother to shave, / I called in sick and went down / to the corner bar."

Bukowski is a poet of the permanent opposition. He opposes "the ruin" on a basis of personal anarchy which must attempt the impossible and create its own order. There is nothing about him of the "dumb ox" and he is certainly not a man without art. … In the best of his work may be found that quality of courage which, as Michael Roberts wrote, occurs "beyond the inhuman pattern" and persists in "men / broken, ephemeral, undismayed."

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