“My Father” by Charles Bukowski

If you read a poem without knowing who wrote it, you’re only reading a tiny fraction of the work, be it haiku or epic.

I’m not talking about knowing the poet’s mere name – I’m talking about the human being; the entire force of life that ultimately pressed itself through fine mesh filters of self-consciousness and into the boundaries of language just so you could get a piece.

Poets need to be felt. They want inside your head in the worst way. If you don’t know what kind of person they are or were, you can’t let them in – not in that intimate souls-groping-across-the-chasm-of-space-and-time sort of way.

Context is everything. As Professor Langdon Hammer said, “While the poet is creating her or his poems, the poet is also creating a poet, a certain figure of the poet, a public image of the poet.” To read one piece – or even several pieces – without knowing a little about the person who created it is to cheat yourself. The artists’ lives tend to be more interesting and engaging than any one thing or collection of things they did.

It was under this assumption that I was attracted to Charles Bukowski. “The ‘laureate of American lowlife,’ you say? Sign me up!” He lived like a bum on the streets of L.A., drank, swore, fucked, and wrote candidly about all of it. That’s my favorite kind of writer; I was looking for Henry Miller in verse form.

But while Miller was this romantic expatriate who lived in Paris, spoke French with his tough New York accent, and wrote like he was taking a piss with his bros in a bar bathroom, I found Bukowski to be a clown – maybe even an assclown. Witness exhibits A, B, and C (trigger warning for domestic violence in those last two).

Granted, I only started researching Bukowski in the past few days, but from what I’ve gathered, he makes Miller look straight-up artsy fartsy.

While hunting for a poem to write about last week, I flipped Septuagenarian Stew open to “Paris” and thought, Huzzah!

never
even in calmer times
have I ever
dreamed of
bicycling through that
city
wearing a
beret

and
Camus
always
pissed
me
off.

Oh. Well, so much for that.

Clearly I needed to divorce myself from the idea that Bukowski was anything like Miller. But he’s not out of step with my fondness for 20^th century gutter-mouthed, macho romantics, either.

If Bukowski’s an assclown, then certainly I am as well. We all are at times, on some level.

(Want me to read it aloud to you?)

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.

And for this week’s tea… Who the fuck drinks tea while reading Bukowski? It’s inappropriate. Have some canned wine.