Why Is Charles Bukowski So Beloved By Young Poets
I could disparage Charles Bukowski, but what's the point? The man is here to stay, no matter how vulgar, misogynistic, or formulaic his poems often are. He's as much a part of the land scape as the Ave Maria. He gives young poets a sense of freedom. They think he's telling the truth because it's an obvious one: people are fucking phony, art is full of snobs, and bores, sex is exciting, and trouble has its charms. Drink, play the horses, be faithful to your habits (including writing) and try to have some "Style." Bukowski is a corrective to our politically correct, "professional," corporate universe. Never mind that such political incorrectness and abrasiveness is a multi-billion dollar industry sponsored by corporate interests in the niche marketing they devote to Indi movies, "raw" punk, and the cult of the "genuine" (as sponsored by The Gap). Bukowski was a reprobate, and he got away with it. Who doesn't secretly love and admire that? I spent all my life among Bukowskis. I knew drunks much meaner and decrepit than Chuck. I knew a guy who carried a photo of his kids killed in a car accident. He'd whip it out at the right time, and get a few sympathy drinks. The sad thing was his kids were really killed in a car accident, and he was the driver! (sometimes he'd own up to that, sometimes he'd leave that part out depending on the "mark" he was flim-flamming). I knew a woman who would cut her boyfriend with a beer bottle, and when the cops came and went to arrest the boyfriend (because he had slugged her prior to the beer bottle) she'd jump the cops, attempt to scratch their eyes out. When my father died, and we were poor, the church didn't do a fucking thing, but 'Two Brother's Tavern" in which my father had his own stool called the "kingdom of Rocky" took up a collection and we not only had money for the funeral, but an amazing wake, and a three gun salute at the grave because a drinking buddy of my dad's was a cop and he told the police my dad was his father. I know the sentimentality and generosity of the poor as well as I know their brutishness, violence, and chronic anger. None of this is news to me. When I first started getting features as a poet, people told me I wrote like Bukowski. I had no idea who the fucker was. I was ignorant of any poetry outside my anthologies and my extensive obsessive reading of Williams, Stevens, and Roethke. I didn't really write like Bukowski. Yes I cursed (Bukowski curses far less than I do). Yes, my poems were often from the bottom, and they had an anger to them. They seemed "real" and truly from the inside of the proletariat, but that's only because I was a prol, and angry, and came from a place where the average life expectancy was a good ten years less than the national average. I took from Williams and Stevens and Roethke, and applied it to my world. I was determined to see beauty and vitality, and a good sort of spiritual ugliness in the place I came from because it was there, and why shouldn't I see it? I was also a devout though malpracticing Catholic and the greatest influence on my writings were the Gospels, especially the sermon on the mount, and the whore falling at the feet of Christ, and the whole topsy-turvy way Jesus turns the world's values on its head: blessed are the poor, the sick, the grieving, those who everyone despises. Blessed are those who are misfits, and whores, and tax collectors, and drunks, because at least they know how far they are from the kingdom of God. They can't hide from their filth the way the rich and the pious, and the self-righteous often do. I can not remember a time when Christ's stories were not living inside me. I'm not a holy roller by any stretch of the imagination. People have seen me polish off 20 shots of Jamesons (most of them doubles). I am often angry, and confused, and far more in proximity to the whore than the saint-- and that's why Jesus' words burn in me because almost every drunk, addict, and miscreant I ever knew is a purist and an absolutist. They are seeking something so pure they don't care if it kills them. This is why the worst people often become the greatest saints. And this leads me back to Bukowski and why he has such a hold on the imagination and hearts of young writers: because he believes in purity-- not morals, not right living, not judicious and sensible and mature seeking of the good life-- but something so powerful that you would rather die than not know it, rather spend your whole life in a shit hole than not embrace it. Yes, he was an alcoholic and has all the personality traits of one: crankiness, bombasity, a hatred of "honest" people, sentimentality, outrage, and a tendency to excuse his behavior by priding himself on writing every day (every drunk I ever knew had some sort of behavior purity fetish: they kept their apartments spotless, or always tipped their hats to old ladies, or never had a bottle before eight in the morning). His work has staying power because it appeals to the spiritual yearning inside youths to give 120 percent of themselves to something that isn't phony, or insisting they be mediocre for the rest of their lives-- a longing to die into truth, to not live a false life, even if that dying constitutes acts of dissipation, vulgarity, trouble, fighting, and over all dysfunction. Bukowski would be very well understood in the Zen tradition as the drinking, fighting, whoring Boddisatva who, through his "bad behavior" attains a sort of enlightenment-- the wild man of Zen mysticism. He would be understood in the older Catholic context of the desert fathers who, though they didn't drink or fuck, lived lives completely against the world's false "values" and were known to be often fierce, and fiery-- prophets who would make Charles Bukowski look like Donna Fucking Reed. But it is not enough to call him a purist. On the dislogistic end of that term is the "bad boy"-- the one who seduces by making you see how fake the "virtue" of the world is. Bukowski also writes a clean line, without much decoration mucking it up. That sells So I read Bukowski to see why people compared me to him. His world was