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Bukowski revisited
By
Afam Akeh
Pleasures is not a ‘complete works’ collection but it does
claim to offerreaders the definitive Bukowski… “the best of
the best”
of his poems. That claim invites reflection and
judgement on his significance as a representative voice of
20th century poetry and poetics. For
readers coming to
Pleasures, already familiar with Bukowski’s work, there are
clues on the covers of this paperback edition by Canongate
indicating the nature of his intervention in American
poetry. I intend to begin with these physical clues. This
bulge of a book is a paean to excess, as was the poet in his
cultivated reputation and later physical appearance. Top of
the front cover is a banner quote from the New York Times
Book Review introducing it as ‘The Definitive Volume of Bukowski’s Poems’. It probably is. The physical book
certainly is. It is in black and white, but mostly dark. Not
much range then in the colour scheme, just the basic and
obvious, and in this way the presentation of the physical
book unwittingly supports adverse critical reception of
Bukowski’s work – the opinion that it lacks subtlety,
layering or complexity. That may be true to an extent, but
we are not quite done with the colour metaphor because on
the cover of this book, there are also the significant grey
areas, the neither-nor inference we also legitimately draw
from engaging the poet of Pleasures and his work.
 Let us indulge this game of interpretation further. The
poet’s face is a dominant presence on the book cover, aged
but younger than he looked in his last years, full silver
beard and companion cigarette in view. This craggy, uneven
face is scarred by its history of ungoverned moments. His
face and name compete for space on the front cover with the
book title, suggesting the kind of poetry to be found in the
book. Bukowski is without apology all about Bukowski. The
poetry is contemporary, with the centred presence of the
poet as protagonist in his uneven, rawhide chronicle of the
damned human way. This is poetry distanced from the studied
impersonality and formalism of the leading modernists. If
Ezra Pound and his modernist collaborators were obsessed
with ‘making it new’, contemporary poetry has been about
‘keeping it real’. Bukowski took this further, not only
keeping his poetry real but also making it street. And very
personal. But Bukowski’s confessionals bear little
similarity with the dedicated self-surgeries of the school
of Lowell and Plath. These two were tortured aesthetes still
influenced by formal traditions, whose deep sorrow was
always going to kill them, and their poems represented that.
Bukowski was perhaps just as scarred, tortured and suicidal
but it is also evident from his poems that for much of his
life he was too drunk on ‘wine’ and women, too much the
celebrant of experience, too focused on earning as a writer,
and much too rational about those social and creative
pressures which felled Lowell and Plath, to let himself be
overwhelmed.
Canongate’s Pleasures also seems to reflect Bukowski’s
preference for familiar and informal usages with its choice
of cover print types. His name and book title are rendered
in a seemingly inexpert scrawl, as if some mischief-maker,
graffiti artist or rights protester happened upon rarefied
space, perhaps a government building, and with unsteady
hands painted subversive information on it. This would agree
with Bukowski’s attempted assault on the edifice of American
poetry. This ‘scrawled’ type on the front cover prepares
readers for those poems in which Bukowski’s rebellion is
most evident. Still studying the cover, we find his craggy,
triangular face staring into the distance, as if to unravel
some unstated mystery, looking very much like the prophet
some admirers of his work think he was. This leads to the
question: What kind of ‘prophet’ was Bukowski? Again the
physical book supplies the answer – on its back cover, where
there are several laudatory comments on his work and worth.
Leonard Cohen, the poet and lyricist, is quoted on Bukowski:
“He brought everything down to earth, even the angels.” TIME
magazine lauds him as “A laureate of American low life”. So,
we do know from the cover of Pleasures what kind of prophet
we meet in the poetry of Bukowski. There is reported
uncertainty about the sources for one or more of these
acclamations his publishers have used, and that too is woven
into the fabric of the Bukowskian legend. It seems wasteful
seeking verification for what he claims happened in his
poems and storytelling, or what others are supposed to have
said about him. Did he or did he not? Did they or did they
not? Does it really matter? In the legend of Bukowski, as
indeed his poetics, it would seem that nothing is
inviolable, every real or imagined human experience open to
recording, and re-interpretation, as art.
‘Come on in’, the title of a poem in this omnibus collection
and also title-poem of an earlier publication, seems to say
it well:
welcome to my wormy hell.
the music grinds offkey.
fish eyes watch from the wall.
………………………………….
hello. hello there. come in, come on in!
plenty of room here for us all,
sucker.
………………………………….
it’s half-past
nowhere
everywhere.
There is that seeming absence of filters and drainage, his
perpetually open door to whatever others may choose to
exclude or deny from their own lives or work or memory. Come
in, come on in! The invitation seems open-ended, but, as he
readily warns in that poem, there is no real refuge or
deliverance offered when a seeker does come into the ‘truth’
and world of the seer Bukowski. His open door may in fact be
a trap door to hell – an entrance into some kind of den or
web. All functionally similar metaphors apply – the boudoir,
for example. You enter at your risk, as ‘suckers’, he
playfully suggests, to get laid or be eaten or corrupted in
some way. You enter as one of the damned. There is
fellow-feeling in this invitation, this offer of a shared
space, but it is a service being offered by a prophet of the
damned to fellow travellers, and no altruism is promised.
