Bukowski: the man-art-art-man

Bukowski’s poems have this beautiful grab to them. You start in on one and it rolls out and you are right there for the ride side-by-side with all the “imbecile winos” as they rise “in the late afternoons / like millionaires.”¹

You can’t help but relish the squalor and the freedom of being content with whatever shithole you happened to wake up in. If, that is, you could ever imagine yourself finding contentment in such a world. The best of his work puts you in it, unquestioning, hand over his shoulder barfing in an alley or grinning an ugly mug at a cracked mirror in a strange town or walking the hot streets of L.A. hungover, jobless at 50, t-shirt riding the midriff of a sagging beer belly, still grinning that ugly mug in spite of it all.

Put me in that bum fight — broken, yellow teeth and all.

At his best, I’m there. Bukowski’s catalog can run the gamut from genius masterpiece on a bum fight to, at times, what seems nothing more than simple haphazard typing; they can get vague or veer into territory it doesn’t seem obvious he quite knows what he’s talking about. It’s nothing short of pure, unadulterated forward momentum, a forward momentum that is pervasive in his work from the best to the worst, and it doesn’t take a MFA or Ph.D. to see it

For Bukowski, that undeniable forward momentum, as it seems to me, is steeped in a kind of discontent with the ill-perception of hardship, privation, and destitution that is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which might well have opened the door for Bukowski’s somewhat arrogant contempt for the forgery of condemning a poorness of spirit to the working class, or, worse still, to the poverty-stricken and the drunks and the deadbeats cowed by a crappy life right outta the gates.

In Bukowski, the deplorables, the hopeless, and the miserable are the sincere and authentic. It is in them where the real strength of will to keep going is revealed. And, likewise, authenticity is not always taken on willingly, which is self-evident in Bukowski’s menagerie of deplorables. Because among them, “what matters most,” says Bukowski, “is how well you walk through the fire.”²

Such a forward momentum is intertwined with both his best and his worst work. In the midst of it, you could easily read several poems in a sitting, or maybe fly though the better part of a book if you have a free afternoon, unimpeded by the crap in anticipation of so many strokes of genius. There is often little about any given poem that causes you to want to dwell there on it for too long because whatever it is he wants to say, it is right there on the page for the most part devoid of metaphor or word games, much like the poet Pablo Neruda who was an important influence.

Unlike many other poets who might in a sense coerce you into scrutinizing each line, with Bukowski you might well move on to the next poem and the next and the next — where each poem is centered around that aforementioned stroke of genius rather than a series of them in each line.

This seems to be an integral characteristic of his style, a dangerous style for those lacking his voluminous output — dangerous because, at such a pace, you might have too quickly ran out of material to read had it been some other author.

At it’s worst, this momentum leaves behind holes or misshapen contours that could easily be smoothed out with a little more than a once, twice glance over in editing.

I see the concern though. When you write a first draft, certain pieces quickly loose that initial flare of emotion that would otherwise suck you in if you hadn’t started moving words around editing. It often seems better to leave a few flat spots or incongruities that might at first go unnoticed in favor of maintaining that initial liftoff. The problem is, you risk a diminishing return on reread value. In that sense, it pays to throw the TV out and get yourself entertained with writing instead, because if that’s your tactic, you better have output.

The best poems I’ve read, I might reread multiple times in any given week, or make a conscious effort to memorize them. Take E.E. Cummings’ “[Buffalo Bill’s]”, Robinson Jeffer’s “Hurt Hawks”, even William Blake’s “The Tyger”. They ring like a tuning fork all the way through, right into the marrow. No holes, no faults, no missteps. Just the purity of words ringing in ease like breaking “onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat”.³

There’s a precision in these poems that doesn’t seem present in much of Bukowski’s body of work. Such an etiquette in writing as his can show in the worst ways in his worst writing and in the best ways in his best. Though this criticism extends increasingly less as you move into his later work.

