Variety in Verse
[In the following review of Longshot Pomes for Broke Players, critic and poet McGrath finds Bukowski's wry humor admirable, despite his reservations about the poet's style.]
Here's Charles Bukowski's Longshot Pomes for Broke Players. The misspelling in the title will probably cause one set of potential readers to shy off. But there is nothing arch about the book. It is an example of what the Beat was before it fell into holiness and hysteria. While much Beat poetry has gone dead or "commercial," it had in it once something of value which we can see clearly in Bukowski's work. Here is part of "The State of World Affairs from a Third Floor Window" offered as proof.
I am watching a girl dressed in a / light green sweater … / as her dirty white dog sniffs the grass /…. I am upstairs in my underwear, / 3 day beard, pouring a beer and waiting / for something literary or symphonic to happen; / … and a thin old man / in his last Winter rolls by pushed by a girl / in a Catholic school dress; / somewhere there are Alps, and ships / are now crossing the sea; / there are piles and piles of H-and-A-bombs. / … and the Hollywood Hills stand there, stand there / full of drunks and insane people and / much kissing in automobiles / … well, from the looks of things relax; / the bombs will never go off.
What Bukowski finds in his unlikely view from the third floor is the value of the quotidian, a kind of spiritual resistance which people put up even when they are not aware of it—as if it were almost a function of that unawareness. This is not far from Sandburg's The People, Yes point of view, but Bukowski is rarely sentimental and sees his people with a tough-tenderness. This may somewhat limit the point of view, but it sharpens the individual poem.
This third-floor view is the view of a man who sees through the deceptions of our society, who protests against a world where "death wants more death" at the same time that he is capable of accepting human follies with a wry smile—as, in fact, he accepts himself. The protest may be largely negative, but that, in certain things, can be a value. He dramatizes a world not far from that of the lumpenproletariat.
Weaknesses? Mainly language. The loose free-verse is generally apt to the kind of story-poem Bukowski writes, but it has a tendency to amplify the anecdotal elements, to oppose condensation, to keep the poems flatter than they might have been. Some dead-opposed to the method would say that it offers the raw material of poems that are never worked out. The poems have to risk such a judgment, which would make it impossible to look at the work seriously, since Bukowski's method is primarily anti-lyrical.
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