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Charles Bukowski

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Bukowski Unbound

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SOURCE: "Bukowski Unbound," in Poetry Flash, No. 238, January, 1993, pp. 1, 6–7, 9.

[In the following essay, Kessler offers a broad survey of Bukowski's work and describes the poet as "a human being of extraordinary character, an indomitable personality who has grown in stature with every document he produces."]

The photo in back of Charles Bukowski's latest collection of poems [The Last Night of the Earth Poems]—a four hundred page tome turned out as the author was approaching and passing seventy—shows a face seasoned by pain and suffering into an expression of tough equanimity, of weary compassion for the human dilemma. It is a face facing up to its own mortality: wise, gentle, kind. As anyone who's read his recent work is aware, Bukowski has lately lost his edge of angst; his comic meanness has sweetened into a humbly ironic gratitude for survival. The voice of the vicious drunk, while still vulgar in its raw frankness, has taken on a far more philosophical tone, an attitude of acceptance if not quite understanding. Despite the spiky white whiskers grizzling his chin in the picture, his shirt collar is crisply pressed, his fingernails look immaculate: the once disreputable poet/bum as clean old man.

Comfortably ensconced as a homeowner in middle-class San Pedro, chatting across the backyard fence with his neighbors, driving his BMW on the freeways, using his credit cards to cash in on his international success, Bukowski has come a long way from the squalid urban landscape of his formative years in Los Angeles. Readers who dismissed his earlier writing as crude and monotonous are unlikely to find much to admire in the mellower, more prosaic lines of his latest work. And those who loved the wildly anti-literary beast desperately flailing at life's cruelties with flights of salty imagination may be disappointed to find the irascible bard gone soft. But those who have watched in wonder as he has brought forth book after book in an unstoppable flow of personal testimony since the early sixties will find in this new volume further evidence not only of the man's astounding perseverance but something approaching greatness.

It's not just that Bukowski's best poetry and prose—in books like The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969), Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972), Love Is a Dog From Hell (1977), War All the Time (1984), and the novels Women (1978) and Ham on Rye (1982)—have such a distinctive clarity, music and courage in their transformation of terrible experience; it is the cumulative proof the writer has provided that even the most apparently hopeless life can be converted to something useful, not only to the self but to others, through the effort of art.

The poems in The Last Night of the Earth Poems tend to be typically straight-ahead narratives, little stories both sad and funny, extended meditations laced with aphoristic kickers, accounts of mundane events that in the telling take on a certain matter-of-fact resonance, philosophical reflections on a past that won't go away. While the present may afford him the material luxuries of drinking expensive wine and working on a new computer, the old days at pointless jobs and nights in flophouses continue to bear the fruit of fresh perspectives. The life is a teeming reservoir of material: anything—a traffic jam, a day at the track, a trip to the doctor's office—can be a source of inspiration. This will to excavate one's autobiography in the most direct and 'unpoetic' style is the Bukowski legacy in all its mixed fallout over the last twenty-five years in American poetry: from lesser typists who think that copping an attitude and spilling their guts is all it takes, to original voices liberated to trust themselves in natural modes they might not have discovered without the master's barbaric example. That evident ease of expression, though, is earned. The short or long lines, the talky rhythms, the swiftness with which his utterances unfold, all the signature stylistic touches have been refined over thousands of hours at the typewriter—not in search of the single perfect phrase but in the repeated exercise of spontaneous composition.

Like some character out of Beckett, Bukowski's transparent, persona in its despair, resignation and resolve-to-carry-onin-spite-of-everything achieves a certain undeniable dignity. Boredom, illness, writer's block become occasions for writing. Even when the results are less than edifying—which is true about three-quarters of the time—there's something poignantly impressive in the struggle to give voice to what others might consider unspeakable or otherwise unworthy of poetry. Rather than discard the weaker poems, Bukowski includes them as part of the public record, the big picture of a work, a life, in progress. His lowbrow eloquence, such as it is, is an antidote to estheticism.

That's why you won't find Bukowski teaching, or being taught, in Master of Fine Arts programs. As he recounts in the new book, in a poem called "creative writing class":

I noticed that the professor's advice
on what to do
and what not to do
to become a writer was
very pale and standard stuff
that would lead to
nowhere.

Not that even a singular path like his own leads anywhere, really: "the uselessness of the word is / evident," he writes in another poem.

this incompleteness is all
we have:
we write the same things
over and over
again.
we are fools,
driven.

Such a bedrock existential admission, echoing the wisdom of Ecclesiastes ("Vanity of vanities … all is vanity"), is as much a self-critique as it is a philosophical truism. Preempting those who would bother to take him seriously enough to criticize his shortcomings, Bukowski is profoundly aware of his limitations as a writer. In his own primitively postmodern manner he incorporates this self-awareness into an ongoing commentary on the act of creation. His 'narrative', especially in this latest collection, deconstructs itself almost every step of the way.

At the same time he's utterly unapologetic for doing what has kept him alive through an often hellish existence. At one point, "after 50 years in the game," he kisses his typewriter as a way of saying thank you. He is grateful for the occasional fire lighting up his lines, for the mysterious friendliness of his cats, for the taste of decent food after decades of chronic hunger, for the patience of his wife in putting up with him, for the pleasure of feeling the night air on his balcony. Throughout The Last Night of the Earth Poems—beyond or within the fear of dying, the pathetic sense of the futility of it all, the sadness of an aging body's failing and an imagination's waning—there is a pervasive feeling of affirmation, of saying yes to life, even as he rejects Sandburgian sentimentality.

the people survive to come up with flat fists full
of nothing.


