I'm a relatively recent convert to the Church of Chinaski. Back when I first came to Madison and would cruise the used and independent bookstores (notably the old Avol's) I would see shelf upon shelf of the Black Sparrow Press editions of Bukowski. Just knew, looking at them, the placement, the prominence, the sheer bulk of it all, that there was something "hip" about him.
Is that why I avoided him? Did I avoid him?
Yeah, probably. Not proud of that, but there it is.
But some time ago I dipped in and... well... Bukowski is like candy for me know. Collection after collection (if I'm lucky I pick 'em up cheap). Just pop one in and polish it off. A nod and a wink behind the rough and tumble pose. There's got to be, right? Bukowski teeters on the edge of being the Danny Bonaduce of American poetry -- and without the slap and tickle he'd tip over.
Or maybe Danny's struggling to live out an adolescent reading of Bukowski "unloading the goods"?
The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain is one of the more recent posthumous collections to come out. They are bound to run out of material, at some point, no? Read in bits and pieces over the last few days, I ran through the poems like I pop Smarties -- in great big gulps, and in fits and starts. Collection to collection he writes about the same things but I'm never bored. Oh, no...
And maybe in that, and the knowing smile he occasionally casts at the reader, is the delight.
And it's in poems like "I have this new room" -- "my disorder was never chosen, it just arrived and then it / stayed" -- where there isn't a wink of any sort, just raw feeling deftly twisted into poetic form that is the very stuff of the poet. And something more than sugary delight.
No wonder "they are after me".
Coincidentally, Jim Harrison reviews the very latest collection -- The Pleasures of the Damned, Poems, 1951-1993 -- in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review.
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