There is a voice with in all of us that starts its ugly monologue every now and again. Sometimes it comes at times of stress, other times it arrives when the blinkers drop for a while and we take a look at the true state of the world around us. It hocks out a gob of phlegm, clears its throat, and says: “Give up.” Have you ever walked past a tramp and thought or feared that, but for the grace of God, that could be you? And maybe you might like to live like that? Charles Bukowski was not a tramp, but in his work and in much of his life he celebrated the freedom you can only really achieve from dropping out of society and refusing to play along. Bukowski spent most of his life on and around skid row in Los Angeles. When he played the game, he took employment in soul-corroding unskilled jobs (for ten years he worked as a filing clerk for the US Postal Service). The disenchantment this sort of work breeds is distilled down in his poetry. Walt Whitman sung the song of transcendence of how we can see the Lord in all things, Bukowski sung the song of the ordinary too, but not to celebrate it, to show how it grinds you down. Then he exulted on how he thought best to transcend the mundane – through drink, drugs, gambling and women.
Born in 1920 in Germany, he moved to America at the age of three. He died in 1994. He wrote poems, novels and short stories, but his poems are probably what he is best known for. He wrote the screenplay of his life, with a bit of poetic licence, for ‘Barfly” which made it to the screen with Mickey Rourke playing Bukowski’s alter-ego, Chinaski. He was a poet formed by the dark side of the USA; he fed on the detritus of free-market capitalism and rapid industrialisation. He was shaped, or misshapen, like we all are, by his childhood. His father would beat him, and as he said himself “…my father was a great literary teacher: He taught me the meaning of pain-pain without reason.” As a teenager he had an incredibly bad acne, because of his appearance he was isolated by others and by himself from much normal social interaction, the only people who accepted him were “the poor and the lost and the idiots”. He would go on to sing the song of their lives, lend meaning to their situations, and his own, through his petry and prose. When he was not finding a meaning to his life in literature, he was searching for it at the bottom of a thousand bottles and on dirty mattresses. It’s not hard to see why through his life and work he inspires so many poets today. He was the living embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s line, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’
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