The Pleasures of the Damned by Charles Bukowski

Henry Charles Bukowski, at worst, is a self-proclaimed poverty-stricken drunk who gallivanted with prostitutes and wrote about it. But at his best, he is a rogue poet—one who has a genuine understanding of both the Canon and free verse and who had almost a journalistic dedication in capturing the plight of marginalized down-and-outs in his hometown of Los Angeles. He’s often compared to Beat poets because of his style and his subject matter, and for good reason: Bukowski’s poetry brought a good dose of hard realism that must have shocked the uppity literary circles of LA.

Bukowski, who despite minimal literary merit compared to his contemporaries, has always received critical acclaim from the commercial world. Even after his death in 1994, volumes of his work are still invigorating readers due to the dedication of Black Sparrow Press, the main publisher of Bukowski’s books in his lifetime, in publishing his books post-mortem. Owned by John Marin, a “great collector of avante-garde books, visionary patron of Charles Bukowski” according to their website, Black Sparrow Press is still continually publishing new poems, new collections, and reprints of older poems of his. Ecco, a smaller subset of HarperCollins, is following the trend as well.

The Pleasures of the Damned is the first book I’ve ever read by Bukowski, followed by Love Is A Dog From Hell. While the former is a post-mortem book published in 2007 and edited by John Marin, latter is a collection published in 1977 solely about Bukowski’s love life. Though Love Is A Dog From Hell definitely gives the reader an intense experience about that one concentrated topic, I find that the diversity of poems within The Pleasure of the Damned served well as an introduction and overview of Bukowski, and to be frank, is really all you need to figure him out as a poet. That said, there isn’t one Bukowski poem that really says it all—Bukowski wrote volumes and his poems are meant to be read in bulk.

Two main trends I find in Bukowski’s writing is an acute understanding of individual loneliness and disillusion, an ardor for the poetic tradition, and most importantly, linguistic brilliance in describing city life (though in a less-than-original “provocative” style, given the influence of the Beats who came before him).

Bukowski, rogue poet as he is, still sees himself as part of the English letters in writerly prowess; yet, he cares less about comparing his works with other writers and more about identifying with himself with the bohemian life of an artist. Scattered in The Pleasures of the Damned are poems about Li Po, Carson McCullers, Sherwood Anderson, and allusions like those in “Junk” (“they pulled Ezra through the streets / in a wooden cage. / Blake was sure of God. / Villon was a mugger. / Lorca sucked cock. / T.S. Eliot worked a teller’s cage,”). Extremely well-versed in art and poetry, Bukowski seems to incorporate these dead writers not as heroes he aspires to but as characters in a long tale of human alienation.

Bukowski is not a cultural analyst given to unique revelations about human nature, but a detail-oriented observer who speaks of day-to-day life and ordinary outcasts. In his raison-d’etre-esque “A Poem Is A City,” he says “a poem is city filled with streets and sewers / filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen / filled with banality and booze…a poem is a city of poets, / most of them quite similar / and envious and bitter…” which is not something we haven’t heard before. But then he reins the dialogue in to a personal dimension in the following lines, “a poem is this city now, / 50 miles from nowhere, 9:09 in the morning…a small music from broken windows,” and yet again in the last poignant lines of the poem: “And now I stick this under glass / for the mad editor’s scrutiny / the trumpets bring on gallows / as small men rant at things they cannot do.” The small man and the rant—those are Bukowski’s main focus.

Bukowski is often the subject of feminist critique for supposedly being a chauvinistic poet who viewed women only as sex-objects; there is certainly some merit to this argument, especially in certain specific lines such as “I walked over and mauled her breasts,” and “when you / first meet [women] their eyes / are all moist with under-/ standing...then they / start BOOMING out DEMANDS.” But rough, colloquial language is to be expected of a poet who uses curses liberally and says things like “your children will be raped and your pigs will be eaten,” and sexual imagery is to be expected from a poet who writes about love affairs with prostitutes.

As insulting as he may seem to the women in his poems, he is as harsh in critiques of his own nature. In addition, Bukowski has always reserved tender lines for women that he never quite manages to apply in his reference to self. In “Prayer in Bad Weather,” he writes “it’s not the fucking and sucking / alone that reaches into a man / and softens him, / it’s the extras, / it’s all in the extras,” and later, “I would give anything / for a female’s hand on me / tonight. / they soften a man / and then leave him listening to the rain.” We can see more of this bitter-yet-longingly-tender Bukowski in writings about his lovers Jane and Scarlet, each occupying small sections in The Pleasures of the Damned. In “Eulogy to a Hell of a Dame,” a work of breathtaking lyric and tightly-controlled line breaks, he writes “you always cursed when you / drank, / your hair coming down you / wanted to explode out of / what was holding you: / rotten memories of a / rotten / past, and / you finally got out / by dying, / leaving me with the / rotten / present;” and later “Jane, you were / killed by / knowing too much. / here’s a drink / to your bones / that / this dog / still dreams about.” Bukowski’s depth in understanding individual trials and tribulations gives way to this empathic and quite tender address to Jane.