Nothing is taken off the table. You trust and enter at your
peril. It is a hard and painful life and shit happens, so,
buyer beware, he takes care to warn. In this poem and others
by Bukowski, there is apparent indignation at social and
existential injustice but it is rooted in the moral code of
canines. The Bukowski dog will eat and expects that it may
be eaten by other dogs. He does not offer the missionary or
transformative rage of the Beat poets, those radical
ideologues and contemporaries with whom he was sometimes
compared. His is a survivalist’s instinctive sensitivity to
existential denial and personal rights. It is also a gut
rejection of the routine – and, to Bukowski, incomplete –
middle class life (‘Safe’ and ‘My Friend William’).
Anti-establishment or counter-cultural rebellion in the
Beats was educated and organised away from its more visceral
representation in Bukowski, who remained a loner, close to
his angry streets. He considered Ginsberg and his fellow
Beats to be establishment types, too ‘unreal’, and did not
really care to associate with them much. He did not seek
organised channels for venting the rage of the streets. His
restricted himself to modelling that rage in his work and
life.
There is evidence in his diaries, letters and responses to
interviewers that Bukowski, just like Hunter J. Thompson,
may have been overly conscious of his reputation as a
wild-living, non-conforming type, aware that this reputation
was part of his brand, and so felt pressured to continuously
live up to and exploit it in his writing. Therefore it may
be overstretching the evidence, as some do, to imagine or
invent Bukowski as some determined class warrior challenging
unjust corporate and establishment representations of the
American dream. There is certainly in his work, mostly in
the fiction but also in some poems, what can be identified
as a political Bukowski. It is not certain, however, that
his cultivated rebellion from a lifetime of exposure to
challenges, including work-family difficulties, can be
constructed as a sustained critical and creative power
confrontation with oppressive agencies and systems.
It is also uncertain what to make of Bukowski’s continuing
rebellion even in his distinguished last years, and that
image he created and continued to nurture of himself as a
loser. These later Bukowskian years had their history of ill
health and that may explain the continued emblematic use of
suffering and denial in his work. But for Bukowski, this
world of the later twentieth century had also changed in
other ways. He was no longer an unknown struggling writer
and the world in which he would die was not quite the ‘black
or white’ world of his beginnings. By the 1980s and ‘90s,
the splintered representations and other ambiguities of
postmodern realism had complicated rebellion’s moral code,
and its sense of identity and entitlement to difference.
Under challenge were the conflicted sense of ‘them’ and
‘us’, true and false, and other similar binaries evident in
Bukowski’s poetry and in the post-war and mid-century
cultural life of his formative years as a writer. Even the
later years of his productive life were driven by cultural
uncertainty. Globalisation, transnationality and hybridity
became the operative words.
By those later years of the twentieth century, the
ideological and culture wars, profoundly influential on the
thought of Bukowski’s literary generation, had lost their
early intensity, affected by the extremism of some activists
and the revisionism or disillusionment of others. Fatalities
and other adverse consequences from the revolutionary
cocktail of angst, separatism and excess had become an
issue. The resulting contrition and related effects of aging
was settling the footloose. By those later decades of the
twentieth century, the romance or myth of the poet as
perpetual outsider, given mid-century literary currency by
the Beats and Bukowski, had lost many believers. The major
poets increasingly settled in respectable academic careers
as many still do. If by these final decades of his career,
contemporary life was not so ‘black and white’, not so
innocent or hopeful, no longer given to the moral certitude
and revolutionary fervour of earlier years, how did Bukowski
sustain his visionary rage in life and art? He remained
remarkably productive on those terms well into the 1990s,
dashing off new poems like signatures, many to be published
posthumously, though he did also become differently
concerned with the matter of his mortality in these last
poems of his twilight moments.
Could it be that Bukowski simply ‘carried on’ with his much
advertised rage even when the period rebellion of his poetry
constituency was losing whatever influence it may have had
on American poetry and poetics? It appears that he did. Some
of his more implacable critics are that way because there is
also a part of the Bukowski story that is inclined to
myth-making. In Bukowski, or our reception of his work and
life, the bullshit has been inseparable from the real deal.
The poet, his primary publisher and an army of loyal fans
have all been contributors in the creation of his larger
than life poetic persona. In one moment during the 1976
interview with Rolling Stone magazine (‘The Pock-Marked
Poetry of Charles Bukowski’, by Glenn Esterly), Bukowski
attempted to charm his interviewer with stories intended to
progress some popular understanding about him, including the
myth that he was some kind of ‘sex god’. This attempt at
influencing or reinforcing public opinion he considered
favourable failed because his interviewer had earlier spoken
to Linda, the woman who would become the poet’s second wife,
and she had volunteered the information that she was really
the teacher in her sexual partnership with Bukowski. During
the same interview, the poet takes a phone call from Linda
and jokes that he is feeding lies to a reporter who happens
to be lapping it all up. A joke, yes, but how many of these
‘jokes’ or imagined realities (fictions) in the work and
life of Bukowski were believed or misunderstood as true or
real experiences? In the poem, ‘A Great Writer’, he observes
how the fans of some unnamed reclusive writer were
desperately trying to see or contact the man after he had
dramatically withdrawn from public life. The poem concludes
with the poet rather taken by the idea of being wanted by so
many and yet being so eminently unavailable.
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