Two Takes on Bukowski (updated)

Jim Harrison reviews The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 by Charles Bukowski in The New York Times Book Review today.

A few excerpts:

Our perceptions of Bukowski, like our perceptions of Kerouac, are muddied by the fact that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits who love him to the exclusion of any of his contemporaries. I would suggest you can appreciate Bukowski with the same brain that loves Wallace Stegner and Gary Snyder.

He had several failed marriages — but then historically, poets are better off with imaginary lovers.

Bukowski’s strength is in the sheer bulk of his contents, the virulent anecdotal sprawl, the melodic spleen without the fetor of the parlor or the classroom, as if he were writing while straddling a cement wall or sitting on a bar stool, the seat of which is made of thorns. He never made that disastrous poet’s act of asking permission for his irascible voice.


But on the other coast, LA Times Book Editor David L. Ulin takes on the poet laureate of LA's underbelly and declares "it's impossible not to ask some hard questions about his status and whether it is deserved."

A few excerpts from his review:

Referring to one of Bukowski's literary heroes, John Fante, Ulin writes, "the bulk of this 500-plus page collection highlights the fact that his own work is not up to such a standard -- not even close. Rather, the 274 poems here affirm a sense of the author as a hit-or-miss talent, capable of his own brand of small epiphany but often stultifyingly banal."

Part of the problem is the Bukowski persona: the dirty old man, the drunk, the layabout. For a lot of readers, especially younger ones, this is the draw -- the idea of the artist as outsider, unbound by social stricture and thus available to tell the truth. To be sure, it's an attractive image, but Bukowski is no Louis-Ferdinand, to cite another of his role models, which means that often what emerges is empty posturing.

One of the benefits of a career retrospective is that it allows us to see how a writer has progressed, how themes and styles are continued or discarded. This collection, though, shows no real growth. A poem from the 1950s reads no different than one from the 1980s; they are part of the same lifelong binge.