Learning From Bukowski
There are few widely read poets in America today, beyond the minuscule community of poets & academics. One is Charles Bukwoski. Bukwoski is widely criticized by serious poets & academics for his self-mythologizing stance & lack of formal skill. I do not deny that Bukowski’s lack of formal skill is a serious flaw. I would argue, however, that it is no more serious a flaw than Pound’s obscurity, Shelley’s ethereality, & Creeley’s domesticity. Furthermore, poets & academics have much to learn from Bukowski’s approach to life & literature. The sum total of Bukwoski’s work presents nothing less than a compressed, crudely coherent philosophy of life. Bukowski’s best poems are triumphs of logopoeia, articulating serious & universal problems & finding consoling resolutions in solitude, seriousness, literature & memory. Bukowski, a blue-collar Proust, was, for all his crudity, as serious-intentioned as any poet writing in century-end America. It’s both reductive & cheap to linger on Bukowski’s rough-hewn surfaces w/ out acknowledging the polished if untutored precision of his worldview and its’ presentation-in-verse.
Take these lines from "the secret":
don’t worry, nobody has the
beautiful lady, not really, and
nobody has the strange and
hidden power, nobody is
exceptional or wonderful or
magic, they only seem to be.
It’s all a trick, an in, a con,
don’t buy it, don’t believe it.
The world is packed with
billions of people whose lives
and deaths are useless and
when one of these jumps up
and the light of history shines
upon them, forget it, it’s not
what it seems, it’s just
another act to fool the fools
again.
It would, indeed, be hard for the serious poet to ignore the technical flaws apparent here— arbitrary line-breaks, flat diction bordering on prose, boring word choices, etc. The poem does fail on that one level— but it is only one level. Even as it fails on the level of technique/formal skill, it succeeds wonderfully on content-levels. We are getting real, hard-won, useful knowledge, maybe even, (dare I say it) wisdom. The usefulness of this wisdom derives directly from its’ immediate cultural relevance, i.e., we live in a fame-saturated culture in which ciphers continually “jump up, and the light of history shines upon them”. Bukowski is writing this poem as a famous poet who sees through his own celebrated status. Rather than wallowing in fame, he rejects it out of hand, and encourages us, his audience, to do the same. In this day and age in America, this stance (for a writer as successful as Bukowski) is both radical & brave. It stands in bold relief to the shameless self-promotion of someone like Allen Ginsberg (probably Bukwoski’s closest analogue), who spent his whole life courting mainstream media & public.
The irony here is that Bukowski’s anti-fame, anti-celebrity, anti-historical (and, implicitly, anti-canonical) stance, rather than alienating his audience, brought them that much closer to him. Whether poets like it or not, the public could care less about conventional notions of craft & technique. They want their catharsis, & Bukowski, like no other modern poet, gives it to them. We may learn from the Bukwoski phenomenon that much of the general populace is both dismissive of popular culture & willing to read. What they don’t want is self-infatuated preciosity; they want poems they can use, poems with a logopoeia relevant to their lives. Bukowski clearly sensed this, & was willing to cut out Formalist re-bop & bare himself whole in these poems. Baring himself was enough, because Bukwoski had a substantial philosophic gift to impart, which, though “Base”, was nonetheless in tune with fin de siecle America Zeitgeist.
What can poets learn from Bukowski? Academic poets often consider Form an end in itself. They discourage, in their workshops & presentations, discussions of Content, as if Content was somehow secondary. This is rubbish & Bukowski was absolutely right to put Content first. More important even than logopoeia is rhetopoeia, the rhetorical impact of any given poem. We must be convinced by the poet’s rhetopoeia that a poem needs to exist, is a necessary entity. This Bukowski is able to do, time & time again, because (in his best poems) he has something to say. Bukowski is a superior poet because, while Form can be faked, Content cannot. You either have something substantial to express (whether it be on an emotional, psychological, aesthetic or any other level) or you don’t. In considering Bukowski & Form, give the man at least the credit of volition— his writing career spanned forty-odd years, if he’d wanted to learn Form, he would’ve. Content was obviously so important to him that Form was (mostly) superfluous; and whose to say he wasn’t right?
I’m not going to try & justify Bukowski’s technical incompetence, or to argue that the pursuit of Formal Rigor doesn’t have its’ own nobility. I merely want to make the point that Bukowski’s sacrifice of Form at the altar of Content doesn’t disqualify him from serious consideration as a poet & aesthete. It has its’ own validity, in the catharses of myself & the thousands of “normal” people around the world who share in Bukowski’s alienation, solitude, & appreciation of the redemptive powers of poetry & the written word in general.
