poetry, as with any art, evolves over time. Bukowski is a widely recognized, critically acclaimed poet. This is what poetry looks like now. It has transcended rhyme and meter. It is condensed.
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poetry, as with any art, evolves over time. Bukowski is a widely recognized, critically acclaimed poet. This is what poetry looks like now. It has transcended rhyme and meter. It is condensed.
Bukowski's great crime is that he is accessible.-
No... there are plenty of accessible poets. Bukowski's "crime" is that he's just a bad poet.
Most people who like poetry that i've met have a strange superiority complex about it. Then someone comes along, gives the finger to all the crap they read that makes them feel intellectual. Bukowski didn't give a darn what other people thought. He wrote his heart, and out of it came some beautiful poetry that doesn't require a certain sense of elitism to understand.
Actually Bukowski didn't give the finger to all the "crap" those of us who love poetry read. Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Robinson Jeffers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, D. H. Lawrence, and e e cummings are among those whom he declares as being influences. Writing "from the heart"? All well and good... but poetry is an art and it involves the intellect as well. Those who imagine him to be a great iconoclast usually don't know enough about poetry to recognize that A. He's not that innovative and B. He's not that good. Does that make me an "elitist"? Very well, then I'm an elitist. Of course you might wish to learn now that the whole of art is elitist.
I'm not accusing the bukowski critics here of being snobbish etc etc... but A. is this really the place for this weird, post-humous put down?
Where exactly should we offer an opinion of Bukowski's work that is not adulatory. I didn't know this thread was limited to worship of the poet only... and what exactly is weird about offering an opinion of his work as a poet?
B. Bukowski is one of the most imitated modern poets. The people who call his stuff crap remind me of the people who say that a monkey could have made a better painting than picaso.
I doubt there is a single critic in his or her right mind who would think to place Bukowski anywhere in the realm of Picasso. The analogy is weak at best because most of those who dismiss Picasso in such an off-hand way dismiss the vast majority of Modern art... and yet I think that I and others who have responded here have made it more than clear that we are quite appreciative of Modern poetry... we simply find that Bukowski rather bad as a poet... Modern or otherwise. By the way... who are all those poets of any merit who have been so influenced by Bukowski?
poetry, as with any art, evolves over time.
Oh... I didn't know that. I thought Anne Carson was the same as Donne. :rolleyes:
Bukowski is a widely recognized, critically acclaimed poet.
By whom. He is largely ignored in most critical circles, rarely mentioned by any major contemporary poets, and seldom shows up it the literary surveys or curriculum. We're not talkin' T.S. Eliot here... not even Allen Ginsberg.
This is what poetry looks like now.
If you believe that you don't know the first thing about contemporary poetry. There are contemporary poets who follow strict classical forms of structure, rhyme, and meter... and there are contemporary poets who blur the very boundaries between poetry and prose and narrative fiction and even drama.
It has transcended rhyme and meter.
Blank verse has been around for quite some time now. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, etc... all regularly employed blank verse. Whitman employed free verse... abandoning not merely rhyme but set meter. More than a few Modern poets continued in Whitman's wake. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Malarme all employed the form as early as the late 19th century and Anne Carson continues to employ such today.
You are making some large and largely incorrect assumptions when you assume that those of us who dismiss Bukowski do so because we don't like modern poetry, only like difficult and esoteric work, and don't have any idea about how poetry has evolved over the years.
What Bukowski does is to belittle the genre of poetry, and by inference, the persona of the poetic narrative voice; this is what the reverence is all about, whether his admirers admit it or not.
I have published with the man, and published with his editors who chased after his cult like a witch in heat for the money. Charles was never about being a poet, good or bad. He was about nearly being the anti-Beat Beatnik, and it was only on rare occasions that I enjoyed the joke--and his little poem about his sex object Jo, who had fleas, (his italics), wasn't one of those times his irony engaged me. I'm a better poet than he was, and some of his last editors who bought me in on the game knew it.
yawn.
yawn.
That, unfortunately, is the response I feel to most of Bukowski's work. Not outrage. Certainly not dismay at something incomprehensibly new. No... just boredom. SOS. Same Old S...:D
Your response probably signifies why you enjoy Bukowski's oeuvre, and I don't care, as I have richer and better tastes, but even within the literary genre, con artists, fool, will take your money, laughing on the way to the bank, and that is all the cult of Bukowski is, a marketing ploy, the chip on the shoulder snigger supporting his family and his publishers, but mindless acolytes don't often stop to think about why they pay for pop culture vapid pap.Quote:
Originally Posted by imthefoolonthehill
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Please do not personalise your arguments.
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Jozy, check out what you wrote on page five of this thread months ago and my response a few posts down. I think it's posts #66 and 74.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
That was my easier version Virgil--or in other words, the kindest thing I could say, but I sort of hope for something better than insolence in defense of insolence. I did not, and do not, know the Beat movement originals well. I was coming of age on the tail end of their influence. Ginsberg, who I also published with, had to "raise his voice" to paraphrase one of my professors, but Allen had something to say; Dr. Creeley, who I met, and nearly swooned over, but found me funny, has something to say, and if you're careful in listening, he engages Romanticism and the Renaissance--granted, he is not to everyone's taste, and can falter, like anyone, but I can teach Bob Creeley.
