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.