Sherry Chandler

Billy blogs here and he does Poetsaurus here.

William Logan says of Seamus Heaney

…he’s the rare contemporary poet unabashed about being a man, and not creepy or depressing about it…

I’m pretty sure the same thing cannot be said about Charles Bukowski. Our Netflix adventure for the week has been watching John Dulligan’s documentary film Bukowski: Born Into This.

I’m not sure I can talk about my reaction to this film or to Bukowski himself without sounding like Mrs. Grundy. For one thing, it is difficult to disentangle Bukowski from the Cult of Bukowski. The Cult has attracted such followers as Bono, Sean Penn, and Tom Waits. Or was it the writing that attracted them? Again it’s hard to tell when the stuff of Bukowski’s writing is Bukowski. And then of course this film is showing us a construct, too, editing, selecting…

The French, bless ‘em, have a term for this: nostalgie de la boue, which I learned to translate “longing for the gutter.” Or, more simply, slumming.

The romance of a sensitive soul trapped in the body of a drunken thug — Bukowski’s “there’s a bluebird in my heart that / wants to get out” — is a singularly masculine construct. A woman probably won’t find much sympathy for a man who would kick his wife off the couch, shouting Bitch! And all while the cameras are rolling. I’ve been witness to some tantrums like that and I’m not impressed.

But that Bukowski is easier for me to take than the one who sits in front of a crowded hall demanding another bottle or who swills Michelob and then growls at an invisible member of the audience, “Another one of these and I’ll take you on like a m*ther f*cker.” It’s possible that this was part self-parody and part performance nerves. But the crowd eats it up. “Yeah!” yells a masculine voice from the back of the room. It was like watching a roomful of frat boys.

But am I arguing here that poetry should be genteel? academic? I hope not. What disquiets me is a pornography of pain. Or a vampirism. Or a search for a sort of gutter Christ. This man suffered like us, he writes our pain, we love him. In a telling bonus interview, a woman describes the hurtful difference between her somewhat gentle sexual encounter with Bukowski and the aggressive rapelike description of it that turns up in his novel Women. She discovered that he was “just a human being with a lot of problems, like the rest of us.”

And I did get a hint, every now and then, that Bukowski knew just how much of all this was theater.

Bukowski was scarred physically and no doubt psychically by a father whose version of tough love included frequent beatings with a razor strop and by a horrible case of acne that made him a social outcast in his adolescence. I’m not so sure I’m as sympathetic about the eleven years or so he had to spend with a mindless night job at the Post Office. Of course he found it intolerable. How does that make him special? Especially since, at the end of those eleven years, John Martin created Black Sparrow Press and bet his fortune on freeing Bukowski to write. Or at least that’s the story they all tell in this movie.

Bukowski’s poetry is good. It’s readable and honest and funny and moving. It might be shocking, but I’ve read Burroughs and so have a high bar for shocking. He may even be a brilliant poet. And in spite of John Martin’s digs at the New Formalists as a bunch of hacks who fall back on the sonnet to mask a lack of originality, I think Bukowski was a formal poet. The form is Whitmanesque/Biblical, based on repetition and listing, but it is a form.

In a bonus interview, Dulligan says he was out to bust the myth, to show us the sensitive soul behind the dirty old man. But I just always thought that was the myth.