Afam Akeh – "Bukowski revisited" 2/4 they walk past his house
write letters
ring the bell
they cannot understand and will not
accept
the way things are.
I rather like
it.
Reading is also a corrective act. Not all the creative
performances of a writer may be read on trust as faithfully
representing the real and true and right. Bukowski was
always performing Bukowski. Bukowskian realism, as reflected
in his writing, devolves on the possibility of survival in
an uncertain, frequently exploitative milieu of entrenched
oppressors, scamming scoundrels and desperate marginals or
losers. There is none innocent among them, and relationship
with any of these is not to be trusted. To escape his
earlier life of damning bit jobs Bukowski had to make his
writing work. Another way of putting this would be to say he
had to work his writing. So he earned not only from baring
his soul and life in books (over forty-five of them, nearly
one for every year of his published life) but also from
acting the entertainer, ever willing to amuse and amaze the
‘punters’ at his reading appearances. How much of the ‘dirty
realism’ (Bill Burford) of Bukowski was real, and how much
of it just dirt? How shall we judge his enduring (and to
some also endearing) rage – and the literary heritage that
was built on it? For Bukowski’s place and influence in
literature rests not only on his skill at validating his
kind of writing as literature but also on validating his
kind of life as a true and proper subject for literature. In
1986, TIME magazine fittingly labelled him a “laureate of
American low life”, and he has also been called ‘the poet
laureate of skid row’.
At some stage in his career, Bukowski was rescued from the
poverty of his self-confessed damned streets but he would
not be rescued from their pain. For some years he would also
insist on living only among these “losers” of his many
anecdotes. These were his people, and relating with them, or
just observing their lives, provided the moments in which he
was most inspired as an author. He identified with them but
never saw himself as their benefactor or spokesperson in
whatever social struggle was going on. The evidence of his
poetry suggests he was just another neighbourhood author,
plundering their lives and his relationships with them for
art. The world of poetry is accommodating, populous with its
varied national and aesthetic schools and forms. But it can
still identify excellence in any of these differently
validated forms and schools. Even with his kind of poetry,
Bukowski could have gained early honour as an establishment
figure in American poetry, becoming an influential poet
laureate, as was the more recent Billy Collins, whose poetry
also promotes the accessible conversational diction and
anecdotal referencing of the common life popularised by
Bukowski. The poet of ‘Come on In!’ was just taking practice
further down a ‘common speech’ route already travelled by
the major American reputations of Walt Whitman and William
Carlos Williams. Elsewhere in contemporary poetry, in
English literature, the poet Philip Larkin was also freeing
up the language and subject of poetry with some of the poems
in his 1974 collection, High Windows, which included his
1971 poem, ‘This Be The Verse’:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
However, unlike Bukowski, who had his skid row experience to
reflect on, Larkin’s rebellion was tempered by his
traditional middle class English experience (Oxford graduate
and professional librarian), as also reflected in his
continued use of rhymes and other formal schemes in his
poetry. In the US, Bukowski never became the Poet Laureate.
In the UK, Larkin was offered but turned it down. Two
different kinds of rebels, one acceptable to the
establishment the other most certainly not.
Though Bukowski’s career path has meant that he is still
thought of by many as an underground poet, and in his time
the pope of fringe poets, a Los Angeles poet rather than the
canonical international figure he actually is, his influence
is pervasive, his example much copied in contemporary
poetry. Mainstream American poetry is today constructed
around the frameworks established by Walt Whitman, Carlos
Williams, Charles Bukowski, The Beat Poets, The Black Arts
Movement, the Black Mountain influence, the New York School
and Confessionalists. Other influences on the American
contemporary would include the late but continuing Modernism
of a mostly retrospective formal practice. However, the kind
of contemporary American poetry one may readily find in
personal online blogs and in much of the new poetry being
published by small publishers, or even being written by many
teachers, students and graduates of the booming MFA writing
courses, has the same signature style Bukowski promoted in
his work – his further freeing up of ‘free verse’ to
eliminate not only the requirement of rhymes and metre but
also the very formality of its creative language. Bukowski
insisted on greater freedom or candour in the choice and
treatment of subjects, candid and sometimes graphic
portrayals of even taboo topics, a liberated poetry of the
realistic human voice, with anecdotal and conversational
speech patterns, replicating the efforts of other
contemporaries in ending modernist impersonality and
abstraction, to centre the poet, or the poet’s recorded
physical experience, as the chief poem. This more recent
American poetry of deregulated practices, concrete imagery,
personal moments, basic biographies, domestic incidents,
barber shop or pub humour and other streetside
significations, diary entries, reportorial notes, private
correspondences, emotional candour, body functions, topical
taboos, anti-heroism, and overall privileging of the
seemingly mundane, is significantly Bukowskian, though I
have also noted some other earlier and contemporary
influences on the new poetry. Added to this was his legacy
or life of notoriety as an anti-hero, and the portrayal of
anti-heroic (character) types and anti-climatic
possibilities in his work, all part of an age of literary
suspicion of the epic form as a representational creative
choice.
