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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Adam Hardin, ULA
The New Yorker Reviews Charles Bukowski
“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. 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 and prize-winning poets. 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.”
This is how the review begins, and it looks quite promising for Mr.
Bukowski. Finally, the New Yorker, the most influential literary
magazine in the United States will concede that Charles Bukowski is
one of our great writers who deserves the respect of the literary
establishment. But be careful, the subtitle of Adam Kirsch’s review is
“The pulp poetry of Charles Bukowski.” In paragraph two, Mr. Kirsch
goes on the attack of Bukowski’s reputation as an underground
writer.
“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. Guest.“
This will be the running attack against Mr. Bukowski through the
entire review. He is not an underground writer, but a mainstream
genre author. He is not a poet, but a fucking balladeer. Mr. Kirsch
makes insulting comparisons with ease that are cleverly written as
false praise.
“Bukowski’s poems are best appreciated not as individual verbal
artifacts but as ongoing installments in the tale of his true life
adventures, like a comic book or movie serial.”
“Such poems offer the same kind of vicarious wish fulfillment that
differently inclined readers might find in spy novels or gangster
movies…And Bukowski is best read as a very skillful genre writer. He
bears the same relation to poetry as Zane Grey does to fiction, or Ayn
Rand to philosophy--a highly colored, morally uncomplicated cartoon
of the real thing. He has two of the supreme merits of genre writing,
consistency and abundance.”
“The pleasures offered by Bukowski’s work are more quickly
exhausted than the questions raised by his life, and the way he
transformed that life into something like art.”
Something like art. But not art. That is the point. Mr. Kirsch spends
the second act of the review on Bukowski’s biography, but then
launches back into his agenda using Bukowski’s words against him:
“It is not just in his business dealings that Bukowski gives the
impression of insecurity--of feeling, as he once wrote to a friend, not
‘so much like a writer …like somebody who has slipped one past.’ The
same sense emerges, more damagingly, in his defensive scorn for
complexity and difficulty, as if these literary values were a trick played
by effete professors on honest, hard-working readers. ‘What is easy is
good and what’s hard is a pain in the ass,’ Bukowski declared to one
correspondent; or, again, ‘Somebody once asked me what my theory
of life was and I said don’t try. That fits the writing too. I don’t try, I
just type.’
Mr. Kirsch takes a cheap shot using a transition to the next
paragraph:
“Just typing allowed Bukowski to accomplish a great deal…”
In the third act of this review, you know that Bukowski is going to be
buried, you just don’t know how. Mr. Kirsch builds Bukowski back up
just before his final attack:
“In a literary sense, too, Bukowski accomplished something rare: he
produced a large, completely distinctive, widely beloved body of
work, something that few poets today even dream of. It is a
testament to Bukowski’s genuine popularity that, at a time when
most poetry books can’t be given away, his are perennially ranked
among the most frequent stolen titles in bookstores.”
The underlying purpose of the review is to reframe Charles
Bukowski from a great American writer to a commercial hack. Mr.
Kirsch launches the final attack :
“Yet Bukowski and his work also have the pathos of mixed
possibilities…Even at his most unheroic, he is the hero of his stories
and poems, always demanding the reader’s covert approval. That is
why he is so easy to love, especially for novice readers with little
experience of the genuine challenges of poetry; and why, for more
demanding readers, he remains so hard to admire.”
This review is not a burial piece as designed by the New Yorker
because it does not bury Charles Bukowski. Ten years after Charles
Bukowski’s death his reputation continues to grow stronger and his
books continue to sell millions of copies, and his influence has
widened in the United States and around the world. Charles
Bukowski is now burying the derivative writers of his generation.
This review is the last gasp of the American Literati against Charles
Bukowski.
It is a historically repeated pattern: the great writer comes from the
underground; the great writer is rejected by the establishment; the
great writer is championed by the reader; the great writer is finally
recognized by the establishment. Readers ultimately decide who are
our writers. The rest fade away into obscurity.
Does anyone know who Amy Clampitt and Howard Nemerov are?
*****
Links for further research:
Charles Bukowski: http://www.smog.net/writers/bukowski/
The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/
Black Sparrow Books: http://www.blacksparrowbooks.com/aboutbsb.htm
Norton Anthology: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/titles/english/namcop3/highlights.htm
Amy Clampitt: http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C0200
Howard Nemerov: http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=226
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