I want to run and hide I want to escape their engulfing nullity.īukowski’s fans realize that “some people,” like E. ![]() The readers who love him, and believe that he would love them in return, know how to look past the bluster of poems like “splashing”:ĭumb, Jesus Christ, some people are so dumb you can hear them splashing around in their dumbness. . . . This mixture of boast and complaint exactly mirrors the coyness of Bukowski’s poetry, which is at once misanthropic and comradely, aggressively vulgar and clandestinely sensitive. So these are my readers, you see? They buy my books-the defeated, the demented and the damned-and I am proud of it.” Not that I want to save them: I have no desire to save anybody. . . . As he told an interviewer in 1981, “I get many letters in the mail about my writing, and they say: ‘Bukowski, you are so fucked up and you still survive. But before his death, from leukemia, in 1994, they could and did, with a regularity that the poet found flattering, if tiresome. Today’s fans can no longer call up Bukowski on the phone or drop in on him at home in Los Angeles, where he lived most of his life. On, the reader reviews of his books sound like a cross between love letters and revival-meeting testimonials: “This is the one that speaks to me to the point where each time I read certain pages, I cry” “This book is one of the most influential books of poetry in my life” or, most revealing of all, “I hate poetry, but I love Buk’s poems.” Bukowski.” Such claims to intimacy are standard among Bukowski’s admirers. There are hundreds of Web sites devoted to him, not just in America but in Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Sweden, where one fan writes that, after reading him for the first time, “I felt there was a soul-mate in Mr. He is one of those writers whom each new reader discovers with a transgressive thrill.įittingly, for a poet whose reputation was made in ephemeral underground journals, it is on the Internet that the Bukowski cult finds its most florid expression. Yet the sense of not being part of the mainstream, at least as the Norton anthology and most other authorities define it, is integral to Bukowski’s appeal. ![]() John Martin, the founder of Black Sparrow Press, who was responsible for launching Bukowski’s career, has explained that “he is not a mainstream author and he will never have a mainstream public.” This is an odd thing to say about a poet who has sold millions of books and has been translated into more than a dozen languages-a commercial success of a kind hardly known in American poetry since the pre-modernist days of popular balladeers like Edgar A. Bukowski’s books make up a burly phalanx, with their stark covers and long, lurid titles: “Love Is a Dog from Hell” “Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.” They give the impression of an aloof, possibly belligerent empire in the middle of the republic of letters.īukowski himself, and his many, many readers, would not have it any other way. Nowhere to be found in the canonizing Norton anthology, however, is the man who occupies the most shelf space of any American poet: Charles Bukowski. ![]() If you were to browse the poetry section of any large bookstore, you would probably find a book or two by each of those critically esteemed, prize-winning poets. In the third edition of “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,” in which poets appear in order of birth, the class of 1920 fields a strong team, including Howard Nemerov and Amy Clampitt.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |