One morning I received an e-mail from a friend who, while researching Charles Bukowski, ran across a blog lambasting Bukowski and his work. He sent me a link, I read it, and wrote a response. I sent the response to my friend, and to him only. I had written it intending to send it to the author, but, on account of the tone - more snide, sarcastic and pedantic than I'm willing to not be ashamed of, I decided not to. Time has passed, and I feel ok about presenting it here, in this way, with this forward - and substantial editing. God forgive me.
The post seems to have originated in the Netherlands, written by a college student and speaker of English as a second language of Indian descent. There were numerous references to Indian aesthetics. I read into this as an example of Indian cultural chauvanism, and responded to it in kind with references to my own interest in Indian philosophy and aesthetics. What was most distressing was the apparent lack of familiarity with American culture, the corpus of Bukowski's work, his life, and very basic nuances of the English language and writing in general which constitute a necessary prerequisite for saying anything as harsh and severe as what was written about Charlie. Here is the link to the original post:
http://wendelin.blogspot.com/2007/01/open-letter-to-india-uncut-and-admirers.html
And here is my response:
Nandini,
This morning I received an e-mail from a friend of mine, which expressed some degree of shock and dismay, and a link to your blog. Curious, I followed the link to see what the fuss was all about.
I must admit that I agree with him. I must also admit that I must agree with you. Am I a hypocrite or a fool? Neither. Rather, I am a student of aesthetics (especially literature) and philosophy, and for those who are interested in half truths, a reality half-constructed of lies is quite sufficient. I’m not concerned with what others consider to be truths and lies – my understanding is that the largest picture is more valid than the smaller picture.
The difficulty in reading your statement is that you seem to be making multiple claims, and some of which have no relevance to the others at all:
“Plain prose with capitals removed and broken up randomly into uneven lines doesn't magically transform itself into poetry.”
This sounds like your railing against all poetry which does not use rhyme and meter. There are many, very widely respected poets who do not use rhyme and meter. There are also many who, over the course of history, have faithfully maintained the technical expectations of the art of their interest and in their day, and although what they wrote could technically be described as poetry, if you refuse to call what Bukowski has written “poetry,” then I can refuse to call anything Alexander Pope has written “poetry.” He was a technician – a grammarian, a wordsmith, but not a poet. I would trust Alexander Pope to fix my car, but I would not take him into my confidence as a friend. Which is not to say that all of my friends are necessarily nice people. What I mean to say is that just as one can write a poem which is technically flawless, but without any heart or soul, so it is the case that a writer can produce a poem which is either entirely flawed from a technical standpoint, but having heart and soul, is very beautiful. Have you read any haikus! They are some of the most boring and the most thrilling poetry ever written! There is a tendency to admire the beautiful flower in the beautiful glass-blown vase, and ignore the flower growing wild in the field. Furthermore, this making a distinction between the poetry of technique and the poetry of feeling may potentially give us some insight into what Bukowski is trying to say. Another look at the poem:
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.
What seems to be the most important line? To my eye, “don’t be consumed with self-love” is the most important line. How might we transcribe that line into non-poetic prose? “Don’t allow your writing to be a vehicle for you egotism. Don’t write because you want to be famous, to prove that you’re smarter than others, to prove that you have more skill than others.” The deeper implication is that people who write because they are driven and compelled to write live life in a similar manner, and that those who write because of egotistical motivations live life….in a similar manner.
Going on, you state: “Free verse does not free the poet from the demands of beauty.”
“Demands of Beauty” is an entirely persuasive term, which says nothing of any value to anyone except for your tastes or specific proselytizing stance. It assumes that Beauty has made certain demands on art, to which all who claim to enjoy or produce art must prostrate in supplication. And I thought a young tree is beautiful because it yields to the wind? (What sort of a fool was I? Maybe I should think that the wind is like Beauty, because it is a force to which the poem-tree must bow?) "Beauty" is a very dangerous word in aesthetic criticism. Rhetoric is also very dangerous.
Further:
“Did you perchance take a look at Charlie's bio? It exposes him as the rankest hypocrite:
[In 1941 he] left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways. Bukowski ... began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five.”
Quite frankly, I completely fail to see anything hypocritical about this. A hypocrite is someone who says one thing (for example, taking a moral stance), yet acts contrary to how he has spoken. Furthremore, this is a pretty bad biography. First of all, he was a heavy drinker before he even started to attempt to become published, and continued to be a heavy drinker until his death. His drinking had nothing to do with either his motivation to write or not to write. The inability to support oneself by getting published, the necessity to spend a large amount of one’s time at a day job does not disqualify anyone as a poet. William Blake was an etcher and lithography by profession, a writer on the evenings and weekends. Otherwise, he would have starved and died. Was William Blake not a poet? William Carlos Williams wrote poems on the cuffs of his shirt on the subway to his job. Was he not a poet? Does it matter that Bukowski didn’t start writing poetry until after 35? Is it unacceptable that a writer should choose to focus on one genre rather than another at some point in life? Thomas Hardy wrote novels because he needed the money, and once he got enough money, retired from novels to write poetry. Why do you think Dickens wrote so much? He was being paid by the word.
So what of this charge of hypocrisy? Let me suggest that success and failure are both relative. I can consider myself a successful poet if I get published, or I can consider myself a successful poet if writing poetry is an activity which validates my existence. Perhaps an artist isn’t someone who can do something, but who feels compelled to create, as though creation is the very essence of their existence. Who do you think writes better poetry? The psychological profile of the jealous artist is interesting, but the trouble with calling anyone a hypocrite (and I’ve discovered this myself, through my own error and observation) is that it is an easy coin to flip: Are you so sure that you’re not railing against Bukowski because he was a successful (published) drunk, and that you are an unknown, although perhaps very talented (sober) poet? Does it matter? It shouldn’t if you write to validate your existence, because when you write to validate your existence, everything you write validates your existence, whether it is good or bad. All true artists know this. (When the yogi has attainted the siddhi of satya all he speaks is Truth, even of those things which have not yet occurred. Thus the poet is the prophet of the soul.)
“Is there any doubt that this poem, this marvellous poem urging others NOT TO WRITE, is of the same breed?”
Well, let’s look again to the poem. Is Bukowski really asking others NOT TO WRITE? I simply don’t see it. I seem him asking folks not to write things that are dull, boring, and pretentious (Alexander Pope, are you listening?) I also see him making a distinction between writers and non-writers, between those who write because it is the very essence of their existence, and those “people who call themselves writers” but who are in fact writing as an expression of being consumed with self-love. Once again, we have to ask the question: Is this poem about writing or life? If a writer is someone who has to write, and someone for whom every word is vital and exciting, and a non-writer is someone who does not have to write, but can (anyone who is literate), how can it be that he is urging writer’s not to write? The true writer doesn’t have any choice. Is it logically feasible to ask someone who already isn’t, not to be? If you’re not an artist, Bukowski, or anyone else, really, cannot ask you not to be one. That would simply be redundant. What Bukowski seems to be suggesting when he uses the word, “pretentious” is that people go about their lives with some sort of integrity by cultivating a sense of self-awareness about who they are. He is not urging people not to be artists, but to pursue the non-aesthetic art of developing an authenticity of one’s character. For the writer, writing is the means for developing this authenticity. For the gardener, the garden. To each his own. Neither his own taste, nor his own capacity, but just: most effective means of moving in the direction of one’s authentic self. Bukowski is probably quite aware that “a boring book can be shut” but if a person is living their life in a way that is the very embodiment of ugliness, isn’t that a curse upon everyone who such a person happens to meet? Including, and especially, that very person?
In his own way, Bukowski is not really special, no different from all other artists. He is obsessively preoccupied with the task that all other artists are: Urging others to, as the Sufis would have it, “Die before death to be reborn within life…” or as Judaic scholars would have it, to multiply life by itself, to live as life itself has been squared, or as the Katha Upanishad suggests, “Arise, awake, and gain knowledge.”
Hemmingway? Hemmingway was also a drunk, and he blew his head off. Remember? Two drunks, one you claim to be a hypocrite because he was a drunk and at first, an unsuccessful (unpublished) writer, and another, who was a drunk, and a successful (published) writer, and then a suicide. What sort of act is suicide but hypocrisy? Suicide is the very epitome of hypocrisy! Bukowski died a peaceful man. His later writing is very peaceful, he aged very well, he became comfortable with himself and life. Even so, he kept writing, and he kept drinking, so he wasn’t a hypocrite for being a drunk and a writer, because he kept doing both at the same time, and he kept doing both after he became successful. I read a poem he wrote in which he railed against his own fans who had the nerve to call him a hypocrite, because his wasn’t writing anguished poetry anymore: “What do you mean I got old, and sold-out - I’m still drinking three bottles of wine a day!” (That was a paraphrase, of course – I don’t happen to have the original with me at the moment.) Hemmingway, well, he blew his head off. Was he a better writer, because he managed to become famous and a drunk at the same time, and because he became famous writing prose instead of poetry (you realize that by comparing the two, you’re comparing apples to oranges in the first place)? It doesn’t really matter. A person writes during the course of their life for their own reasons, and literature is studied, critiqued, and hopefully, amidst all of the polemic, enjoyed. However, the life of a writer cannot ever validate or invalidate the value of the writer’s work. This idea that biography validates art is an inherently moralistic notion which has notion to do with aesthetics. Does it matter that Michelangelo was a homosexual? Or Walt Whitman, or Plato, for that matter? Plato’s skill in debate and the acuteness of his logic would have pleased Shankaracharya. Yet still there are many who make such assumptions conflating biography and aesthetic value.
