POPULARITY CONTEST

A few weeks ago I finished reading my first Charles Bukowski book. I bought it off a shelf of a bookstore because I wanted to know why his section was almost as big as Shakespeare's. That is only a slight exaggeration. Bukowski's section was bigger than Billy Collins. That's big.

I had a book NINE HORSES signed by Billy Collins in Daytona Florida in 2004. I wanted to thank him for what he was doing for poetry in general and for what he meant to my poetry at a particular time, but some woman who had had her book signed but was hanging around the edge of the table talking to Billy about his dogs was ruining the opportunity.

Bukowski's LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL is an interesting read if you like Bukowski, I guess. I didn't really come to this book having any inclination toward liking or not liking his work. It is classified as work, for me. Yet, it is taking everything that happens to himself on a daily basis and working it as the soil for his poems. He wrote an insane amount, and so you have to pardon most of the poems--they are wreckless and sloppy. But every twenty-pages, I found myself wondering what kind of man would write a poem with his phone number as the title? What kind of man rotates between writing about a red head, a race track, a candy bar, his telephone, and a bar? At times, he is self-indulgent. It's a given for him. He seems to know that some of his work (on a large scale) seems pathetic. A keen reader who moves past it to see what these poems mean to the writer realizes their autonomy from pure self-indulgence. Bukowski concedes that he his heartbroken, and tells the reader over and over. There is something to be said for hiding the things you want to say to the reader (as a more abstract writer like Wallace Stevens might) but there's also something said for bridging that gap and giving the reader something they may ultimately be uncomfortable with: your life.

While lacking substance in some individual poems, or essentially rewriting many, as a whole, the collection works for me. It works because it forms a conglomerate, a cohesive utterance of a man's pain. The challenge for the reader is to not grow overly sentimental for Bukowski or hate him for his pain. Pain is pain. Writing about it doesn't make it go away.

What I take away from a Bukowski book is that each poem doesn't have to say the manifesto of one's life. It can be simple. This is comforting. Isn't it?

The forward in the beginning of the book says that Bukowski moves his reader along a track of places (which I listed above) and this is fascinating to me. What places your imagination can work in is interesting to me. We are constantly brought back to bars, to his lonely apartment, to the bathroom, to the racetrack as a way of feeling the grit and grime of his daily life. This is much more realistic to me than trying to find or reshape the ordinary as spectacular.

LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL. What is it with dogs and bopular poets? It must be a requirement, an emblem of being American.