New Poems Book One - Charles Bukowski

 NEW POEMS BOOK ONE - CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Charles Bukowski was never an alcoholic as such, though he was certainly a drunkard. Let's just say he liked a bit of a drink and that he made a good drunk, if there can be such a thing? Bukowski knew how to drink. Often he would just shut himself up in his rented room, close the curtains, prop himself up on his bed and swig down bottles of the most noxious, cheapest wine he could find and drink himself into oblivion. He knew, however, to always lie on his side when slipping into unconsciousness so as not to end up choking on his own vomit. It's the little things in life such as this that are important and what differentiates the amateur from the professional. It's a sort of life skill, in a way. One that in the scheme of things is probably more important than being able to write. And Charles Bukowski certainly knew how to write, just as certainly as he knew how to drink.

New Poems Book One is part of an archive of  work that Bukowski left to be published after his death in 1994. It's a collection of random poems though I'd hazard a guess and say a fair few of them were originally written as vignettes and then edited into poems. Some of them are but cursory glances and wry observations but others are moments of reflection and illumination captured for eternity.

In one piece, entitled The Column, Bukowski describes how in 1942 at the age of 21 he's sitting on a park bench alongside a bunch of other bums when 'the war chariots' roll by, and how the soldiers on their way to war see him and hate him. Bukowski describes the soldiers yelling, cursing and screaming at him because they want him to be going with them. After the column passes, one of the old bums next to him asks Bukowski why he's not in the Service, at which Bukowski gets up and walks down to the public library where he sits down at a table and starts reading. The meaning of the book is too deep for him, however, so he puts it back on the shelf and walks back outside 'to wait'.

There are some who won't understand what Bukowski is talking about here but for those who do, it's like suddenly recognising a kindred spirit.

If you feel there's something wrong with the world, something you can see with your own eyes but that you can't put into words, then what do you do? Well, there's very little that you can do. How can you talk about it if you don't have the words? How do you explain not only to others but to yourself? And then one day if you finally have the words then who do you talk to if others don't share those words also? The answer is that you don't talk, you write. And that's exactly what Charles Bukowski did.

In a piece entitled Commerce, Bukowski remembers his father's words of 'work hard and you'll be appreciated' but later Bukowski learns that this is true only if you make much more for them than they pay you. 'America at work, where they rip out your intestines and your brain and your will and your spirit. They suck you dry, then throw you away. The capitalist system. The work ethic. The profit motive.'

In another piece entitled The Great Escape, Bukowski relays a conversation between himself and a colleague at work one day, where his colleague is comparing working for the postal service to a bucket full of crabs. Every now and then, his colleague tells him, a crab will climb on top of the others and begin to climb toward the top of the bucket and just as it's about to escape, another crab will grab it and pull it back down. Mid-conversation, a supervisor approaches Bukowski and his colleague and says 'you fellows were talking. There is no talking allowed on this job'.

Eleven and one-half years Bukowski has been working there so he gets up off his stool and climbs right up the supervisor, reaches up and pulls himself right out of there. 'It was so easy it was unbelievable,' Bukowski writes 'but none of the others followed me, And after that, whenever I had crab legs I thought about that place. I must have thought about that place maybe 5 or 6 times - before I switched to lobster.'

Bukowski became a writer and years later as he describes in another piece entitled About The Mail, people write to him to say that his books have helped them through tough times. And there was Bukowski thinking his writing was for the purpose of keeping him from going under but it now appears he's helped any number of others. 'Well, being helped happened to me too,' he writes, and then goes on to list those who he means: 'Celine, Dostoevsky, Fante, early Saroyan, Turgenev, Gorky, Sherwood Anderson, Robinson Jeffers, E E Cummings, Blake, Lawrence and many others.'

It's an interesting reading list, particularly in regard to his admission in The Column that he didn't understand the book he had pulled off the shelf at the library and therefore had 'to wait'. Waiting obviously paid off because once he was ready he devoured the most heaviest of books and this time understood their meaning. Consecutively his own writing came bursting out of him. Roaring out of him, even, as it should do if you're ever going to call yourself a writer.

Bukowski can be a divisive figure. His writing appeals to some but to others it repels. It's undeniable, however, that when he's good he's very, very good indeed. The main problem with him was that he was never consistently good and sometimes came across as a sexist, negative boor. Happily, there's no such problems here in this particular book.

John Serpico