The attention Bukowski gives to every personal quirk (from the subject of “Girl On the Escalator,” who “has a guru…wants to / be a dancer and she’s unemployed and she / gets migraine headaches every time she / eats sugar or cheese” to the exact dialogue of subway-goers and gamblers to how the youth in “A Killer Gets Ready” shows his dedication to bringing reality to his poetry and thus poetry to his reality—for Bukowski, they are one and the same.

Gulf Music by Robert Pinsky

For starters, I’ll make no pretensions about being an expert on Robert Pinsky. In fact, I’ll even admit that, besides a select few poems (“The Want Bone” comes immediately to mind) I have never read any of Pinsky’s work – that is to say, I have never read a truly complete work by Robert Pinsky, because to read a book of poetry is to read a deliberate collection of symbols, metaphors, words, and thoughts, each relating and alluding to the others in some way, however delicate. This, then, is not only a discussion of a collection of poems, but it also serves as a sort of introduction of a poet, at least for me, and the introduction of a longer discussion of contemporary poetry. This is certainly not an analysis of Gulf Music’s place in the Pinsky canon, nor is it an attempt to situate these poems in any sort of literary context. This is, first and foremost, an attempt to wade through and bask in a rather curious collection of poems.

Gulf Music, the collection itself, is divided into three simply numbered sections, each with its own distinct character and thematic elements. The first is the most immediate and anxious of the sections, particularly between the opening salvoes of “Poem of Disconnected Parts” and “Gulf Music,” both of which delve into present political and social issues in fragmented, sometimes nonsensical lines. In a collection largely concerned with memory and forgetting, these poems fit only tangentially, particularly because Pinsky forgoes his otherwise delicate touch in favor of a fractured prose poetry that ends up feeling far too heavy-handed. The right idea is there in eschewing political propheticism and its dramatic baggage for simpler, more humane description, but the poems simply feel too safe – too much of a summary of news items one could have read in the paper this morning. However, that said, Pinsky’s very unique concern with historical memory and the American civic conscience is on full display, and lesser poets would never attempt such an audacious (and admittedly refreshing) project.

The second section opens with a prose poem exploring the etymology of the word thing, which sets the stage for nine peons to objects, seven of which are contained under the framework of the poem “First Things to Hand.” Taken by themselves, the poems are clever and playful, particularly the wonderful eponymous first section of “First Things to Hand,” but they on first glance feel like traditional odes and nothing more. However, in his “Note” at the end of Gulf Music, Pinsky reflects on these poems: “Every artifact, every natural object, with its ghostly wrapping of associations and meaning, begotten and forgotten, is a gathering of minds or contending voices: every thing is an invisible assembly.” In looking back at these odes after reading this declaration, one finds that they construct an etymology of connotations and associations – these objects tell their stories through their name and the baggage that word carries when spoken or written.

The last of this collection’s three sections is, without a doubt, the strongest and most compelling, and it sees Pinsky move from the disjointed potential of the first section and the understated simplicity of the second to a magnificence that I can only imagine is the poet in full flight. He transitions with two poems tracing poetic concepts instead of things: “Rhyme,” which feels more like its tangible brethren, and then the flowing “In Defense of Allusion,” one of the most impressive poems in this collection and certainly one of more thought provoking, even more so because of its morally ambiguous closing. Pinsky manages to sum up a large chunk of Gulf Music’s verse in the latter poem’s simple opening declaration: “The world is allusive.” Each word is an allusion to a thousand others, and each line of verse takes the place of hundreds more spread across the years, from the inmate in Guantánamo in “Poem of Disconnected Parts” to the dying lines of Dante’s Paradiso that closes Pinsky’s collection. Gulf Music is partly about recalling these allusions, but it is even more so about the way in which we forget them: “Forgetting is never perfect, just as recall is never total: the list or the person’s name or the poem or the phone number may be recalled in the same detail, but never with the exact feeling it had. And conversely the details may be obliterated but the feeling lingers on.”

-Will Cogswell