Bukowski and Poetry
If there’s one thing that is undeniably true of Charles Bukowski more so than anything else, and that includes whatever anyone may dislike about him, it is that he’s revealed to the world what a sham modern poetry can be.
I enjoy his work quite a bit, but I read and on occasion can’t help but think: “WTF, this passed for a poem?”. And then I take that a step further and think: “Well, a lot of really great poets admired Bukowski’s work, and they’re reading the same stuff I am. Maybe it’s not as complicated as the inexperienced and otherwise unknowing are making it out to be.”
Because, a lot of his poetry is so impossibly direct it comes off almost dumb, but it also speaks deeply to many people great and small, and that is also plainly undeniable. In that sense, it seems that he wiped away the veil of “poetic language” that courses through—what is it?—academia?—or modern literature?
Embedded in any poem published in Crazyhorse magazine is, at its core, no more profound than anything Bukowski said in any one of his poems. Poetry is supposed to be life changing! and all I see is blank nonsense and vague attempts at something, anything beyond what appears to be word games. None of it has any real guts. None of it is taking any real risk at stepping out into the unknown and, hopefully, to say something that’s really worth saying or risking falling flat on your face. There’s inklings of decency and talent, but it’s buried under preoccupations with trying to come off as impressive or talented or mystically complicated, instead of really trying to feel it through to the end — and maybe that end is self-discovery.
I guess, I understand why that is. Getting to know yourself can be terrifying, and if you can’t find that “whatever-it-is-that-makes-you-go: ‘uh, is that who I am?’” maybe you’re just bland, old, boring normal. But is that really who you want to be? … just normal? and maybe kind of inconsequential?
Probably not. And that’s probably not what we want from poetry either.
It’s almost as if poetry has been relegated to a tradesmen’s vocation, as if to say: “This is poetry here, and this is psychology here; this is for the philosophers, and what this is here is meant for them, so stick to your word games, please. It’s your job. There’s no such thing as cross-disciplinary learning, and if you get out of line you won’t get published. Kay?” And if you write poetry, your job is more or less word games that ultimately lead to little more than the regurgitation of political ideology—at least that’s what the poets are doing, because it’s safe and apparently “meaningful” to the masses of bland, old, boring normals out there terrified to take an honest glimpse at themselves.
How little I’ve read from anyone that seems to be sincerely useful to anyone’s day.
I wrote a short story a while ago, and I came back to the short story maybe a year later and reread it. It was a fine story. Not great, not particularly special in any way. Just fine. After some editing, I collected it in my book Cervine. It is called “Hollow”. One thing I noticed in the early draft is that I had attempted to say a few poetic things that struck me as plain nonsense. The writing itself was interesting in that it was poetic and had a fine rhythm and interesting cadence, but the words themselves meant almost nothing — while simultaneously being somehow grammatically correct. Strange, as I think back, that I had such difficulty making cuts to that story and how bad those portions proved to be once I had taken a more objective eye to it. Stranger still that a full complete sentence can be both grammatically correct and essentially meaningless in its implications.
An embarrassing proportion of what I read strikes me in this way. When I look back at the contributors profiles at the end of these literary magazines and I see the insignia of MFA and Ph.D. strewn across the page, after having read much in the pages of that literary magazine that resembled my own attempts at trying to say something profound through vagueries of poetic language, I can’t help but think that modern poetry is a god damn sham.
At the core of each of these absurdly complex poems is a word, an emotion, an ideal that those complexities have been hinged upon. The core of it is simple, usually — and probably powerful. Why would we turn such a meaningful simplicity into such an absurd complexity? Doesn’t that strike anyone else as profoundly superficial?
I’ve noticed that I can reduce even the most complex ideas into simple, readable, direct sentences, but I often have to rewrite them many times over to actually understand for myself what the core meaning of the sentence or paragraph is. In that sense, I am very much like Flannery O’Connor, who said: “I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Perhaps I bury that little tidbit of sincerity and truth under superficial complexities to ease the ego into it. Or, maybe, the ego is a priority for most people to begin with. Both options seem likely, but the latter of the two is clearly the more unsettling, ongoing of the pair.
If you can’t say whatever it is you want to say in direct language, maybe you’re not really saying anything at all, or maybe in your desire to come off as impressive that core of utility was simply been made convoluted and useless.
That’s not to say that we should do away with “word games”, but I have a rule of thumb which is this: it is not in my best interests to assume my ideas are so profound and so complex in how they are profound that they can be expressed only in their initial form which can on many occasions be unnecessarily complex.
Let’s try that sentence again: It is unlikely that I am a genius whose ideas can only be expressed through deeply complex language. If I cannot render my ideas into direct language, perhaps it is a failure of my own intelligence to have understood myself or the world-at-large well enough to say it more directly. And perhaps this is true of many of the poets and writers today.
The first expression of my rule was unedited. The second is the same idea expressed directly and clearly with a hint of self-criticism that might otherwise have been pushed aside or convoluted in complexity and roundabout word games.
The poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is about getting old and doing so idly, one coffee spoon at a time. And apparently very pretentiously as well. The shammery might have started here — not that I really dislike this poem but, nonetheless, it seems that the lineage of academic shammery might be traced back to here.
