Zach Wells' comment on my
Tuesday post brought to mind Adam Kirsch's
excellent essay in the
New Yorker from 2005 where he brilliantly, and somewhat mercilessly, exposes the nature of Bukowski's appeal:
Such poems offer the same kind of vicarious wish fulfillment that differently inclined readers might find in spy novels or gangster movies, with their parodies of unbound masculinity. (In one poem, Bukowski acknowledges this affinity, boasting: “don’t believe the gossip: / Bogie’s not dead.”) And Bukowski is best read as a very skillful genre writer. He bears the same relation to poetry as Zane Grey does to fiction, or Ayn Rand to philosophy—a highly colored, morally uncomplicated cartoon of the real thing. He has two of the supreme merits of genre writing, consistency and abundance: once you have been enticed into Bukowski’s world, you have the comfort of knowing that you won’t have to leave it anytime soon, since there will always be another book to read.
4 comments:
That is a good essay. I agree with about 75% of it. A few years back, it would have been closer to 95% of it. But that's largely because I suspected my own enthusiasm for certain Bukowski books was juvenile. I've since revised that opinion. This isn't the first time I've found Kirsch to be a forcefully persuasive unreliable narrator. He also makes some serious mistakes--of fact, not just of opinion--about Bishop in The Wounded Surgeon. I think to properly appreciate Buk as a poet, as opposed to as a persona, you have to try and read _Mockingbird Wish Me Luck_ as tho you'd never heard of him. Which is probably as hard as it sounds.
More precisely, I find his statement that the posthumous books aren't readily discernible from his best work utterly confounding. Maybe it isn't to precisely the sort of reader he is chastising, but it really should be to him. I'm tempted to say it's dishonest, but I'm not 100% sold on that.
Which is to say that I find mistakes that conveniently fit an apparently pre-formed thesis highly suspect.
Heh. Also: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-on-personal-mission-to-explain-why-univer,29922/
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