Charles Bukowski

[Etienne]

Such verses as: "I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife
inside" strikes me as being boring. I think this poem is boring both on an aesthetical level as well as the thought expressed. I have never really read Bukowski otherwise and don't intend to...

[Cellar Door]

That's okay Etienne, I welcome your input. Plus, it leaves more Bukowski for me

[Etienne]

It's all yours

[JBI]

I'm with Virgil as well - that isn't very talented writing. Any kid who picks up a pen and fashions himself a poet could probably scribble that. He seems an extension of the beat generation, key word generation, I.E. sooner or later they die off.

[stlukesguild]

There are writers and even poets who deal with the disconcerting, ugly, disturbing, even distasteful of subjects... and do it well. Look at Paul Celan's Death Fugue, check into Baudelaire, Rimbaud, etc... Poetry need not mean flowery language. It can use stripped-down minimal language. It can be colloquial and even crude. It can follow traditional formats or be incredibly innovative... tearing apart every expectation. The problem I have with Bukowski is that he is not good at any of this. He strikes me as the sophomoric "poet as rebel/anti-hero" who is appreciated by an audience that is unaware of the fact that everything he has done... his breaking of the rules... transcending the traditional... taking a walk on the dark side... embracing the ugliness that exists is but a pale echo (and sadly comic at that) of poets far greater than he.

[Jozanny]

I hate to defend Charles, really, but this is an instance where I might have more sympathy with mortal terror's sympathy for the aesthetics of the masses... because I think to dismiss Bukowski's narrative voice as trite and sophomoric misses the point of what Bukowski was *about*, and that *about* is closer to Andy Warhol's mass media ironies, actually, more so than any of the original Beats sincere attempt to stick it to Ike's generation.

Charles didn't give a flying ***** about craft, and this attitude is part of his aesthetic, the chip on the shoulder devil may care the 25 year old groupie I am sleeping with has fleas man. He lets his audience in on the joke, and this is part of his staying power. I respect the populist appeal he generates as a phenomena; his name recognition certainly lent me a helping hand in the eighties.

[mortalterror]

I like Charles Bukowski, but I don't like this poem. He has a dirty, low down, mean, authoritative voice which appeals to me on a personal level, although I don't believe he has done as much with persona or the art of writing as Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, or London whom he principally reminds me of. Whether his writing is of a stature equal to theirs, or as I suspect, it is more of the Norman Mailer, James Jones variety is for time to tell.

In recent years, I've mostly shunned literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If I ever have the time though, Bukowski is definitely one of the artists I'd be interested in reading more of. As it stands, most of what I know of the man is second hand, and what I've been able to glean from the first pages of several novels perused in a bookstore one day.

The man undoubtedly has a gift, more I cannot say.

[curlyqlink]

I have only recently discovered Bukowski, and I think he is profound. His poetry is eloquent and immediate, raw and beautiful. There is after all such a thing as raw beauty. Who's to say poetry should be civilized? Poetry can be brutal as well as mannered.

I have a certain admiration for Bukowski's unending refusal. His refusal to belong, to join the team. He was an ugly man with an eye for tragedy. Real tragedy, not mundane failure. He saw nobility in life, in the midst of squalor.

[Cellar Door]

He appeals to me on a different level than "the great ones", but I think poetry should have more than one level- if it only had one, I would grow bored with it. That is part of the intrinsic beauty of poetry; it is multi-faceted. This gives depth, inspiration, character, even life to the whole art form. Just as there are different styles of paintings (Renaissance is much different from Cubism) there should be different styles of poetry. There are those whose primary interests are in Renaissance styles, and who shun Cubism. And that is the beauty of poetry!

the schoolyard of forever

the schoolyard was a horror show: the bullies, the dragons, the
freaks

the beatings against the wire fence
the eyes of our mates watching
glad that they were not the victims
we were beaten well and good
and afterwards
followed
taunted all the way home to our homes of hell
full of more beatings

in the schoolyard the bullies ruled well, and in the restrooms
at the water fountains they owned us and disowned us
but in our way we held
never begged for mercy
we took it straight on
silently
we were trained within that horror
a horror that would later hold us in good stead
and that came around
as we grew in several ways with time
the bullies gradually began to deflate, lose power

grammar school
Jr. high
high school
we grew like odd plants
gathering nourishment
blossoming
as then the bullies tried to befriend us
we turned them away

(missing stanzas- don't want to go to jail )

new bullies
deeply entrenched
almost but not quite worthy
they kept us under for decades
we had to begin all over again
on the streets
and in small rooms of madness
it lasted and lasted like that
but our training within horror endured us
and after so very long
we outed
oblique to their tantamounts
we found the tunnel at the end of the light

it was a small minority victory
no song of braggadocio
we knew we had won very little against very little
that the changing of the clock and the illusions beat everybody
we clashed against the odds just for the simple sweetness of it

even now we can still see the janitor with his broom
in his pinstripes and sleeping face
we can still see the little girls in their curls
their hair so carefully washed and shining

and the faces of the teachers
fall and folded

(missing stanzas, again the jail thing)

and Herbie Ashcroft
his fists coming against us
as we were trapped against the steel fence
as we heard the sounds of automobiles passing but not stopping
as the world went about doing what it did
we asked for no mercy

and we returned the next day and the next and the next
the little girls so magic as they sat so upright in their seats
in a room of blackboards and chalk we began badly
but always with a disdain for occurrence

which is still embedded
through the ringi-ng of new bells and ways
stuck with that
fixed with that:
a grammar school world
even with Herbie Ashcroft dead

from "Third Lung Review" - 1992


I always really liked this one. It echoes my life in strange parallels.

