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Charles Bukowski: Rebel & Blasphemer
Find a steadfast reader of Charles Bukowski’s poetry, and you have located a died-in-the-wool rebel,
a hard-core biker, a gambler, a drinker, a loverboy, a tough-guy wanna be, or at least that was the image.
“He sat naked and drunk in a room of summer/ night, running the blade of the knife/ under his fingernails,
smiling, thinking” [from Question and Answer]. Bukowski rejected most accepted theories of poetry composition.
He once explained to an interviewer, “My theory of life [is] ‘Don’t try.’ …just type.” Alcohol was his fuel.
“I don’t think I ever have written a poem when I was completely sober,” he said. “I usually write ten or
fifteen [poems] at once.”
With this philosophy, he has been pretty completely rejected by the poetic establishment.
There was no place in the tidy world of poetry that existed right after the world war for
such a freaky character. Luckily, he had an early admirer in Black Sparrow founder and
editor John Martin, who published almost all of his original work from 1953 to 2004.
Unlike the usual publisher/author relationship, Bukowski sent his work to Martin in
a continuous stream, and Martin packaged, published, and sold his work as he saw fit,
rather like Van Gogh having a brother in the trade. In the long run, this relationship
resulted in considerable material success for both publisher and poet. Bukowski bought
a BMW and boasted friendships with Sean Penn, Madonna, and Norman Mailer.
John Martin probably never had a more successful author in his stable.
For Bukowski, success came slowly. He was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920,
the result of the marriage of an American soldier and German madchen. When Bukowski
was three, the family moved to Los Angeles where he lived a life of quiet poverty and
eventually went to City College, graduating in 1941. He was found unfit for military
service and moved to New York to become a writer, but when years of trying resulted in
little success, he descended into ten years of solid drinking, occasionally punctuated
by working stints as a dish washer, truck driver, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant,
stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, postal worker, parking lot attendant, Red Cross
orderly, elevator operator, dog biscuit factory worker, slaughterhouse man, and cookie maker.
Naturally, this itinerant life deeply influenced his writing. He knew the streets as few
college-educated poets could. In 1956, a bleeding ulcer convinced him to return to writing as a career.
If he kept drinking to drown out the sorrow of not writing, he’d be dead in a year.
His early short stories featured depraved urban characters in subways and busy streets.
The popularity of these stories rests on an abundance of profanity and the shock value of
raw sex and violence. After 1955, he turned to narrative poetry, which followed the adventures
of a vaguely autobiographical character named Henry Chinaski. Bukowski’s appeal in print was
largely based on its accessibility at a time when most published poets were still trying to be
deep and obscure. He told the absolute truth as he saw it, no matter how raw or un-nerving.
There was a kind of dirty thrill in reading him.
He reflected the life of a man accustomed to the realities of urban life. He withheld nothing.
Though Bukowski fell out with many of his early friends, he never crossed his editor and publisher,
John Martin, and Martin, for his part, was very careful not to cross him. Through 46 books, Martin
remained true to his belief that Bukowski had something to say to modern America, no matter how twisted or decadent it might be.
Bukowski’s death in 1994 has not staunched the regular flow of his publications. Fully six volumes have
been published posthumously, thanks to the unique nature of the Martin/Bukowski partnership.
Martin has long since sold Black Sparrow Press to Ecco, which in turn was bought out by Rupert
Murdock’s HarperCollins, but Bukowski mysteriously publishes new work each year and has work in the
pipeline for years to come. At first, he couldn’t get anyone to read his work, and now his books
are translated into a dozen languages and are distributed all over the world.
The ironies and coincidences abound. It took Bukowski 13 years to break into the industry, and now
it appears he will experience a 13 year afterlife. Bukowski’s main theme has been the absurdities
of life, and now, as a result of some goofy cosmic coincidences, he is stuck in an absurd half-life
that refuses to let him die. The reputation of the ultimate literary rebel is now in the hands
of the ultimate print capitalist.
Bukowski, like the Edgar Guest, Robert Service, or Vachel Lindsey, found his own
followers outside the traditional boundaries of poetic readership. Despite selling
over 3 million copies of his books, he is not listed in The Oxford Companion to
American Literature or many other standard reference books. American poetry may
exist in a democracy but its official establishment awards its laurels, then and
now, based on highly elitist rules which automatically exclude poets like Bukowski.
Just count how many sacred cows he gores in this poem.
So you want to be a writer by Charles Bukowski
if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.
don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
What you notice right away in Bukowski’s verse is brutal honesty, little fussy artistry,
few precious words, just straight-forward statement. I first encountered Bukowski when
I came across his novel Post Office [1971], a strange little volume about being the deliverer
of other people’s bills and junk postage. I was getting tired of packaged prose, and Bukowski
offered a breath of fresh air. He boldly proclaimed what it was really like to be working
for peanuts in a federal bureaucracy, that is a bureau-of-crazies, who had no sense of joy,
or love, or real life. He openly published his home address and phone number in L.A., and
readers stopped by and called him all the time.
I hated the rawness of Post Office, and yet, I could not put it down.
His in-your-face attitude captivated me like a peep hole into the girl’s
locker room at school. I didn’t particularly admire his style, but
I recall its crude power to this day. It was like going to an imaginary party with James Dean.
There is something completely American about Charles Bukowski, brash and unforgiving.
At the end of his life, he fell into an endless spiral of illness.
He died of leukemia, but the details hardly matter. The last ten
years were a semi-controlled crash, like reading Jack Kerouac’s On
the Road again, and again, and again, and again, backward and forward, until
the pages just fall out. Bukowski’s hard life finally took its toll on him.
There is a place for poets like Charles Bukowski in American letters,
just as there has been a tiny place for his predecessors Vachel Lindsay,
Robert Service, and Edgar Guest. They remind us that poetry lives in a big
tent that can encompass the words of brawlers, gold-diggers, and blasphemers,
as well as pretty college boys who are trying to impress their sweethearts with sugared words.
Gary Lehmann teaches writing and poetry at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
His essays, poetry and short stories are widely published—about 60 pieces a year. He is
the director of the Athenaeum Poetry group which recently published its second chapbook,
Poetic Visions. He is also author of a book of poetry entitled Public Lives and Private
Secrets [Foothills Press, 2005], and co-author and editor of a book of poetry entitled
The Span I Will Cross [Process Press, 2004]. His poem "Reporting from Fallujah" was
nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his short play, "My Health Care Worker Stole My Jewelry"
has recently been produced by GEVA Theatre in Rochester, NY.
Email: Gary Lehmann
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