|
8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worth a smile now and again, but not his best., December 2, 2003
Charles Bukowski, The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps (Black Sparrow, 2001)Can a person be great and yet not too good at the same time? I ask myself that pretty much every time I open another book of Charles Bukowski's poetry. Something in me quails, because I know in the roughly 300 pages before me (this one clocks in at just around 350), I'm going to see every rule of decent poetry writing broken. Usually multiple times on a page. "Show don't tell" goes completely out the window. Line breaks? Absolutely hideous. Avoid confessional poetry? Bukowski wallows in it. By all rights, I should be right there with the rest of the critics talking about how much the man's work sucks, how it's simply not poetry. A few examples should serve to be sufficient: "I am such an unpopular human/being." (the first line of "It's Just Me") "the house of horrors/the house of a thousand beatings/the house of brutality and unhappiness." ("A Drink to That") The word "brutality" has no place in a poem. Ever. Any writing teacher I ever had, and the vast majority of critics, would look at any poems containing the word "brutality," slash a red line through it, and say "show, don't tell!" And yet the simple fact of the matter is that Charles Bukowski has outsold every other American poet who penned a single line during the twentieth century. Ran rings around most of them; the sales of one Bukowski book probably dwarf the sales of the complete output of every Pulitzer prize winner, taken on their own. Something draws people to his books by the thousands. Unfortunately, I doubt that it has anything to do with the truly brilliant flashes of image that shine through once every twenty pages or so, the places where the later work of Bukowski sounds like the older work of Bukowski (Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, written between 1955 and 1970, is one of the finest books of poetry written in the last century). They are few, but some of them are so heart-stopping they make wading through the rest of it a joy: "sometimes dogs/in the alley/play the violin better/then the privileged peacocks/who swim in butter./I speak now of young/dogs in/old rooms of peeling wallpaper and/the bathroom down the hall-always with/somebody in there." ("The Fish with Yellow Eyes and Green Fins Leaps into the Volcano") I think it has more to do with the idea that a volume of Bukowski's poetry (and his novels, too) reads like a dime store self-help book. "Here, look at how bad my life is. Identify with a few things and use the rest to reflect on your own life and say, `hey, it's not that bad.'" Even the severest critic, when alone, probably finds a few of those image-less strophes to identify with and smile at. "the dark is empty;/most of our heroes have been/wrong." ("I Can't See Anything") No, it isn't poetry. But it's something. And it's something in the works of a self-confessed prudish misanthrope that reaches out to others. I don't pretend to know what it is (Bukowski does, though-"'it's easy,' I said, `all I do is/lie as truthfully as possible.'" -"Good Pay"). And I force myself to admit that while they're getting what they're getting out of it, at least they're getting snatches of greatness in amongst the rubble. ***
|
by Charles Bukowski
by Charles Bukowski
by Charles Bukowski
by Charles Bukowski
by Charles Bukowski
See all Editorial Reviews
Visit our huge selection of magazine subscriptions often to see the latest special offers and bonuses. Check out magazines like
The New Yorker,
Wired, and
Vanity Fair. 
