Charles Bukowski

[Cellar Door]

I have not read any, Neely, though I have been meaning to for some time. Any particular recommendations?

[quasimodo1]

THE JAPANESE WIFE



O lord, he said, Japanese women,
real women, they have not forgotten,
bowing and smiling
closing the wounds men have made;
but American women will kill you like they
tear a lampshade,
American women care less than a dime,
they’ve gotten derailed,
they’re too nervous to make good:
always scowling, belly-aching,
disillusioned, overwrought;
but oh lord, say, the Japanese women:
there was this one,
I came home and the door was locked
and when I broke in she broke out the bread knife
and chased me under the bed
and her sister came
and they kept me under that bed for two days,
and when I came out, at last,
she didn’t mention attorneys,
just said, you will never wrong me again,
and I didn’t; but she died on me,
and dying, said, you can wrong me now,
and I did,
but you know, I felt worse then
than when she was living; ... {excerpt}

[LitNetIsGreat]

I have not read any, Neely, though I have been meaning to for some time. Any particular recommendations?

I have read Post Office, Factotum and Women, of these I prefer Factotum, then Post Office, although Post Office is perhaps technically a little better written of the three.

Post Office is more or less centred around autobiography, or at least it draws heavily from his days working in the post office, I would certainly recommend this as a great place to start. In Factotum Bukowski's alter ego Chinaski, floats from meaningless job to job, as he struggles to make it as a writer, with some hilarious observations. Women for me is too tiresome and boastful of his obviously mostly imaginary conquests with women.

What does seem a little odd is that mostly in his prose he almost degrades himself, he is happy with the label of "bum" or "alcoholic" but in his verse he seems to strike himself as a great writer.

Extracts from Factotum:

After losing several typewriters to pawnbrokers I simply gave up the idea owning one. I printed out my stories by hand and sent them out that way. I hand-printed them with a pen. I got to be a very fast hand-printer. It got so that I could hand-print faster than I could write. I wrote three or four short stories a week. I kept things in the mail. I imagined the editors of The Atlantic Monthlyand Harper's saying: "Hey, here's another one of those things by that nut..."

I was finally hired on at an auto parts warehouse. It was on Flower Street, down around Eleventh Street. They sold retail out the front and also wholesaled to ther distributors and shops. I had to demean myself to get that one - I told them that I liked to think of my job as a second home. That pleased them.

I arrived in New Orleans in the rain at 5 o'clock in the morning. I sat around in the bus station for a while but the people depressed me so I took my suitcase and went out in the rain and began walking. I didn't know where the rooming houses were, where the poor section was.

I had a cardboard suitcase that was falling apart. It had once been black but the black caoting had peeled off and yellow cardboard was exposed. I had tried to solve that by putting black shoe polish over the exposed cardboard. As I walked along in the rain the shoe polish on the suitcase ran and unwittingly I rubbed black streaks on both legs of my pants as I switched the suitcase from hand to hand.

Well it was a new town. Maybe I'd get lucky.

The hours at the dog biscuit factory were from 4:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.

I was given a dirty white apron and heavy canvas gloves. The gloves were burned and had holes in them. I could see my fingers peeking through. I was given instructions by a toothless elf with a fim over his left eye; the film was white and green with spirdery blue lines.

He had been on the job for nineteen years.

[...] I worked for several weeks. I came in drunk each night. It didn't matter; I had the job nobody wanted. After an hour at the oven I was sober. My hands were blistered and burned. Each day I sat aching in my room pricking my blisters with pins I first sterilized with matches.

One night I was drunker than usual. I refused to punch in "This is it," I told them.
The Elf was in trauma. "How will we make it, Chianski?"
"Ah."
"Give us one more night!"
I got his head in the crook of my arm, squeezed; his ears turned pink. "Little bastard," I said. Then I let him go.

[Janine]

Humm.....I could have sworn awhile back there was another thread on this poet or am I thinking of someone else. I really don't know his work so I can't judge.

[Virgil]

Humm.....I could have sworn awhile back there was another thread on this poet or am I thinking of someone else. I really don't know his work so I can't judge.

There was and that may not have been the first either. This seems to come up once a year.

[Cellar Door]

Thanks Neely! You've given me a great starting point! I will start with your recommendation.

[Jozanny]

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.

Mmm, again luke, I have to raise something of an objection, even if Warhol himself was handicapped by a mild form of autism, which wasn't recognized when he was an ailing child, to me his Marilyn reproductions do have a powerful iconic irony, and my sense is the critical winds have been shifting on him since the days in the 80's when he paraded his personality cult in the streets for the critical elite to despise. Not that I can embrace the tasty cake whole-heartedly, but it is in this sense that Bukowski plays in the poetry pond much as Warhol plays in the illustrator's pond and holds it up.

