A Comic Book Poet

As much as I wanted to write a beautiful poem in honor of National Poetry Month, poetry is just not my craft: I’ve never worked on it, never gotten feedback on what I do haphazardly throw together, and usually I prefer to use anything that I write in poetic form as inspiration or building blocks for a song or essay. So although I pretty quickly decided to write an homage to a poet instead of a poem this week, I didn’t expect one poet to come to mind so immediately, clearly and irrefutably as an artist I want to honor: Charles Bukowski.

It might be because I’m back in food service, working at the North Quad dining hall. North Quad isn’t too bad; I can say with confidence that I’ve worked worse jobs. But there’s something about banging your head on the oversized milk prep tubs, about showering off that thin layer of grease after working grill, about reaching your arm into the garbage disposal up to the elbow and pulling out a consolidated wad of raisins, egg, yogurt, sausage and napkin, that is so goddamn far from poetry. There’s something about the burns on your forearms, the lingering smells of bleach and sour milk, the small, infected cut on your palm, that feel at once too dull and too intimate to abstract from. How do you transpire from sore feet? From hairnets? I don’t mind food service – sometimes I even like it – but there’s a certain embarrassing something about human nature that comes out when people are getting fed. The day drags on, the polite customers start to irk you, the rude ones suddenly deserve to die, and suddenly you feel weighed down by the sheer amount of grease, trash and dirty pans that go into feeding the masses. So how do you come home stinking like chicken grease and escape a mindset that accidentally, subconsciously derides the idea that your human experiences are worth making art out of?

Well, that’s when Charles Bukowski comes to mind.

My middle-school friend Montana Welton had made a startling jump from a propensity towards pulpy, serialized vampire novels in sixth grade to a suddenly refined preference for Kerouac, Salinger and Punk Rock anthologies in seventh grade, and she first lent me ‘Ham On Rye,’ by Bukowski around that time. The grim autobiographical narrative covered Bukowski’s childhood during the great depression, describing a childhood and young adulthood plagued by abuse, poverty, chronic acne, and isolation. I was intrigued and drawn in to Chuck’s gritty, proletarian world, and when I went looking for more novels I discovered that Bukowski had written volumes upon volumes of poetry.

The poems are forceful, declarative sentences separated by line breaks, elaborating on basic themes of Bukowski’s life: drinking, horseraces, women/whores, menial labor, and cheap hotels. Through the narrative of Bukowski’s body of poetry, we seem the poet as a laboring, legendary tough guy, a kind of superhero of everything voracious and brutal and secondrate. Bukowski’s “lowlife odyssey” has been described as a kind of comic-book world, the production of a poet who comes to the brink of self-reflection but can’t quite give up the need to be the hero of his own narrative – a pride that ultimately condemns him to be a ‘conventional writer.’ And it’s true that Chuck’s fierce pride and bravado might ultimately limit his capacity to self-reflect.

Yet presence of this ludicrous, whore-mongering, horse-betting, hyper-masculine character has stuck around in my life and my thoughts, because he gave me the tools to understand how poetry – how art – could be pulled out of the least lofty of human experiences. Would Bukowski shy away from writing about the grime of the dish machine, the spilled antidepressants, the shiny scars left by a mysterious rash, the cruel or stupid lover? Though Bukowski’s poems may caricature the poet as a colorful character, an uncomplicated, comic-book serialization, they resound with me because they took pride in the insanity of life. Where poets often seem to be trying ruefully acknowledge life’s gritty mess in an attempt to transcend it, Chuck just rolled around in it. And that’s what I love about him, because that’s all that we mortals can really do.