Strangely enough, there’s a beauty in his offhanded attitude toward his own work. I’m reminded of an occasion in which he lost a series of poems after his cat pissed on his word processor in the late 80s. The loss of this work seemed to concern him very little. He, of course, had no qualms about producing more. And he did — volumes of it, as he even then was proving himself to be one of America’s most prolific writers with several novels and thousands of poems and short stories, some of which are still being published on occasion today.⁹

I think at first glance we take this sort of attitude to most craftmanship as kind of slipshod, but perhaps there’s something to be said here that is much more intrinsic to our approach to life itself, about when we should sit on something and when we shouldn’t, and how we might equip ourselves for a changing world and what might leave us unprepared and dumbfounded at our inevitable lack of foresight.

At his worst, Bukowski has a tendency to go after an idea as if it were all-encompassing, when plainly it is not. Take his poem “the shoelace”, a well-known and popular poem that seems to me to be ever so slightly untrue. Admittedly, it is not his worst by any means, but I hesitate to setup a straw man argument that any bum looking for a row might venture.

“the shoelace” is a fair poem and just true enough that you can read it a few times and agree and enjoy it. To read it more than that would likely mean the mysticism of the poem will have vanished some. In another poet, to find incongruities is almost a treasure for how rare it is. In Bukowski, his occasionally slipshod style is simply the nature of the beast.

The problem with the poem starts in the assumption that these singular difficulties might “undo” a person, despite the fact that millions of people line up every day for their⁴:

…license plates or taxes
or hiring or firing,
doing it or having it done to you, or
farts or constipation
or speeding tickets
or rickets or crickets or mice…

And still are not “undone”.

A series of daily problems are mounted in a frenzying list that pulls you in as you read, but gradually the apparent minutiae mounts into circumstances that cannot be said to be so minute anymore.

Nonetheless, you are, on the initial read, honed in on his flight through “making it” in the L.A. squalor. Until, finally, he is listing jobs and lifestyles themselves, and, as if aware that his digression into these larger circumstances do not correlate with his theme, it’s:

suddenly
2 red lights in your rear view mirror
and blood in your
underwear…

And he has landed us back into the daily problems to round out the poem.

It could be interpreted that that was his intention, to mount the minutiae into the whole of a life and then to land us back in the minutiae again, that is with a broken shoelace. Though it does not feel like that was the intention.

If he had said, for instance, the phrase ‘all the while’, so it reads: “[all the while] making it / as a waitress at Norm’s on the split shift…” where he had previously used a diminutive ‘or’, I might have been convinced.

Such a minor change would no less disrupt the theme of the poem anymore than it would the general themes of whatever he tended to work with throughout his career. If it were up to me, I might have suggested that he cut 30 percent of it if he had wanted to bring it somewhere closer to “perfect”.

Bukowski’s etiquette toward finishing a piece of writing is very likely his greatest criticism from the academics. Had he taken care of these apparent incongruities he might have found recognition from the academics early on despite the fact that he was, in truth, denouncing them all along.

As someone who is also for the most part self-taught, as are all of my favorite writers, I have a hard time exacting too firm a criticism on the side of the academics, though I’ll grant that it is there. However slipshod it proves to be we shall see.

Perhaps the problem isn’t so much the execution of the poem itself because it may not have been executed any better regardless of whose hands it was in. That is to say, I didn’t write it, nor would I have ever written it, or apparently anyone else for that matter.

A work of art of any kind, in all likelihood, can only ever be in one person’s hands, ever, which says something important about the totality of Bukowski’s work and who he is as a poet — as a man who was self-made in the strictest sense, and there is certainly a kind of art to that, a kind of art that shows in his art and that art, likewise, shows in his life. For Bukowski, perfection is the stumbling block that he has happily dodged.

To put it more philosophically: perhaps it is the nature of a poem that makes it intrinsic to the poet her or himself because, of course, no one else did write it, and as much as we may imagine some world of ultimate forms in which perfection resides — that is to say a world where the poem “the shoelaces” has been rendered into some platonic form destitute of human imperfection — in a practical way, there’s nothing like that around here on this apparently flat Earth. And you and I accept that reality much more definitively as being a part of Bukowski’s philosophy, a philosophy present in the form his writing takes.