gritty (so was mine). It contained people who died, were destroyed, lived on the margins (so did mine), but here's the difference: I wrote about people who didn't want to live that way, who weren't doing it as some sort of counter statement to the prevailing values or because they had read "Beyond Good and Evil." They were in deep shit and suffering and they didn't take any particular pleasure in it. In spite of their dysfunction, and their limitations, they managed to be decent to others when decency was an option. They managed to love their kids, and pray to a God who never seemed to give two shits about them. They worked shit jobs in factories, came home, and managed somehow not to murder anyone. My father became a drunk only after my mother had half her face eaten by cancer, he couldn't pay the bills, and they cut his voice box out. I don't blame him. Talk therapy, support groups, and Prozac were unheard of where I came from. When he died, I was heart broken, but I never had to forgive him for drinking himself to death, because I saw him work a double shift and still go to sit with my mother all day in a hospital. He was fucked up, and often angry, but his heart was not wrong. His meanness was the meanness of a kicked and abused animal. My poem 'The First Time I got Up Early" has none of Bukowski's sarcasm, his hatred of the phony values of the society. Loyalty to a hurt and wounded animal is futile and mispent-- a sucker's bet, but it is the only truth I know. Still, what did I think of Bukowski? I liked the bastard. I loved his nasty sense of humor, his crankiness, his sense of urban pastoral. There are many who are interested in the good life, but he was interested in the "pure" life. By purity I don't mean morality, but commitment to something beyond all costs. He was a committed drunk, race horse gambler, whore-chaser, and, yes, a disciplined writer. Perhaps I should shut up about his spiritual value, his "purist" and absolutist aesthetics and put down here a poem I just opened to at random in his book "Love is A Dog From Hell:"
there once was a woman who put her head into an oven
terror finally becomes almost bearable but never quite
terror creeps like a cat crawls like a cat across my mind
I can hear the laughter of the masses
they are storng they will survive
like the roach never take your eyes off the roach you'll never see it again.
The masses are everywhere they know how to do things: they have sane and deadly fingers for sane and deadly things.
I wish I were driving a blue 1952 Buick or a dark blue 1942 Buick or a blue 1932 Buick over a cliff of hell and into the sea.
See what I mean? It's better to die, to drive a car into the sea than to become part of the "strong" masses with their "sane and deadly angers for sane and deadly things." Bukowski has put his own purist tendencies into the mouth of a woman who puts her head in the oven rather than stop witnessing to the roach. The roach is the filthy and false "virtue" of the mass man.. the one Rilke refers to when he writes: "These days a man dies in 800 hundred beds." (Maultis Brigges, which I am misspelling) You can see why this might appeal to a seventeen year old who thinks life is shit, and who is afraid he will end up a drone like his parents-- the pure life rather than the good life. It's attractive because it speaks of absolute commitment-- no compromise. This is why Shelly was loved, and Byron-- They were "pure" rather than good. The smart marketing exec realizes that the myth of the genuine, the raw, the pure, works as much for the hell bound as the heaven bound born agains. Purity sells much better than the sane and boring offerings of goodness. You can run purity both ways. It's about trespassing and living over the limit. Saints are usually as annoying and scandalous to ordinary folks as Bukowski. I think Bukowski and Simone Weil would have hit it off had they worked in the same factory. But this is one of his more blatant essays on purity. Bukowski also triumphs because he deflates certain forms of sentimentality (though he has his own sometimes maudlin brand of it). Consider this rollicking gem that is refreshingly self depreciating:
one of the hottest
she wore a platinum blond wig and her face was rouged and powdered and she put the lipstick on making a huge painted mouth and her neck was wrinkled but she still had the ass of a young girl and the legs were good. She wore blue panties and i got them off raised her dress, and with the tv flickering took her standing up. as we struggled around the room (I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life, marvelous so marvelous like eating cold olives at 3 a.m. with half the town on fire) I came.
you boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old.
of course, you leave after wards or get very drunk which is the same thing.
we drank wine for hours and watched tv and when we went to bed to sleep it off she left her teeth in all night long.
There are feminists who will have a visceral reaction to this poem, or any poem by Bukowski. They won't care that he's extolling sex with an older woman, or saying its better than with a young girl (except she must have a young girls ass). They'll want to rip Bukowski a new asshole, but a young writer finds this poem and, for the first time perhaps, a poet is saying ugly but vital (and hilarious) truths, and the lines are clear, understandable, and, if he or she has any aesthetic sense, he or she will love and cherish the part about the sex being like eating olives at 3 A.m. with half the town on fire. The triumph in this poem is echoed by Bukowski's excited claim to have raised the dead. The purity here is that the poem gives the lie to more appropriate views of intimacy. For all his praise of the woman, she is wrinkled and has false teeth-- just as the sermon on the mount reverses the dialectic of what is holy and unholy, Bukowski makes a triumph out of a disaster. Good for him. He aint going away any more than Rabelais or bawdy Herrick, or Falstaff. As Pound said of Whitman: "let there be converse between us." (or some such shit as that).
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