(by Charles Bukowski, copied from The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps)

i sometimes get edgy
wonder where i’m at,
miss a step or two, feel
lost.

everybody i know seems
taller
more intelligent
kinder
than i am
and
of course
not as
ugly.

but that mood never
lasts
very long.

i take a good
look around,
a straight
hard look around
and then
i know
better

but just
for a
while.

***

In recent years, Bukowski holds the title of Misogynist Poet Laureate of liberal-arts ladies nationwide. He is misogynistic, brutal, and a little amateurish. (See: his clunky, too-autobiographical novel Post Office.) That aside, though: I love Bukowski.

The poem above is one of my favorites. He captures both the fleeting moment of self-doubt and the subsequent feeling of lightness and acceptance, and he does it with mild macho grace. I wonder if his popularity among the liberal-arts crowd is a reaction to our educations in “real” poets . . . A line I heard quite a bit from my classmates in rural Illinois was, “How can it be a poem, it doesn’t rhyme!” Nonrhyming, arrhythmic, variant poetry only appeared in my public schooling through textbook segments on “outsiders” (ruralspeak for any minority, racial or cultural) and the hippie English teacher I knew in high school.

Literary opinion varies or discounts Bukowski altogether, and I can see where all of it comes from. His language is not at all polished, there isn’t much in the way of imagery or figurative language, and then of course there’s his substance abuse and wanton objectification of women. Let’s not make the man into something he’s not, though; he admits, both in his work and his journals, that he’s a pretty ignorant unqualified guy who writes in order to keep moving through his daily life of brokeness, shitty jobs, and bad relationships.

It’s this barebones necessity that resonates with me: urgency to spit out the words to explain the terrible day you have, the terrible moment when you envy someone more successful, all of the poisonous things that ever happen — pointedly when you’re to blame — and experience meager-but-critical relief as a reward.

Bukowski mostly published through the small, artisanlike Black Sparrow Press, whose paperbacks are characterized by their textured tagboard covers. They also published Wanda Coleman, a California poet who shares my birthday.

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