I was just reading this customer review on Amazon and I thought it would raise some eyebrows here.
By Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal"
Charles Bukowski, Come on In!: New Poems (Ecco, 2006)
The more of Buk's posthumous poetry I read, the more I wonder why anyone buys it. I've long held the hypothesis that he published the best bits while he was still alive (and really, let's face it, Bukowski's pinnacle as a poet came during the sixties and early seventies, after which he spent more time working on, and improving, his prose style), and what was left over was meant solely as a moneymaking scheme; he did, after all, realize that he'd reached that critical mass where the fans would buy anything. He could write something about watching the cat walk across the room, chop it up into one or two-word lines, and people would buy it. Or, for that matter, he could write about writing.
"almost ever since I began writing
decades ago
I have been dogged by
whisperers and gossips
who have proclaimed
daily
weekly
yearly
that
I can't write anymore
that now
I slip
and
fall."
("I have continued regardless")
Every artist runs the risk of becoming a self-parody; it seems that the more influential the artist, the greater the risk, or maybe that's just because we have so many examples of bad imitation of that artist. This is a perfect example of a bad Bukowski imitator...except that it's the man himself.
That said, there are still flashes of brilliance every once in a while, and no matter what else you can say about the guy, one thing Bukowski's poems have always had is the kind of readability that few other poets possess; yeah, readability is nothing in and of itself most of the time (I'm resisting the urge here to call Buk the Dan Brown of poetry), but in a genre as legendarily obtuse as poetry, however undeserved the tag may be, one has to grudgingly admit that readability for its own sake must carry at least some cache. If it gets more people reading poetry, it's got to be worthwhile on some level. ***
http://www.amazon.com/review/RMOHHFWND2O4T/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#RMOHHFWND2O4T
By Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal"
Charles Bukowski, Come on In!: New Poems (Ecco, 2006)
The more of Buk's posthumous poetry I read, the more I wonder why anyone buys it. I've long held the hypothesis that he published the best bits while he was still alive (and really, let's face it, Bukowski's pinnacle as a poet came during the sixties and early seventies, after which he spent more time working on, and improving, his prose style), and what was left over was meant solely as a moneymaking scheme; he did, after all, realize that he'd reached that critical mass where the fans would buy anything. He could write something about watching the cat walk across the room, chop it up into one or two-word lines, and people would buy it. Or, for that matter, he could write about writing.
"almost ever since I began writing
decades ago
I have been dogged by
whisperers and gossips
who have proclaimed
daily
weekly
yearly
that
I can't write anymore
that now
I slip
and
fall."
("I have continued regardless")
Every artist runs the risk of becoming a self-parody; it seems that the more influential the artist, the greater the risk, or maybe that's just because we have so many examples of bad imitation of that artist. This is a perfect example of a bad Bukowski imitator...except that it's the man himself.
That said, there are still flashes of brilliance every once in a while, and no matter what else you can say about the guy, one thing Bukowski's poems have always had is the kind of readability that few other poets possess; yeah, readability is nothing in and of itself most of the time (I'm resisting the urge here to call Buk the Dan Brown of poetry), but in a genre as legendarily obtuse as poetry, however undeserved the tag may be, one has to grudgingly admit that readability for its own sake must carry at least some cache. If it gets more people reading poetry, it's got to be worthwhile on some level. ***
http://www.amazon.com/review/RMOHHFWND2O4T/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#RMOHHFWND2O4T
