Don't Blame Bukowski For Bad Poetry

Don't blame Bukowski for bad poetry

Tony O'Nell
The Guardian
5 September 2007


He made writing great poetry look easy and laid down some truly beautiful lines: it's time to reappraise Charles Bukowski.

Does Charles Bukowski deserve more respect?

"Everybody hates us, and we don't care" was an infamous chant that originated on the terraces of Millwall football club. But it is a sentiment that I sometimes feel could just as easily be applied to fans of Charles Bukowski.

With the release of Bukowski's fifth posthumous poetry collection, The People Look Like Flowers At Last (Ecco), now seems as good a time as any for a consideration of Bukowski's work and worth.

When looking at reactions to Bukowski's poetry there seems to be a lack of, well, respect ... despite his hardcore fan base, and sales that would make most poets extremely happy. In fact the common accusation is not that Bukowski isn't a good poet, but that his work is barely even poetry at all. In a mostly appreciative New Yorker review, Adam Kirsch still managed this cheeky, backhanded compliment:

"He bears the same relation to poetry as Zane Grey does to fiction, or Ayn Rand to philosophy - a highly colored, morally uncomplicated cartoon of the real thing."

Bukowski's lack of pretension, his repetitive subject matter and his seemingly simple free verse style often leaves the poets who came after dodging accusations of being Bukowski-esque. Of course, a lot of people's lives, and indeed poets' lives, are blighted by poverty, alcohol abuse, and problems with the opposite sex. Yet some young poets really are nervous of citing Bukowski as an influence or tackling his mostly universal themes.

His influence is everywhere: in an era where it can be difficult to give away poetry books, the many volumes of poetry that Bukowski produced during - and after - his lifetime take up more shelf space that any other contemporary poet I can think of.

Of course, there are a lot of bad poets in thrall to Bukowski - after all, his great skill lay in making the writing of great poetry seem easy. Poets who affect his lifestyle without learning the craft of writing do so at their peril. And don't look to the man himself for clues on where the poems come from: he once said that writing a poem is ""like taking a shit, you smell it and then flush it away ... writing is all about leaving behind as much a stink as possible". But to disregard Bukowski's work on the basis of the bad poetry that followed in his wake seems as bloody minded as denying the greatness of The Clash because of the mohicaned twattery of Sum 41.

In the rush to file away Bukowski as a booze-addled fluke, his ability to lay down a truly beautiful line has often been overlooked. Take these lines describing the genesis of Los Angeles:

this land punched-in cuffed-out divided held like a crucifix in a deathhand

Or take his poem Tragedy of the Leaves which ends with the heartbreaking lines:

and I walked into a dark hall where the landlady stood execrating and final, sending me to hell, waving her fat, sweaty arms and screaming screaming for rent because the world has failed us both.

Reading his extensive back catalogue you will stumble upon a hundred, a thousand moments of brilliance like these.

Bukowski embodies the idea of the "punk poet" even better than the poets who came from the punk scene. Jim Carroll and Patti Smith were too in thrall to the romanticism of Rimbaud to truly "speak it plain". It is Bukowski's machine gun delivery that creates poetry that actually relates to the back-to-basics ethos of punk rock.

Unlike most poets, Bukowski was also a master prose writer. My favourite work of Bukowski's has to be the short story collection Hot Water Music. This 1983 anthology is Bukowski at his prime, and contains some of the best writing the man ever produced: The Death of the Father (parts 1 and 2) is a heartbreaking - yet ghoulishly funny - dissection of the days following his father's death. Some Hangover opens with the shocking premise that our narrator has just awoken with a hangover and no recollection of the night before, and is accused of molesting his neighbour's daughters while in an alcoholic blackout. Not Quite Bernadette features the attention-grabbing opener: "I wrapped the towel around my bloody cock and called the doctor's office." What all of these stories share is a writing style that has been totally pared back, and a view of humanity that is cynical, deadpan, and almost entirely without judgment.

Unfortunately, the posthumous poetry collections have been patchy at best. In an indisputable act of necrophilia, Ecco has been exploiting the dead poet's odds and ends for years now, mercilessly sullying the back catalogue of one of America's greatest contemporary poets. But since - thankfully - this new collection supposedly marks the end of such acts of desecration, maybe it is time for the Bukowski-doubters to calmly reappraise the man's work, laying aside all former prejudices. Go on. I think you might be pleasantly surprised ...