I remember Carl Sandburg's poem, "The
People, Yes."
nice thought but completely inaccurate:
the people did not survive through a noble
strength but through lie, compromise and
guile.
I lived with these people, I am not so sure
what people Sandburg lived
with.
but his poem always pissed me off.
it was a poem that lied.
it is "The People, No."
then and now.
and it doesn't take a misanthrope to
say this.

Elsewhere he expands on this observation:

people are strange: they are constantly angered by
trivial things,
but on a major matter
like
totalling wasting their lives,
they hardly seem to
notice …

Bukowski notices, and salvages what truth and comfort he can by recording the trivial things.

Recording in his case means more than taking note of what happens from day to day; it also means remembering everything: a feeling of contentment while eating in some greasy spoon, a moment of peace in the library stacks as a miserable young man, the "clean, gentle" satisfaction of a job unloading boxcars. It is striking how often the word clean appears in these poems, as if writing about the grimy past were an act of purification. It's also an act of recovery in every sense of the term. As time runs out on the life, the mind works harder to resurrect what was, to savor the fading evidence, to find in what may have seemed meaningless at the time not a lesson or a moral but an essence of lived reality and fix it on the page in the plainest language. There is no illusion that the words are anything like the actual thing, the experience itself, but the written record can hint, can suggest, can solace, can inspire.

I always resented all the years, the hours, the
minutes I gave them as a working stiff, it
actually hurt my head, my insides, it made me
dizzy and a bit crazy—I couldn't understand the
murdering of my years
yet my fellow workers gave no signs of
agony, many of them even seemed satisfied, and
seeing them that way drove me almost as crazy as
the dull and senseless work….

I knew that I was dying.
something in me said, go ahead, die, sleep, become
as
them, accept.
then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest
bit.
it needn't be much, just a spark.
a spark can set a whole forest on
fire.
just a spark.
save it.

I think I did.
I'm glad I did.
what a lucky god damned
thing.
("spark")

Bukowski's tendency toward solipsism is corrected by his regular attention to the world around him, both here-andnow and then-and-there. Though W.C. Williams is one precursor he seldom if ever invokes, Bukowski resembles him not only in his ear for ordinary speech but in the grounding of ideas in things. Language is not an end in itself, nor some opaque screen through which to question itself, but a tool for touching the facts of life, however unremarkable those facts may seem.

Does this mean that anybody can write a 'Bukowski poem? Well, yes and no. While he has spawned countless imitators, especially in the L.A. area, few of these mini-bukowskis have anything like the naked desperation that gave rise to the original, and so no matter how well they may mimic the old man's mannerisms they can't approach the power of his expression. That's because the nonconformity of his early daring is what gave those defiant writings their sense of risk. Here was someone doing the poem his own way and fuck you if you didn't like it. To model oneself on such an individual is to miss the point of his distinctive nerve, the lonely creation of a radically different voice. That there should now be an unofficial 'school of Bukowski' may be a tribute to his funky genius, but it makes no sense in light of his own accomplishment. The fact that the later Bukowski is a far gentler and in some ways more refined writer than he was at first does nothing to negate the integrity of his journey or to contradict its essential continuity. However many imitators he may have, he remains fundamentally inimitable.

What writers can learn from Bukowski, as from any author with heart enough to break out of the safety of convention, is to listen for one's own deepest, most authentic music, no matter how discordant it may sound, and let it rip. The bottles of booze, the filthy ashtrays, the pukestained undershirts, the scummy one-nighters and other unsavory images so often associated with the Bukowski legend—even the seemingly ragged yet sneakily crafty style of his verse—are of little consequence beside the relentless determination he has demonstrated to carry on regardless of the revulsion or adulation his work evokes. Indeed, he seems to have as much contempt for his admirers as for his critics—maybe more. At least the critics offer a stimulating opposition analogous to the challenges the rest of his life has provided: he thrives on resistance. The fawners, the fellow outlaw-geniuses, the ass-kissers asking for favors are, to judge from his documentation of their behavior, a pain in the ass. Though Bukowski has in fact been known to be kind to his fans, from a distance at least—answering their letters, responding to solicitations from unknown editors of upstart magazines—his aloofness from the literary fray, proceeding with his project at whatever cost, is exemplary.

Like an aging boxer losing his speed or a tired slugger whose "batting average has dropped to / .231" (recurrent tropes in the Last Night poems for his fate as an ancient veteran), Bukowski sees retirement coming inexorably in the only way that can take him out of the game. Death, a favorite theme for many years, is ever present in this book, a punchline for the ultimate joke at his own expense. We see the poet stoically enduring tuberculosis, cancer, all the indignities of decrepitude, yet somehow resisting destruction by writing it all down in meticulous detail. His tone is less pugnacious than elegaic as he tries out variations on the dirge that will finally honor his own demise.

Given the unlikelihood of his having lived this long, for all we know he may go on to crank out a thousand more pages of reportage, adding a few last-ditch volumes to his already awesome output before the cosmic powers call his number. Either way, even a selective reading of his forty-five books to date reveals a human being of extraordinary character, an indomitable personality who has grown in stature with every document he produces. Whether any individual piece has the requisite artistry or grace or truth to hold up over time remains to be seen—for my money there are many. But odds are that in terms of a life's work there are few contemporaries who can claim to have made a more substantial, accessible, entertaining and enduring contribution.

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