Whatever the case may be, humans exist here on Earth, in all their awkward stupidity and blunderings, and this is the only world we got: where quick and dirty poems like “the shoelace” are getting the job done, quick and dirty, just like the poet Bukowski wanted it to.

I wonder about that sometimes, if some pieces are in a sense dead, aka finished, on arrival and no amount of editing will ever, or should ever, cure the piece of its… misshapenness, however much editing and rewriting we might do.

As I write this, I remember an interview with Martin Scorsese where he said that all art contains mistakes. He went on to relate an occasion in which he had written a perfect scene for a movie, and, after realizing his mistake of creating something perfect, he had gone back and purposefully entered a mistake into it.⁵

Scorsese’s anecdote seems hyperbolic, to say the least, and can really only work by his own subjective opinion of his own work, though the point remains: in a flawed world, art is flawed. Even if he had left the scene presumably “perfect”, it would still have been flawed by the lights of a flawed world.⁶

And, likewise, perhaps this is the genius of Bukowski: the guts to have the vulnerability to say it anyways and take the risk of being off base, wrong, dumb, and genius all at once.

An early poem called “dreamlessly” is an excellent example of where Bukowski shines at his absolute best. The poem doesn’t assume that the core idea of what he is saying applies to everyone, that is to say not everyone gives a shit about a broken shoelace.

What “dreamlessly” assumes is that there’s a variety of human experience passing by you on the open road — if you look you might see it; some of them are lonely people in the world but not all of them are lonely right now, and some never truly feel the loneliness that others do, and perhaps never will. “dreamlessly” these loneliest of people crave nothing but food, shelter, and clothing, and “they concentrate on that…”.⁷

“I do not understand,” says Bukowski in despair, “why these people do not vanish.”⁷

This poem works almost effortlessly. But when he makes conjectures that he seems to assume we should all agree with, rather than simply what he sees or would like to share with us, the poem does not come off as well or as easily because that is very rarely the case in terms of human behavior, and we all know this intuitively, and this seems to be where “the shoelace” has come up short.

Take, on the other hand, his poem “the bluebird”, which is one of his most famous. Like he writes in the poem, there’s not a bluebird in everyone’s heart, there’s a bluebird in his heart, and when I read it, I think, “hey, I think there’s a bluebird in my heart too!”.

The opening of the poem is as follows:

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know
he’s
in there.

It is a short poem with three more stanzas. It continues on by further developing the bluebird in his heart as a metaphor — the blatant metaphor being a rarity for Bukowski. It is arguably his most famous, and for good reason. It is an excellent poem. I feel the reaching out to be heard in it, whatever the case may be, and we as readers feel it to the point that we internalize the poem, and through him it becomes something we also wish to say to the world.

The poem, in general, incites a kind of freedom either through a focusing in to reveal some external truth we might like to relate better with the world at large or to refocus an internalization out to reveal some truth about how we might like the world at large to relate to us, and this is what occurs here in “the bluebird”.

Perhaps this is the question implicit in all good writing.

But, in terms of the success of “the bluebird”, if Bukowski were to say: “There’s a bluebird in your heart”, I would say “No, there’s not. I’ve never thought that.” Or at best, I would say: “You’re trying to playing my heart strings here. Sure I want to think that. But I don’t want to give you the credit of having incited that thought. Next.”

But this is Bukowski at his best, and such a mistake he has not let slip passed.

In terms of my theory above, a bluebird is an external characteristic that can be refocused inwardly as a metaphor, as opposed to his poem “the laughing heart”⁸, which is a poem concerning something internal the reader can refocus outwardly.

You can’t tell people how to think and when you do, you have to be careful what it is that you’re telling people to think.

Bukowski’s “the laughing heart” is a masterful rendering of such writing. It is clearly speaking from sincere knowledge and concern for whoever happens to pick up the poem.

