Sex, booze, and vers libre
Charles Bukowski and emotional power
Earlier this week I picked up a copy of Charles Bukowski’s The Pleasures Of The Damned: Poems 1951–1993. By picked up, I mean I bought it in a bookshop rather than ordered it from Amazon. A bit retro, I know, but possibly apt for a Bukowski.
I started reading Bukowski for all the wrong reasons about 20 years ago on a work trip to New York. All I knew of him was a reputation for hard drinking and unemotional sex. So I bought Post Office. I didn’t even know he wrote poetry then.
So the drinking was there. And there was a lot of casual sex but I was wrong about the lack of emotion. Actually, casual sex is probably not the right term. This was sex that seemed to demand a lot of effort and thought, both before and after the deed. And a lot of drinking before, during, and after.
This was anything but unemotional. Every line dripped emotion. Feelings raw and unfiltered.
There were obvious echoes with Henry Miller, whose books had seen me through tough times in the early 80s. I read more Bukowski and found out more about him, especially in Neeli Cherkovski’s biography. The biography finally brought me to the poetry.
His poetry, like his prose, is misleadingly simple; the simplicity that appears artless. It’s not, of course.
The first poem in The Pleasures is one of my favourites — the mockingbird. It’s a typical Bukowski set-up. You can picture him looking out the window of his damp sock of an apartment, taking it all in through the haze of a morning hangover.
The main event of the poem involves the poet — Bukowski, of course — watching a cat with a bird in its mouth. Bukowski prefaces this with a back story that pits the bird — the mockingbird of the title — against the cat all through a summer. He imagines the bird literally mocking the cat. The cat bides its time.
Then the cat finally catches the bird. The bird is “no longer mocking,/it was asking, it was praying”. The cat’s instincts mean no pity is possible: “but the cat/striding down through centuries/would not listen.”
The best line in a poem of good lines is the penultimate one. The cat carries its prey under a car “to bargain it to another place.” The use of the word bargain I find both powerful and strangely terrifying. It smacks of a final end that is inevitable.
I’ve read little poetry for a long time. Bukowski repeatedly shows me what I’ve been missing. In both senses.
