Arguing with Myself Over Charles Bukowski

by Edith Critchley

A few months ago I came across a new poet- Charles Bukowski. Raw, dishevelled and satisfyingly unpleasant, Bukowski is seen as one of the central figures in a movement in America in the middle to late years of last century: Dirty Realism.

However this title is massively ambiguous, and insufficient when it comes to describing the works it labels. These stories and poems are bland, both in subject matter, structure and language. They, ironically like Eliot or Blake who explored the ‘lowly man’,  explored life in the lower classes in America at this time - in a much simpler manner. They were (and wrote about) the everyday alcoholic, cheat, angry neighbour and washed up writer. They refused to take part in established literary conventions; they didn't mask things with metaphor or simile or obscure language. They said it how it is.

I find something bizarrely appealing in this: cutting straight to the chase. It's refreshing, and occasionally hits right on an emotional nerve; the lack of academic writing makes it easy to digest and in many ways more impactful. However, I'm also massively wary of Bukowski, wary of easy misanthropy that reeks of ignorant youth, which is rife in the Dirty Realist works. Wary of Bukowski's character and wary of how much I think I would have disliked him personally obscures my reading of his poetry. But also wary of the self-satisfied misogyny I can feel creeping around the corners of the pages. But these worries hit right on problems with poetry and literature itself: what makes ‘good’ poetry, can you separate artists and work? Yet the more I sit here wondering, the more I read his poems, the more I am torn between my literary consciousness and my natural reaction.

Bukowski lived a bizarre life. Born in 1920, much of his youth was shadowed by the Great Depression. After a brief, unsuccessful stint attempting to write short stories, the myth goes, he gave up writing and travelled around the country doing miscellaneous jobs here and there and being a full time alcoholic, which then triggered him to begin writing poetry. His life was outlandish and sometimes ridiculous; he allegedly got into numerous fights at bars and was a prolific womaniser, a 20th century pirate, travelling around America with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, unkempt hair and very little money. This swashbuckling lifestyle, however, is the central influence in a lot of his poetry. Often his best poems are strongly narrative and draw on his wealth of anecdotes and experiences that still vibrate with grave realism, making you feel like a cowboy on the run yourself.

However, equally often he narrows in on a small, meaningless encounter, himself starting to feel like his lack of achievement is blending him into obscurity. This is Bukowski at his best, when he most strongly appeals to a human love for the grimy, small moments, ones that scare us through our own obscurity but also ignite our own patchwork of experiences: poems like ‘2 p.m beer’ or my personal favourite ‘a not so good night in the san pedro of the world’, where he fights with an unknown listener about their expectation of greatness from him in that moment, to the sound of distant piano, before finishing with ‘this will not be a memorable night in my /life/ or yours. /let us celebrate the stupidity of endurance.’ Again, this poem cuts right to an emotional core; it speaks for a need for stillness, to feelings of smallness in the context of everything else, but also revels in this smallness, this survival, human nothingness.: this everyday feeling and actions that lack historic importance at all. 

However, something in the narrative voice of these poems puts me on edge; it almost feels too easy, too bland. I ask myself: should I enjoy this poem when it, likes the subject matter seems to lack significance? Then there's the layer of how often Bukowski grinds on my nerves; he seems self-pitying or self-centred, ready to blame his misfortunes on the awfulness of others, an attitude I aggressively reject and consciously try to stop myself falling into. I often feel that he believes his readers owe him something, not to mention the way he refers to women, often in massively derogatory terms (if they don't depict a nagging, disappointing wife they present a dispensable prostitute). Finally, I am conscious of how he was genuinely an unpleasant character.

But then he occasionally wears me down slightly. He doesn't seem to take himself too seriously (‘i'm not shakespeare’, he reminds the reader jokingly, laughing at how they never considered he was). I try to tolerate him when reading his poetry, but then I feel guilty: I feel guilty that I enjoy his simple poetry, I feel guilty that I forget how he is, until it has crept up on me and I'm beginning to judge his wife for keeping him in a death-like state where he describes himself in a ‘coffin’.

So this is what has led me into this bizarre relationship with Bukowski and his back-alley poetry. However, I must admit, that, for all my literary pretension, poetry is, and has to consist of, personal relationships with the poetry itself. The great poet Emily Dickinson once wrote to Thomas Higginson that she knew something was poetry if ‘she felt her head had been taken off’. And this, I have to concede, is how Bukowski makes me feel, makes me revel in the minutiae of everyday life until my head feels dizzy. He helps verbalise small things that almost don't feel worth poetry; when writing his poem ‘i met a genius’, he looks at the revelations small children impart casually upon us, in this case that the sea isn't ‘pretty’. It isn't just feeling like a pessimistic smoking American cowboy that is so compelling, I suppose, but on a level below that. Bukowski reduced himself to what society views as effectively nothing to write about the basic nothingness of human life. He presents the flippant moments of each day: having a beer, having your grass cut, lying in bed. All compiled in anthologies with massively contrasting names, like ‘the last night of the earth poems’ or ‘burning in water drowning in flame’. Within the lofty depressiveness of these titles, his poetry can sometimes feel even more powerless, small and depressing. However, now, more than at any time, I welcome this focus on small things, feel relief in human smallness, when it feels as if the world is going to end.