 Charles Bukowski was born in 1920. He was first published in 1940 having written from a very early age, but he subsequently abandoned his career as an author for twenty years. During that time he worked in various monotonous professions and took to drinking. For ten years he wandered from boarding house to boarding house and then for another ten years he worked for The United States Postal Service. During that time he dealt with both alcoholism and near insanity. According to Bukowski’s own account he had started writing again the day he quit the postal service however there is evidence of a publication by him a few years prior to his quitting his job as a postal service worker. Bukowksi’s first recognized publication was in the 1960s.
Although he published only before and after what is generally considered the beat generation, many recognize him as a “beat” poet because his style similarly flies in the face of accepted structure, subject matter, and language. I chose “my father,” a poem he published in 1990, to be the example of Bukowski’s work. I chose this poem because I believe it exemplifies Bukowski’s keen attention to rhythm, unique approach to structure, bluntness, and intensity of subject matter. You will notice, when reading the poem initially, that the fact that the title is rhythmically and syntactically connected to the first line really catches any reader’s attention. There is no sense of introduction or traditional ritual of introducing the poem. Secondly, the line breaks imply a spoken rhythm of retrospect. We can almost hear the spaces where the speaker breathes trying to collect his thoughts and remember. The entire poem is also not capitalized except for proper nouns. This lack of proper capitalization within every sentence implies the casual nature of the monologue already invoked by the rhythm and the two aspects of the poem compliment each other nicely. The diction itself is predominantly colloquial, which reinforces the aforementioned interpretation of the tone of the peice. Yet, within the casual storyteller speaker, we get this tonal shift on line twenty eight. First of all, the diction is higher. Secondly there is this ambiguous syntax at the end, which could be interpreted to mean that the oddities were wasted or that the speaker himself was wasted when he buried his father. The poem is about desire. The speaker does not want to want to be rich because it is clearly what has ruined everyone around him. He calls his father an oddity invoking both exoticism and, quite simply, abnormal behavior. He is the only sane character who realizes that wanting wealth is not the source of happiness. The tone is casual because the speaker does not desire to be higher than he is. I hope you enjoy this week’s poet and poetry selection. Feel free to send in any suggestions to the editors of the Pacifican via e-mail. my father
was a truly amazing man
he pretended to be
rich
even though we lived on beans and mush and weenies
when we sat down to eat, he said,
“not everybody can eat like this.”
and because he wanted to be rich or because he actually
thought he was rich
he always voted Republican
and he voted for Hoover against Roosevelt
and he lost
and then he voted for Alf Landon against Roosevelt
and he lost again
saying, “I don’t know what this world is coming to,
now we’ve got that god damned Red in there again
and the Russians will be in our backyard next!”
I think it was my father who made me decide to
become a bum.
I decided that if a man like that wants to be rich
then I want to be poor.
and I became a bum.
I lived on nickles and dimes and in cheap rooms and
on park benches.
I thought maybe the bums knew something.
but I found out that most of the bums wanted to be
rich too.
they had just failed at that.
so caught between my father and the bums
I had no place to go
and I went there fast and slow.
never voted Republican
never voted.
buried him
like an oddity of the earth
like a hundred thousand oddities
like millions of other oddities,
wasted.
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