12/16/2023 0 Comments Bukowski and instanity![]() ![]() The inescapable conclusion from this panoply is that love is futile, duplicitous, or, at best, based on mutual concessions. In “Soiree,” a bottle becomes a “dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers,” and in “His Wife, the Painter,” a bus becomes “insanity sprung from a waving line” he spoke of the sunlight as a lie and markets smelling of “shoes and naked boys clothed.” “Soiree” also announces the impossibility of sustaining a relationship “Did I Ever Tell You” captures the tragicomic element of love. Similarly, in “I Cannot Stand Tears,” a guard kills a wounded goose because “the bird was crying and I cannot stand tears.”Īlso evident in this first volume is Bukowski’s justification for callous machismo as a defense against “the lie of love” he established his argument by infusing his poems with countless oxymorons that rearranged the signposts of reality. By focusing on the cat and the “dishes with flowers and vines painted on them,” he effectively understated his angst. He employed a farcical dialectic to conjoin the bizarre and the mundane he used brutal undercutting, as in “Love Is a Piece of Paper Torn to Bits,” in which a ship out of control and a wife being “serviced” by another are divested of significance while a worrisome cat is promoted to center stage. He constantly challenged the contours of reality. ![]() Although the potential for violence was ever present, it defied logic. In Bukowski’s world almost anything was possible. Beginning with “Ten Lions and the End of the World,” Bukowski moved from the mundane to the apocalyptic without missing a beat he forged a vantage point that is both ironic and sentimental as he pondered the cost of the pell-mell pace of modern life. These poems have the cadence of impending catastrophe. he had his bulbs on the screen ready for planting while I was laying with a whore from 3rd street.” His own ambivalence is suggested by the scarecrow image he presented as he realized “I can’t keep him alive no matter how much we hated each other.” So, he stands, “waiting also to die.” Read in conjunction with “All-Yellow Flowers,” “The Twins” establishes one of the dominant motifs in Bukowski’s work-the transient nature of life and the exaggerated import that human beings attach to ephemera. The poem is replete with antithetical images: “We looked exactly alike, we could have been twins. Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wailįlower, Fist, and Bestial Wail is the most consistently crafted of the four books and includes one of his best-known poems, “The Twins,” which transforms his lingering animosity toward his father into a transcendent statement of shared humanity and mortality. At his worst, he succumbed to self-pity, mired in his own mundane reality. At his best, he blended seemingly incongruous elements to plunge the reader into a surreal landscape. They also reveal the risks inherent in this kind of personal, reportorial poetry. Clearly, he knew the reality of the seamy side of life his poetry teems with grotesque and sordid imagery but unlike those who would write in order to reform, Bukowski was content to capture the pathos and rawness of the streets.īukowski’s first four chapbooks properly acclimate the reader to his dual vision- his rawness and his compassion. Interestingly, in his best poems, the tough guy persona falls away and one discovers a sensitive poet who chose to adopt a savage bravado. One senses that he was an idealist soured by the ravages of time, wearied by political betrayals, and rather appalled by the vacuity of the American left and contemporary American writers who seemed to be playing it safe and producing pallid prose and senselessly arcane poetry. He was neither a poet’s poet nor a people’s poet, but a personal poet who used his craft to ensure his own survival.īukowski’s “tough guy” image was less posturing than self-protective. Facing it right with yourself, alone.” It is this kind of courage and stoicism that informs Bukowski’s canon. The futility and senselessness of most human endeavor conjoined with the desperation and essential solitude of the individual are constants reinforcing his “slavic nihilism.” The trick, he suggested, is “carrying on when everything seems so terrible there is no use to go on. ![]() Living on the periphery of society, Charles Bukowski ( Aug– March 9, 1994) forged a brutally honest poetic voice.
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