Those who would deny Bukowski’s potential canonicity must remember that one hundred years ago, Whitman, roughly ten years dead, was in the exact same position that Bukowski is in now. Whitman was reviled by the academics & serious poets of the time, who now are considered irrelevant & hopelessly outdated. He had achieved some popular success (especially in England where his work was embraced by Wilde & others), but his place in the canon was far from secure. It took an impassioned essay from D.H. Lawrence in the early twenties to seal Whitman’s reputation as a superior poet. After this, Whitman maintained a steady influence in world letters. It may take some years for Bukowski to achieve the level of critical recognition that he deserves. Literary critics are notoriously inclined to refute the opinions of the general public (dismissing them, perhaps, as image-besotted Philistines). Nevertheless, it’s only a matter of time until a D.H. Lawrence shows up & assures Bukowski his place in world letters.
Take these lines from "the secret":
don’t worry, nobody has the
beautiful lady, not really, and
nobody has the strange and
hidden power, nobody is
exceptional or wonderful or
magic, they only seem to be.
It’s all a trick, an in, a con,
don’t buy it, don’t believe it.
The world is packed with
billions of people whose lives
and deaths are useless and
when one of these jumps up
and the light of history shines
upon them, forget it, it’s not
what it seems, it’s just
another act to fool the fools
again.
It would, indeed, be hard for the serious poet to ignore the technical flaws apparent here— arbitrary line-breaks, flat diction bordering on prose, boring word choices, etc. The poem does fail on that one level— but it is only one level. Even as it fails on the level of technique/formal skill, it succeeds wonderfully on content-levels. We are getting real, hard-won, useful knowledge, maybe even, (dare I say it) wisdom. The usefulness of this wisdom derives directly from its’ immediate cultural relevance, i.e., we live in a fame-saturated culture in which ciphers continually “jump up, and the light of history shines upon them”. Bukowski is writing this poem as a famous poet who sees through his own celebrated status. Rather than wallowing in fame, he rejects it out of hand, and encourages us, his audience, to do the same. In this day and age in America, this stance (for a writer as successful as Bukowski) is both radical & brave. It stands in bold relief to the shameless self-promotion of someone like Allen Ginsberg (probably Bukwoski’s closest analogue), who spent his whole life courting mainstream media & public.
The irony here is that Bukowski’s anti-fame, anti-celebrity, anti-historical (and, implicitly, anti-canonical) stance, rather than alienating his audience, brought them that much closer to him. Whether poets like it or not, the public could care less about conventional notions of craft & technique. They want their catharsis, & Bukowski, like no other modern poet, gives it to them. We may learn from the Bukwoski phenomenon that much of the general populace is both dismissive of popular culture & willing to read. What they don’t want is self-infatuated preciosity; they want poems they can use, poems with a logopoeia relevant to their lives. Bukowski clearly sensed this, & was willing to cut out Formalist re-bop & bare himself whole in these poems. Baring himself was enough, because Bukwoski had a substantial philosophic gift to impart, which, though “Base”, was nonetheless in tune with fin de siecle America Zeitgeist.
What can poets learn from Bukowski? Academic poets often consider Form an end in itself. They discourage, in their workshops & presentations, discussions of Content, as if Content was somehow secondary. This is rubbish & Bukowski was absolutely right to put Content first. More important even than logopoeia is rhetopoeia, the rhetorical impact of any given poem. We must be convinced by the poet’s rhetopoeia that a poem needs to exist, is a necessary entity. This Bukowski is able to do, time & time again, because (in his best poems) he has something to say. Bukowski is a superior poet because, while Form can be faked, Content cannot. You either have something substantial to express (whether it be on an emotional, psychological, aesthetic or any other level) or you don’t. In considering Bukowski & Form, give the man at least the credit of volition— his writing career spanned forty-odd years, if he’d wanted to learn Form, he would’ve. Content was obviously so important to him that Form was (mostly) superfluous; and whose to say he wasn’t right?
I’m not going to try & justify Bukowski’s technical incompetence, or to argue that the pursuit of Formal Rigor doesn’t have its’ own nobility. I merely want to make the point that Bukowski’s sacrifice of Form at the altar of Content doesn’t disqualify him from serious consideration as a poet & aesthete. It has its’ own validity, in the catharses of myself & the thousands of “normal” people around the world who share in Bukowski’s alienation, solitude, & appreciation of the redemptive powers of poetry & the written word in general.
Those who would deny Bukowski’s potential canonicity must remember that one hundred years ago, Whitman, roughly ten years dead, was in the exact same position that Bukowski is in now. Whitman was reviled by the academics & serious poets of the time, who now are considered irrelevant & hopelessly outdated. He had achieved some popular success (especially in England where his work was embraced by Wilde & others), but his place in the canon was far from secure. It took an impassioned essay from D.H. Lawrence in the early twenties to seal Whitman’s reputation as a superior poet. After this, Whitman maintained a steady influence in world letters. It may take some years for Bukowski to achieve the level of critical recognition that he deserves. Literary critics are notoriously inclined to refute the opinions of the general public (dismissing them, perhaps, as image-besotted Philistines). Nevertheless, it’s only a matter of time until a D.H. Lawrence shows up & assures Bukowski his place in world letters.
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