Frankly, I appreciate the work of many drunks, homosexuals, madmen, scoundrels, of many saints, sages, and mystics. Antonin Artaud is on my bookshelf right next to Tagore, and the autobiography of that madman-homosexual-scoundrel-mystic Salvador Dali is right next to Yogananda’s “Autobiography of a Yogi.” You are correct in stating that “History is rife with examples of writers who slaved, bled, wept and tortured themselves to get the words out, and we are so much the richer for their work.” But it must be remembered that Hemingway was writing at the typewriter all six hours, even though he only produced six sentences. Again, we must remember the distinction between writing and a writer. For a writer, writing is the essence of existence, irrespective of the number of words. For the non-writing attempting to write like a true writer, there is just the continual effort to fill the blank page with pretense, albeit a pretense which one might slave over in order to make it appear to others (or rather, oneself) as “authentic.” Furthermore, if we are to dismiss all writing and other art and knowledge produced by madmen, drunks, and scoundrels as being “invalid” or “illegitimate,” what an enormous loss that would be!
“Who was it that said, "Writing is easy. You just put a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter and open a vein." Easy writing makes hard reading. Like that poem.” The writer who said that “Writing is easy…” was, I am quite sure, as a native English speaker, English teacher, and aesthetician and poet – sarcastic. A literary device which, judging by your comment, “Easy writing makes hard reading. Like that poem” you seem to have missed entirely. The writer is not saying that writing is easy. The writer is using the first sentence for contrast – it puts the reader at ease, expecting to receive another bland truism about writing, only to follow with a rather shocking, violent image of someone opening a vein. Which is a way of saying, “it’s easy – you just have to look death in the eye without flinching and get the experience onto the paper.”
Your refutation of the poetic value of Bukowski should very well be dismissed on this point alone – you don’t seem to have a keen enough grasp on the English language to make this aesthetic criticism. You can criticize the grammar, you can analyze the style, but you simply can’t handle the aesthetic aspect of English poetry yet, and you certainly don’t know enough about the development of art within the context of American culture and particularly 20th century history. And to dismiss the value of Bukowski’s life and poetry, after having read, so it seems to me, only one poem and a hackneyed, ideologically slanted, paragraph-long biography (Where exactly did you find it? www.ihatebukowski.com), is vulgar and irresponsible. Rhetoric is dangerous - a little skill with rhetoric places the power of persuasion in the hands of fools.
Finally, let me say that to some degree, I agree with you. I don’t believe that dismissing poetic convention makes a good poet. And there are those who write prose, remove capitalization, hit the return key eccentrically, and call themselves a poet. I used to do that. Sometimes I wrote that way, and sometimes when I wrote, it wasn’t that way. I stopped writing when it wasn’t completely and absolutely true, or real, or coming from the deepest part of me. I only write about poem a year, but when I do, it is such a powerful experience that my body is shaking, and I don’t know who or what is guiding my hand. And the poem is beautiful. Or it’s beautiful to me, and I go on living, not concerned about whether it is good or not, or if I could get it published, or even considering if, having only written one poem in the last two years, instead of two poems in the last two years, I am still a poet or not. There are thousands of Jackson Pollocks imitators, and plenty of Emily Dickens imitators, but only one, legitimate Jackson Pollocks, and only one legitimate Emily Dickenson. Not because either of them were better writers or artists than those who imitated them – but because, through their art, they were living their own truth.
Have you wondered what Stephen King thought about Bukowski? Many people who love Bukowski think that King is a hack, and I have a feeling King himself is pretty keen on Bukowski…I’ve read enough Stephen King that I feel comfortable writing that. King is essentially saying that “The writer with blood on the typewriter (the one who has opened a vein) is the one who is taking writing seriously, not the technician or moralist. If one thing can be said about Bukowski, it’s this (and this is generally something that is agreed upon by those who both like and dislike him): He was a man with blood on his typewriter.
So what is poetry? Why do we call some writing “prose” and other writing “poetry?” It has nothing to do with technical considerations, and nothing to do with dismissing technical considerations…so it must have something to do with content. I used to make a lot of attempts to define what poetry is, and then I quit – the task seemed not worthy the effort. In hindsight, perhaps the best possible working definition of poetry is simply, “Appearing to say one thing, but saying another, by saying in a different but similar manner.” It does not matter whether or not the poem says something simple in a very elaborate way (which dogmatically adheres to contemporary convention) or if a poem is written by a drunk like Bukowski, who says very elaborate and beautiful things in very simple, plain, “unpoetic” language. It’s just another turn of the coin. But if we turn the coin, again and again, in every situation, every scenario, in the direction contrary to the inclinations of our egos, then maybe we can follow those divergent streams of happiness and sadness, upstream to that point of divergence where one becomes two, and know the two to be one, and, having had a taste of Creative Unity, can free ourselves from the silly mandates of “Beauty” and look upon the pleasant and the unpleasant with an equal and unflinching joy, recognizing each as manifestation of the infinite, and accepting them as such.
Chris
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