My unease is that critics dismiss both men without asking why they have the fan and audience base which they do.

I have been something of a mild name dropper on the board, but even though I did not know Charles personally, I knew his publishers who included my work with his--and it is this looking at him as a small press marketing force who breaks the mainstream that has earned some of my regard. I have some of his last-produced chapbooks for one of my editors, and I should sell them, now that I think about it. As a poet they made me angry at first, but they also mock the force of celebrity itself. Denigration for its own sake may have a limited merit, but if it makes Bukowski a doorway writer for readers who think they hate literary arts otherwise, then what Bukowski achieves by drawing them in isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[jikan myshkin]

the only of his that i have read gives me the impression of a man with nothing to say except to swear and be angry

[LitNetIsGreat]

Thanks Neely! You've given me a great starting point! I will start with your recommendation.

That's ok glad to help.

[JBI]

Honestly though, he is like all that is bad in Irving Layton's verses without any of the good ones (judging on 3 volumes). Layton at least destroys his put-on personality in at least a few of his poems, Bukowski doesn't seem to ever do it.

[Cellar Door]

JBI- Though I am not overly familiar with Layton, I think I know what you are saying; I think Bukowski doesn't do it because he is trying to appeal to Mr. Every Man. It is unlike most humans that I know to admit fault, let alone destroy a personality. I feel as though he uses that front which a lot of you forum readers find so offensive and terrible to try and create one character- a "poetic person", if you will, in order to speak his messages. In other words, I think Bukowski did it with a purpose; I never met the man, nor have I researched this. This is just what I surmise from the tone of the poems as a whole to me.

[JBI]

I disagree - I think he uses that front because he knows it is controversial. He is trying to play off some macho man's man fantasy that seems to captivate the want-to-be man's men macho-nobodies, no offense meant - his verses never alter, and he might as well have written one poem as 1000 poems because they all have the same voice, and say the same thing. When reading the first example you posted I thought the poem, that is, that exact poem, sounded familar, yet when I reread it, I figured out why - He used that same image of the knife in another poem of his which I had read, posted by Virgil I believe, a while back. That sense of recycling I find is what makes him so appealing -

Those who want the same junk only want more of the same junk - no body walks into MacDonalds wanting a steak, let alone anything worth eating. Likewise the readers of Bukowski go in with the same assumption, and, ironically, are never displeased at what they find.

He is a culture icon yes, but not a poet icon - his words and ideas aren't knew, they are just collected into countless volumes of repetition, spewing out what we expect it to.

This is merely my own critique, keep in mind, feel free to disagree at any period, yet I cannot bring myself to think higher of a poet who recycles so obviously.

[LitNetIsGreat]

What is strange is that this persona character seems very different from his poetry to that in his novels. I have not read many of his poems but from what I can gather he sort of builds himself up as a tough, uncompromising, underground writer, I may be wrong here though. In his novels he tends to pull himself down and even degrade himself completely, at times at least. Of course it goes without saying that you shouldn’t mix the narrator with the author, but his work is deeply autobiographical that at times it is hard not to.

[mortalterror]

He is trying to play off some macho man's man fantasy that seems to captivate the want-to-be man's men macho-nobodies, no offense meant

I disagree. I think his persona is a breathe of fresh air and a necessary counter-weight to the dominant literary culture. His authorial voice is more authentic and down to earth than the effeminate sentimental abstractions commonly pressed upon the public as poetic language. He shows by his writing that you don't have to be a limp wristed nancy boy, no disrespect, who's bad at sports, no disrespect, and drives a Prius, no disrespect, to write verse, no disrespect.

[JBI]

I disagree. I think his persona is a breathe of fresh air and a necessary counter-weight to the dominant literary culture. His authorial voice is more authentic and down to earth than the effeminate sentimental abstractions commonly pressed upon the public as poetic language. He shows by his writing that you don't have to be a limp wristed nancy boy, no disrespect, who's bad at sports, no disrespect, and drives a Prius, no disrespect, to write verse, no disrespect.

Counter-weight what? All he does is write the same poem, and the assumed voice can hardly be his own. The reason why he works is because people think "hey this is easy, this is poetry, This guy is macho and cool, there is no underlying layer, I'm having fun." There's nothing profound, nothing witty, nothing creative about his work. Sure, you can argue it goes against the concept of poetic voice, but simply because it is not a poetic voice. It is an opportunist voice which mocks its readers. Take the above poem of the Japanese Woman, Bukowski is playing off of our inherent racism, and not going against it, or at best, beyond it, but is merely feeding it with more stereotyping.