Bukowski was relentless in the creative exploitation of his
own life. A less accomplished performer would be considered
repetitious and boring. But that could never be a fair
comment on Bukowski because he was such an entertaining
master of his chosen idiom. He would introduce the incidents
or opinions or observations which populate his poems
conspiratorially, invoking attention, provoking a response,
making it obvious from the beginning he wanted to keep his
readers or listeners interested. Like an entertainer playing
to an audience he will turn a somersault or do whatever else
is possible with words to keep the attention of his readers
and audience. It is not important that they agree with him,
and he is rarely the campaigning poet; he just needs that
laughter, ovation, or other audience or reader indicator to
confirm his work is done.
The poems of this collection, including some previously
uncollected, were written in the years 1951 to 1993. ‘Poem
for Personnel Mangers’, from his 1969 collection, The Days
Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, is among the
longest and better organised in the collection. It begins
with the familiar, almost innocuous, ‘everyman’ voice of
Bukowski’s poetry:
An old man asked me for a cigarette
and I carefully dealt out two
It is another invitation to another moment or incident from
his much exposed life, yet another tale from his endless run
of anecdotes. However, by the second stanza, ‘Poem for
Personnel Managers’ displays the facility for rhythm, rich
original imagery, and juxtaposition of contrasting but
related realities, which mark the best of the poet’s work:
He was close to rags and rage
and he leaned against death.
It was a cold day, indeed, and trucks
loaded and heavy as old whores
banged and tangled on the streets…
Repetition is also rife in Bukowski, sometimes varied and
alliterative and sometimes a style burden but mostly serving
as excellent connectors or indicators to the emphatic
moment, thought or mood:
We are dying birds
we are sinking ships –
the world rocks down against us
and we
throw out our arms
and we
throw out our legs
Here, the poet progresses the idea of futility, the sense of
denial and desolation, with which the poem had been
introduced, simply by employing adept line management and
images indicating constricted movement or the impossibility
of escape. There are style echoes in this part of the poem
of T. S. Eliot’s modernist classic, ‘The Hollow Men’.
‘Poem for Personnel Managers’ is also one of Bukowski’s
openly political poems, a chance encounter with one of the
dispossessed providing the occasion for an extended
statement on injustice. He deploys the plural ‘we’ and the
symbolic offer of a cigarette as connectors for allying
himself with the unwanted, those whom he would differently
identify elsewhere as ‘losers’ in the American dream.
Usually, preference for the humorous narrative rather than
committed statement, and flashes of his double-edged,
sardonic wit, would cut through any sustained impression a
poem may be establishing Bukowski as a campaigning poet. But
‘Poem for Personnel Managers’, though also richly allusive,
fulfils its course as unambiguous political commentary.
Perhaps, its length is to blame, but in the closing stanzas
there is a decline in the wealth of its language, and in its
power to hold our attention as readers.
‘Something for the Touts, the Nuns, the Grocery Clerks and
You’ is another long poem in this collection. It is the
poet, lyrical, unusually at ease, ‘taking stock of life’
(and not just focusing on his own life). Bukowski shared
with Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, and Chilean, Pablo Neruda,
the Whitmanesque facility for listing. ‘Something…’
involves a reflection on known or experienced days, which
are listed with their particulars as remembered. The poet
populates the poem with similar and mutually dependent lines
of itemised subjects and meanings:
we have everything and have nothing –
days with glass edges and the impossible stink
of river moss – worse than shit;
checkerboard days of moves and countermoves,
fagged interest, with as much sense in defeat as
in victory; slow days like mules
humping it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed
……………………………………………………………………
good days too of wine and shouting, fights
in alleys, fat legs of women striving around
your bowels buried in moans,
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