An Old T-shirt
I have an old T-shirt—coming apart at the neck, stained around the belly—on which is a black and white photograph of Charles “Hank” Bukowski. He looks to be in his fifties, but is more likely in his thirties, and is leaning against a streetlight, one arm wrapped around it like an old friend. His forearm rests on a pamphlet box. The sign on the box reads: JESUS CHRIST SAVES FROM ALL SIN. PRAY TO JESUS NOW. OBEY THE BIBLE. WARNING: DEATH, JUDGMENT, ETERNITY, HEAVEN or HELL. There is also a small note telling passersby to TAKE ONE PAPER FREE. The box is empty. Several people have asked who the preacher is on my shirt, and expressed more than a little surprise that I am religious. I generally laugh and explain that the preacher is a poet and that the shirt, to me, suggests that the Word of God is empty, and Hank is the one to listen to.
I realize this sounds a bit hyperbolic, and too many young braggadocios love to invoke him and his lifestyle, but Bukowski really did have a strong, nearly spiritual effect on me. I was never one for reading. No papers. No glossies. Nothing. Then I serendipitously came across Love is a Dog From Hell when I was around twenty years old. And ever since reading that book from cover to cover over a couple of hours, and repeat readings each day for three days after, I have been addicted to reading his words. In fact, reading Bukowksi was a sort of ironic “moment of clarity”, an epiphanic moment. I read him with the attention an ascetic would poring over the Bible. I read through his oeuvre with a catechismal rigor. I went from simply lying back on the floor of my apartment letting the words rush over me, to actually reading Bukowski’s words.
With his gritty, poignant brevity, with a blunt street vernacular, a frank looseness of tone with seemingly arbitrary line-breaks, the language of the layman—a language that one might use in conversation with a friend over a drink—Bukowski showed me at the heart of the American Dream lies profound ambivalence and empty morality. His first person narratives reflect parts of American society that I had long ignored—the working American, issues of social stratification, a harsh critique of the American Dream, and a critical analysis of work. Bukowski wasn’t the sort of poet that had driven me away from reading poetry; the type that had me disenchanted by literature’s alienating austerity and antiseptic content, though in high school I simply thought it corny and boring.
He was neither elitist, bohemian, nor overtly political, but simply working-class. It was his unique brand of beer-soaked irreverence and comic misadventure, tempered with scathing social commentary, and his blatant challenge to the efficacy of the American Dream; an unwavering assault on numbing, routinized work deadening the majority of Americans and a strong anti-consumerist belief—essentially, to hell with consumption for the sake of consumption—that spoke to me like scripture. I was embracing the sins of man, and Bukowski seemed to be showing me that I had, we have, no other choice. In fact, Bukowski told author Ben Pleasants that all of his, Bukowski’s, work dealt with an America that was “mentally fucked up and unhappy, not knowing what to do, how to get out of bed, how to get a job, how not to get a job, how to get through another day...” Oh, Yes! Tell ‘em, Brother Hank! Brutal truth teller!
I drank in his words and read that my refusal was a positive one, in that it implicitly demanded something more than material affluence. His work, ferociously bleak in its portrayal of life, his depiction of drunks, drug addicts, criminals, prostitutes and outcasts of all shapes and sizes was the world I was living in, those were the people I talked to, worked and drank and rode the bus with everyday.
It was this aliterary style with its characteristic themes of desolation among society’s misfits, outcasts just getting by, managing somehow to cope with the absurdity of life and work, that moved Ezra Pound to recognize Bukowski’s writing as “new” and “slapping the face of the status quo of writing.”
For me, Bukowski’s work will always be one of a kind in its range, its detail, and in its perspective from which readers are able to make value judgments regarding notions of work and its influence on the individual and all of us.
For a long time I carried around copies of Bukowski’s poetry clenched tightly in one hand and, like a bus stop or barstool preacher, I slurred catechisms to anyone who would listen.
Now, a husband and a father, I don’t preach so much, but there is a four shelf altar in my basement to old Hank to which I direct any visitors wanting to read good lines about the bad life.
