Sunday Whatever. A Readers Guide to Bukowski;

Or: To Know Buk Better You Need to Know Buk’s

Or: Start with This First

I’m tired and sick of people who slam Bukowski without knowing what he’s really all about.

If you don’t know, don’t say. An apothegm that should apply to all areas of life. And, think about whether you really do know it before you say it. And analyze what you said afterward, too. Not obsess over, not ruminate upon in a psychologically distressing fashion: ANALYZE. Harold Bloom said that Shakespeare invented the human by showing us how his characters listen to themselves, not to each other, which I never really understood until right now.

To Buk himself I say, these MISUNDERSTANDINGS I’m snarling at must be partly the wages of having become so well-known, sir, like you both did and did not say you wanted to. By the end of the century, you will have outgrown Hemmie (but he will still be there).

This column is ghost-written by a guy who calls himself The Drifter. That isn’t his name. It’s what he calls himself now – sometimes.

Today, The Drifter is limiting himself to listing, and briefly commenting upon in offhand fashion, a round half dozen Buk-like artists who Buk knew like the back of his hand before he became “Buk.” Any Reader would do well to be or become a little familiar with one or a few of them, at least, before encountering Bukowski – BECAUSE THEY ALL CAME BEFORE HIM.

It’s a form of ancestry-study, an ancient ritual hundreds of thousands of years old (minimum) and as fresh as tomorrow. Everyone wants to know where they’re from and who their ancestors are, at least somewhat. All good writers, in whatever genre, come out of a lineage. There would be no H.P. Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson without Edgar Allan Poe, and without EAP and HPL and SJ, there would be no Stephen King, just as there would be no King without Tolkien. Cormac McCarthy put it this way: “Books are made out of other books.”

ONE: Hemingway. REALITY. Autobiography as fiction and fiction as autobiography.

TWO: Ezra Pound. The spare, hard, non-superfluous, unadorned and without-artificialities writing style. Hemingway got the style from Pound, Twain and the Kansas City Star, but it’s also a modern thing in all writing. Pound also didn’t care about a wide audience while wanting to reach everybody. And he was an absolute wizard of the small and independent press and “do-it-yourself” publishing, which is the place Buk came from and always belonged and still does belong. He is “the King of the littles.” No blogging or posting without him first. Pound and H.D. together invented Imagism, which was poetry’s answer to Picasso’s Analytical Cubism, among a million other things. Read Norman Mailer on what Analytical Cubism REALLY was and apply that to Bukowski’s project, too. Pound also did more than anyone else in the twentieth century to bring Chinese literature into English and American literature. Bukowski loved LI PO and practiced his own very private form of Buddhism while living through his final cancer. And the man LIVED – even while dying. Life gets more precious as you feel it slipping away but also, if you’re ready, it isn’t too hard to say goodbye (and if you don’t believe this is really goodbye, it’s even easier). You knew this would happen to you one of these days, if you were awake. “Let it be.”

THREE: Antonin Artaud. Look at his pictures on the internet and study his personality and the progression from young to old man. Old for Artaud was 40s and early 50s, thanks to hard drugs, hard living, and other factors, like incarceration. He exited the vale of tears at 51. Study his “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society.” Study his theories about the Theater of Cruelty and apply to Buk’s writing. Study the pictures of Buk.

FOUR: Nathaniel Hawthorne. The figure of the solitary artist in America, both North and South, and by that I mean both North and South America, as well. Just like One Hundred Years of Solitude.

FIVE: Picasso. He was also a poet. He claimed that in a thousand years he will be known as a poet – and that his visual art will have disappeared. All of art is all of life and all of life is art, if it’s any good. No need to travel to the other side of the world, just be awake here. Everything and everyone are right in front of you wherever you are, if only you will open your eyes.

SIX: Diogenes, the Dog Philosopher. He was the greatest critic of Society who ever lived – except Yeshua.

We need them more and more and more and more and more and more.

CODA:

I hereby append a selection from a recent email correspondence betwixt myself and Leila Allison, Editor (and a writer who stands with Hawthorne and Shirley Jackson):

 “LEILA, I SAW THE OLD GUITARIST AGAIN!”

Dale

Image: A background of dried leaves, seeds, pods and petals in pink, gold and brown from Pixabay.com