That's right, ladies and gentleman, you heard it here first, Charles Bukowski is Eric Cartman. Proof, you say?
"But Matt," you may say, "that's just a terrible Photoshop job, not actual proof!"
Is it? Is it merely that? Or is it evidence of SO MUCH MORE?!?!?!
gold in your eye
charles bukowski
pick up my american express gold card.
i told the girl at the desk what i
wanted.
"youre mr. chinaski", she
said.
"yes, you want some
i.d.?"
"oh no, we know you..."
i slipped the card into my wallet
went back to parking
got into the bmw (paid for, straight
cash)
and decided to drive down to the liquor store
for a case of fine
wine.
on the way, i further decided to write a poem
about the whole thing: the bmw, the bank, the
gold card
just to piss-off the
critics
the writers
the readers
who much preferred the old poems about me
sleeping on park benches while
freezing and dying of cheap wine and
malnutrition.
this poem is for those who think that
a man can only be creative
genius
at the very
edge
even though they never had the
guts to
try it.
Let's break this down. As always, the line breaks are completely arbitrary. The rhythm is too erratic to be poetry and too stilted to be prose. And yeah, that's right, he's too cool and too rich for capitalization. But there's something far more distasteful and actually kind of tacky about the whole thing.
He's awesome now, he's not a drunk or if he is it's by choice not out of necessity. He's the celebrated hero of the counter-culture, a literary lion who can't be bothered with "street cred" or "doing good work" because the business of being ridiculously amazing takes up far too much of his time. Hey, he's too fantastic for his own name, deciding that in his poems and stories he'll call himself "Henry Chinaski" in the hopes none of us will notice that fast switcheroo he pulled.
You can't judge him, you're not Bukowski enough! Walk a mile in his rotgut-soaked hobo shoes, throw up in the gutter, sling some words around Mickey Rourke and get rich, THEN you can judge him for the true genius he is!
So all snark aside, I've come to hate Bukowski's work. I was all primed to like it in high school, having heard of him third-hand: he's debauched, degenerate but still literate, influential on my early heroes like Bono. So I asked my mom to pick me up a book of his when she was back in the States on a trip. She went to Books-a-Million and chose one more or less at random. (It was "Septuagenarian Stew: Stories and Poems," if you'd like to know. And by the way, having your poetry available at Books-a-Million is indeed a warning sign.)
So all excited, I started in and found myself having to grimace through the book, acting as though I liked it. Sure, it was literate, in that he knew some big words and had read a thing or two. It was debauched and degenerate, but not with the mystique of Baudelaire or Mallarmé doing opium or absinthe. It was more like Lee Marvin getting trashed with his horse in Catballoo, which is to say sad and comical (mostly unintentionally) and a little disheartening.
Bukowski has come to represent much of what I dislike in contemporary poetry, but especially the myth of contemporary poets. You have to be an outcast, an outsider, a rebel in order to make something of worth. The proper response to the world around you is flipping the middle finger to the man as you ride off half-stoned on your motorcycle, sporting aviator shades and a black turtleneck under a bomber jacket.
It's all so hackneyed and boring. It reminds me of this.
Yeah, Chuck or Henry or whatever you're called, you're so different and special just like all the other toolbags who think being a jackass and drinking copious amounts of lager is the same thing as poetry. For some reason, a comparison with John Mayer springs to mind. If John Mayer thinks being a fratboy womanizer makes you a credible songwriter and artist, why shouldn't Bukowski think being an alcoholic egomaniac turns you into the finest wordsmith of your aging generation?
And then he has the gall to turn around and say, "What? Me? Naw, man, you've got it all wrong, I'm rich and well-known, loved by most everybody, total upper-class bourgeois bohemian and STILL I write the way I used to! Being poor doesn't make you a great artist."
Well, sure, unless you've worn that like a placard around your neck at every step of your career, and then discarded at your convenience. It casts doubts about his sincerity and hungry drive in the first place. You either get to be sloshed tortured genius Henry Chinaski or aging-celebrity-poet Charles Bukowski, but don't turn on a dime and tell me it's a nickel.
My moral for this story? Whether in an alley or a penthouse, being an oversized UPS delivery of douche doesn't de facto make your writing worth anyone's time.
If you're so rich, why aren't you good?
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