there’s only one poet in this room tonight
only one poet in this town tonight
maybe only one real poet in this country tonight
and that’s me
– Charles Bukowski in Raymond Carver’s poem “You Don’t Know What Love Is.”
Charles Bukowski was a prolific poet, an inveterate drunk and womanizer, and a purveyor of both bleak truth and flaming bullshit. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, I can’t claim to be a sophisticated reader of poetry. There is a lot of poetry that I experience mostly as a sensory experience, along the lines of T.S. Eliot’s observation, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
Bukowski’s poetry in Essential Bukowski, however, is very accessible. Its plain prose, unhidden meanings, and almost complete lack of metaphor is more like reading a brief, plain-spoken essay about Bukowski’s obsessions. These obsessions include death, aging, women, drinking, decay, self destruction, and social corruption. In his poem “Dinosauria, we” I was struck by the prescience of these passages:
born into this
into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
[….]
the rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground
the sun will not be seen and it will always be night
the sea will be poisoned
the lakes and rivers will vanish
rain will be the new gold
the rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
the last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
While Bukowski’s poetry can be appealingly pitiless, there is a lot of dark humor as well. In between boasts about his own poetry, he wryly recounts his own debauchery and the dark side of aging. He also has, shall we say, women issues. In the first poem of the book, titled “friendly advice to a lot of young men, and a lot of old men, too,” he writes
Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a straight razor
And carve your name in her anus
In the poem “to the whore who took my poems” he writes
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn’t you take my money? They usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
But it’s not all anal carving and larceny. There are some poems about love, light, and “the bluebird in my heart”:
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
While I fully believe Raymond Carver’s account of Bukowski as a drunken blowhard, I ended up somewhat liking his unrepentant nature. He certainly doesn’t spare himself when it comes to criticism. And there’s enough wit to prevent him from being just another glum poet consumed with death. I kind of appreciated not having to plow through a lot of dense imagery, though that is precisely what I like about other poets’ works. It was certainly a quick read (not that you’d notice since it’s been almost three months since I reviewed a book….). While I’m in no hurry to read more of his poetry, I can say I enjoyed it for the most part, anal incantations notwithstanding.