[JBI]

You need to chop some of it - it's illegal if you don't.

[Cellar Door]

Thanks JBI! An unfortunate oversight on my part, I'm afraid. I really do know better, I swear.

[stlukesguild]

Jozanny... I'll say no more on Bukowski. My position is clear. Andy Warhol however... Trust me, there were no mass-media ironies ever intended by Warhol. If you go through any of his journals you would find that his thinking is not far from that of an uneducated adolescent who worships celebrity and incessantly ponders over "whether Bobby likes me or not (in this case Bobby being Robert Rauschenberg) and imagines that the fact that he just might not is the most profound tragedy one might experience. The notion that Pop Art was all about some Post-Modenist ironic view of popular culture and mass media was an idea hoisted upon the movement by the marketers in order to sell the work to the more sophisticated art audience, yet it completely ignores the fact that for the most part the Pop Artists were some of the dumbest, least educated artists to ever break upon the art scene. It also ignores the fact that they actually worshiped the very popular culture they supposedly were lampooning. There wasn't the least intention of satire or irony, because in reality they lacked little or no knowledge or appreciation of the history of that art which had gone before. They were merely painting what they loved. Warhol began as a commercial artist... an illustrator... and remained a commercial artist.

Certainly there were some Pop Artists who were exceptions. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, for example, who were much more responsible (and earlier) for the development of Pop Art, were certainly ironic in their intentions. The vast majority of American Pop Artists, however, merely embraced the subject matter of popular culture as any adolescent awed by celebrity... film icons and rock stars... never questioning it, let alone imagining it might have some dark side. There is nothing so much wrong with this... except for the fact that they offered nothing beyond a recreation of that which popular culture, by its very nature, did far better. They merely recreated the imagery and the techniques of the mass-media within a fine-art gallery context. If there was any genius (and if there was it owes far more to the marketing savvy of their dealers, Leo Castelli foremost among them) it lies in the fact that they were essentially able to do the same thing that endless anonymous T-Shirt and poster designers... that Hallmark Cards continues to do... and convince an audience (grown weary of abstraction) that the mere change in context was enough to raise the work to the level (and the value) of fine art.

The justification for this notion was always Marcel Duchamp, whose Fountain and other "ready-mades" had thrown out the possibility that context was everything... and an artist need do nothing. Duchamp merely threw out the question... the dealers and theorists and critics leaped upon it. Such a "conceptual" idea of art seduced academics, and critics, and art writers who found much more to write about in such work than in the more traditional concepts of art which were not so dependent upon words and theory, but instead relied upon a language of color and form and shape, and line that they were not fluent in.

The dealers became enamored when they discovered that such art could be rapidly mass-produced and marketed to an audience raised on popular culture and suspicious of the intellectual demands of "high art"... thus guaranteeing astronomical sales figures. In this manner Pop Art dragged painting into the world of mass-media, mass production, public relations and marketing, and fashion. The artist became a designer... and essentially nothing but a name... like Gucci or Prada... Figures like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst follow in this "tradition"... in complete opposition to those artists who actually create their own works and reject the notion that the highest goal of the artist is celebrity... Warhol's 15 minutes.

You need to chop some of it - it's illegal if you don't.

It might also be an improvement. In fact... it most decidedly will be.

[Cellar Door]

hey now st luke's! I'm laughing, you're funny. I guess you'd like me to delete the whole thing? No, it wouldn't be fair to the discussion. Maybe some people will like this one more than the last one. But I know and respect the fact that you do not care for his works. If everyone liked him, there would be no discussion, would there?

sample discussion:

random user:
I like Bukowski

some other user:
yeah, me too

random user:
okay

some other user:
well then

[Virgil]

I hate to defend Charles, really, but this is an instance where I might have more sympathy with mortal terror's sympathy for the aesthetics of the masses... because I think to dismiss Bukowski's narrative voice as trite and sophomoric misses the point of what Bukowski was *about*, and that *about* is closer to Andy Warhol's mass media ironies, actually, more so than any of the original Beats sincere attempt to stick it to Ike's generation.

Charles didn't give a flying ***** about craft, and this attitude is part of his aesthetic, the chip on the shoulder devil may care the 25 year old groupie I am sleeping with has fleas man. He lets his audience in on the joke, and this is part of his staying power. I respect the populist appeal he generates as a phenomena; his name recognition certainly lent me a helping hand in the eighties.

Jozy, I think you put your finger on it perfectly. That is exactly the essence of Bukowski. Still I have no desire to read him. You said it best: he "didn't give a flying ***** about craft." And that is why he will never be considered a great poet. He is a transient phenomena.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Cellar Door, are you a fan of his novels as well? I have read a few of them and they do more for me than his poetry, I am not a fan of his poetry.