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Pointless
by Jonathan Penton

To the archived articlesLiterature thrives on free speech, and free speech thrives on dissenting opinion. I'd like to begin this month's article by saying that I, as a representative of the artists represented by Unlikely Stories, am in an extreme minority with this rant. Many of my contributors have told me, on numerous occasions, of their opinions on this matter, and they have always disagreed with my opinion.

That said:

I'm so fucking sick of Bukowski that I don't think I can hold my guts in any longer. For crying out loud, the guy wrote maybe a dozen poems, then reproduced them in various forms for the rest of his career. His very long career.

Let's go over the basic facts for those who don't know them. Bukowski was born in Germany in 1920 to a German mother and American father. He was brought to Los Angeles when he was three, which meant he was growing up during the Depression, a fact he would be proud of the rest of his life. He began writing at a young age, and published his first short story at age twenty-four. During these early years, he was the consummate "starving artist," living off of very little food and a great deal of alcohol.

Bukowski was one of the world's most famous unrepentant alcoholics. His poems state that he never drank before noon, but after that, he was rarely sober.

Bukowski began to gain recognition as a poet, novelist, and author of short stories in the sixties. (His novels were autobiographical, with the character "Henry Chinaski" living out Bukowski's own experiences.) He was often associated with the Beats, for reasons I can't quite figure out. He was, more logically, held up as the antithesis to a poetry culture that was fast moving away from the American mainstream. He was the opposite of an academian; he wrote about drinking, whores, poverty, pugilism, gambling and bar culture in a way that seemed to directly insult the rest of the poetry world. His poems did not attack academian culture; they ignored it, except to occasionally complain about their own difficulty getting published. Bukowski died in 1994.

Black Sparrow Press now publishes all of Bukowski's work. If you check out their web page, you'll find 32 books of his, several of which are anthologies that cover the full range of several other, earlier books. If you sit and read this collection, you'll find that he had very little to say.

Bukowski chronicled what he saw, and he went looking for things that most of society considers unseemly and unattractive. But he had nothing interesting to say about these things. All of his poetry and fiction, in the parlance of Creative Writing workshops, was plot-oriented. He described what he saw, often eloquently, and expects us to care. Which would be fine, for a book or two. But he wrote more than a book or two, in his same, simplistic style. He told us everything, and taught nothing. He saw, and he allowed us to see, but he never lifted his rum-soaked head to the heavens long enough to observe. "Nature bores me," he once told us. Evidently, the same went for human nature, because his many character descriptions never described anything but the simplest and most surface of characters and actions.

Contrast him to John Fante, another novelist of the same generation, also published by Black Sparrow Press. Fante also wrote books that appeared to be plot-oriented, but with a different goal. His characters did the things they did for a reason. The more we read about his characters, the better we understood them. Fante could make you feel intimate with eight characters in the space of 150 pages or less. You could spend book after book trying to "get" Bukowski, and still wind up with a very shallow understanding of the man, not because the man was deeper than others, but because of his shallow writing.

Bukowski's style is an easy pleasure to read. So is Dr. Suess's. But you'll learn nothing of human nature reading Dr. Suess.

Two contributors and I were recently wandering around looking for a Chinese restaurant. One said to the other, "Bukowski taught us that not every poem has to be about love and death. He taught us that sometimes it's OK to just write what you see."

That's true, and that's great. But Bukowski never wrote about higher concepts. He dribbled about what he saw for, during his lifetime, 44 books. Come on! At a certain point, that shit ceases to be nourishing. It certainly doesn't make him the greatest poet the world has ever seen. He was a novelty writer, a footnote to literature. I hope he shuts up soon.



Jonathan Penton is the overworked editor and publisher of Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.