Charles, in the best of all possible worlds, apes himself, and by extension, the essence of 60's radicalism, without saying much of anything.
I was in this bubble, and knew those who chased his tail. The youthful can take it or leave it, or yawn, for that matter.
I liked that language you used in that post. :lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
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Of course you might wish to learn now that the whole of art is elitist.
Can you please elaborate on your statement..The whole of art is elitist? I'm not sure what you mean entirely. Also, I would like to know if you have ever read any Billy Collins. He was the Poet Laureate of the US 2001-2002 and then reappointed the next year. I'm almost afraid to say that I like him as a poet, too, since I was shot down with C. Bukowski. earlier.
I'm not sure if you're referring to me Lynne. Did I use the word elitist? There is a line between discriminating good from bad poetry that is not elitist. Look, if I were to look at some of the personal poems here on lit net I think I could distinguish someone who was a beginner or not up to par and someone who excells. I think I can descriminate between a poet who uses metaphors, similies, original imagery, rhythm, rimes and alliteration to connect language and ideas, and careful structure all to show complex relationships. Bukowski has almost none of that, and when he attempts to, it's crude and sophomoric. If that is elitist, then I guess I'm elitist. I consider it having good judgement based on a lifetime of experiencing poetry.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lynne50
Yes, I've read some Billy Collins and though I can't recall any particular poem I do remember having a positive reaction to his work.
In my last post, I wasn't clear as to who I quoted. It was stlukesguild. My questions were directed toward stlukesguild, but I would welcome any feedback from anyone who's interested. Thanks in advance.
One of T.S. Eliot's most important essays is the one entitled Tradition and the Individual Talent found in his seminal work of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood. In this Eliot expounds upon the notion that every writer (and by extension every artist) engages in a struggle or competition... comparison with the past... with the whole of his or her art:
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities...
Art certainly evolves and artist must and do speak to and of their own era... but survival of an artist... of an art work... is based upon judgment in which an artist or art work is placed in comparison... in contrast... with the whole of the tradition in which one works. 50 years ago Jackson Pollack appeared earth-shattering in his innovation... a towering figure in Modern painting. Today... as a mere half-century has passed he is seen more within the whole of the tradition of Western painting. He remains an important figure... but no longer earth-shattering. We clearly see Monet's late waterlilies as a precursor along with JMW Turner. We also see who follows in his footsteps... and who rejected or ignored him.
All art is Elitist in that it is competitive. Artist's struggle to gain attention and artists and art must strive to maintain whatever fleeting vestige of immortality. Artists are elitist in response to their own work (as well as that of others) recognizing greater or lesser successes... or failures... continuing to strive to surpass themselves. We, as art lovers, are elitist in that we continually make value decisions. We must make such decisions for we recognize that Mallarme's famous quote "The flesh is sad, Alas! and I have read all the books..." was but hyperbole. The flesh is indeed sad in that we all have but a limited time here in which to spend doing what we love... including reading. As such we must make decisions... value judgments... based upon our experience. We must... and we do... we decide one writer is better than another... that our time would be far better spent in reading this poet than that. We also come to recognize that what we like or what we love are not immediately one and the same with what is good or great. There is no denying James Joyce' importance... and yet I will admit to a love/hate relationship with his works. Picasso is almost universally recognized as the single most important artist of the 20th century... probably since Rembrandt... if not Michelangleo... yet I will admit to a preference for Matisse, Bonnard, Beckmann, and Klee. But I would not think to suggest that Klee was Picasso's equal... let alone better.
Of course Walter Pater says it all better than I:
Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy...
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biased by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve — les hommes sont tous condamnés mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion — that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
Yes, but luke, despite my fly swatter, let me push back a little against Eliot's unipolar thesis: No art can embrace all traditions, and I think Rothko's canvases which ask the observer to think about the enormity of infinity serve as a primary example of this. He isn't embracing abstract expressionism with those solid colors sometimes in perfect halves.
You need tradition, however, to get the full impact of what he is doing with those black and green and orange rectangles.
One can be aware of tradition in reading Charles too, but it only makes Charles himself sound the worse for wear, and again, as I tried to say before, what his loyalists probably admire is his absurdist reductionism of the genre. lyn lifshin, who is a generation ahead of Charles, practices a similar type of reductionism through her line breaks, but her redeeming value, possibly, is she is a better poetic satirist. I wrote to her once in a less than praiseworthy attitude and sent her my book--so this may be damning praise--but she at least recognizes that even a caustic, sardonic voice needs a poetic cadence.
As quasi told me today, bad chopped up prose is just that, bad chopped up prose. I've seen no one in this thread make a reasoned defense for Bukowski's poetic strength. Only quasi himself came closest to digging that up, and I did not agree with the defender he cited. Charles isn't modernist, post-modernist, or even a real Beat, he's just a narrative voice which relishes devaluation.