But it seems such poems as “the laughing heart” are pulled off rarely, for anyone. More often than not, you have to show the reader how, or, even better, you show them what’s okay to think about so that they find their own creative momentum. You have to persuade them to see things from another perspective, because you and I both know that blatant authoritarian rule over a persons mind can never truly gain the desired effect. People will maintain some secret reservation if they have no other choice.

The failure of many of Bukowski’s worst poems is that he didn’t edit them enough. Though I respect his risking his neck like that. He was very prolific, but you can’t help but wonder that if he’d made his books a third shorter and focused a bit more effort on editing and rewriting, he might have turned out marginally less substantial catalog that was of a much better quality overall. To even shorten his catalog by thirty percent would still make him one of the most prolific writers around.

Except that, one thing he accomplished through this apparent misstep on his part, which in all honesty helped me as a writer immensely and affords me with a strong reason to give him immense credit — it was that he made himself real.

I read his shit and I read his masterpieces and I cannot deny the fact that he lived as a real person, not a god or ghost. That he was an ugly son of a bitch who walked the streets of L.A., got drunk, fought in alleys, and leered at women from his squalor, and in all those stories was a real person, fallible and dumb, and genius when he had a mind to be and every ounce of who he was showed up in his work. It makes one wonder what other secret reservations he kept from his writing.

“That most men don’t gamble with their lives or their creativity is not my fault. And it makes for dull writing and duller writers.”
— Charles Bukowski, from the essay “He Beats His Women”

At the worst, his writing reveals a pathway to greatness, and that age old guise of perfection has been lifted. You must write shit to know how not to write shit.

Footnotes:

1. quoted from “millionaires” by Charles Bukowski
2. quoted from “How is your heart?” by Charles Bukowski
3. quoted from “[Buffalo Bill’s]” by E.E. Cummings
4. Though it might seem at first that a claim that such day-to-day difficulties might “undo” a person go against his philosophy of forward momentum. So perhaps he is giving a warning. And sure enough by the end of the poem, he has a “caution: wet floor” sign up, as if to say: “The shoelaces are down there. One of these times you’ll look and one will be broken, so beware because that’s when you might loose it.” As a poem, no matter what flaws you see in it, it seems we wind up with a means to realign our impression of it with a certain utility, and so we find ourselves in a strange loop. However much we might try to pull off some Kantian continuity to dissolve of all possible semblances of cognitive dissonance, ultimately even Kant was shown to have made some missteps. Will Bukowski prove ultimately to be more right than Kant? LOL! One lived the life of a poet and the other the life of a philosopher. I’m sure if we go far enough into the future, Kant’s work will still further be shown to have some pretty glaring inconsistencies, and probably just as many Bukowski. Ultimately, it seems that one had a little more fun along the way than the other. And you know what? I’m not sure Kant was any smarter. He may have had a higher IQ, but there’s a point where high IQ doesn’t always amount to intrinsic value overall. Maybe someday, but we aren’t there yet.
5. I do not remember where I saw Scorsese relate this anecdote. It was in an interview I believe. It may have been in the interviews that were taken for his documentary film “No Direction Home” about Bob Dylan, which was excellent by the way.
6. Neverminding the fact that only a human would ever consider their world flawed. In other words, if it might have been some other way, it would have been, but it was not and we are still here.
7. quoted from “dreamlessly” by Charles Bukowski
8. The first several lines of “the laughing heart” read: “your life is your life / don’t let it be clubbed into dank / submission. / be on the watch. / there are ways out. / there is light somewhere. …[etc.]”
9. This anecdote was related in Howard Sounes biography cited below.

• Gaylord Brewer’s “Charles Bukowsi”, a critical analysis of Bukowski poems, short stories, journalism, and novels was, very helpful in the writing of the above.
• Also of notable help was Howard Sounes biography “Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life”.

“I just don’t love my stuff that much. You know what I’m interested in? what I’m gonna type tomorrow night. That’s all that interests me. The next poem, the next fucking line. What’s passed is past. I don’t wanna linger over it and read it and play with it and a’… jolly it up. It’s gone. It’s done. If you can’t write the next line, well, you’re dead. The past doesn’t matter.” — Charles Bukowski