I have an old T-shirt—coming apart at the neck, stained around the belly—on which is a black and white photograph of Charles “Hank” Bukowski. He looks to be in his fifties, but is more likely in his thirties, and is leaning against a streetlight, one arm wrapped around it like an old friend. His forearm rests on a pamphlet box. The sign on the box reads: JESUS CHRIST SAVES FROM ALL SIN. PRAY TO JESUS NOW. OBEY THE BIBLE. WARNING: DEATH, JUDGMENT, ETERNITY, HEAVEN or HELL. There is also a small note telling passersby to TAKE ONE PAPER FREE. The box is empty. Several people have asked who the preacher is on my shirt, and expressed more than a little surprise that I am religious. I generally laugh and explain that the preacher is a poet and that the shirt, to me, suggests that the Word of God is empty, and Hank is the one to listen to.
I realize this sounds a bit hyperbolic, and too many young braggadocios love to invoke him and his lifestyle, but Bukowski really did have a strong, nearly spiritual effect on me. I was never one for reading. No papers. No glossies. Nothing. Then I serendipitously came across Love is a Dog From Hell when I was around twenty years old. And ever since reading that book from cover to cover over a couple of hours, and repeat readings each day for three days after, I have been addicted to reading his words. In fact, reading Bukowksi was a sort of ironic “moment of clarity”, an epiphanic moment. I read him with the attention an ascetic would poring over the Bible. I read through his oeuvre with a catechismal rigor. I went from simply lying back on the floor of my apartment letting the words rush over me, to actually reading Bukowski’s words.
With his gritty, poignant brevity, with a blunt street vernacular, a frank looseness of tone with seemingly arbitrary line-breaks, the language of the layman—a language that one might use in conversation with a friend over a drink—Bukowski showed me at the heart of the American Dream lies profound ambivalence and empty morality. His first person narratives reflect parts of American society that I had long ignored—the working American, issues of social stratification, a harsh critique of the American Dream, and a critical analysis of work. Bukowski wasn’t the sort of poet that had driven me away from reading poetry; the type that had me disenchanted by literature’s alienating austerity and antiseptic content, though in high school I simply thought it corny and boring.
He was neither elitist, bohemian, nor overtly political, but simply working-class. It was his unique brand of beer-soaked irreverence and comic misadventure, tempered with scathing social commentary, and his blatant challenge to the efficacy of the American Dream; an unwavering assault on numbing, routinized work deadening the majority of Americans and a strong anti-consumerist belief—essentially, to hell with consumption for the sake of consumption—that spoke to me like scripture. I was embracing the sins of man, and Bukowski seemed to be showing me that I had, we have, no other choice. In fact, Bukowski told author Ben Pleasants that all of his, Bukowski’s, work dealt with an America that was “mentally fucked up and unhappy, not knowing what to do, how to get out of bed, how to get a job, how not to get a job, how to get through another day...” Oh, Yes! Tell ‘em, Brother Hank! Brutal truth teller!
I drank in his words and read that my refusal was a positive one, in that it implicitly demanded something more than material affluence. His work, ferociously bleak in its portrayal of life, his depiction of drunks, drug addicts, criminals, prostitutes and outcasts of all shapes and sizes was the world I was living in, those were the people I talked to, worked and drank and rode the bus with everyday.
It was this aliterary style with its characteristic themes of desolation among society’s misfits, outcasts just getting by, managing somehow to cope with the absurdity of life and work, that moved Ezra Pound to recognize Bukowski’s writing as “new” and “slapping the face of the status quo of writing.”
For me, Bukowski’s work will always be one of a kind in its range, its detail, and in its perspective from which readers are able to make value judgments regarding notions of work and its influence on the individual and all of us.
For a long time I carried around copies of Bukowski’s poetry clenched tightly in one hand and, like a bus stop or barstool preacher, I slurred catechisms to anyone who would listen.
Now, a husband and a father, I don’t preach so much, but there is a four shelf altar in my basement to old Hank to which I direct any visitors wanting to read good lines about the bad life.
No comments:
Post a Comment