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Bukowski and the Beauty of Vulnerability
…or is that the “vulnerability of the beautiful”? — Critical Reflections — 21 July 2021
Desire has been a cornerstone of the poetic enterprise for, quite literally, millennia. Ovid, Shakespeare, Shelley, and who could possibly name them all. But, desire has an opposite, and though it almost always shows up alongside the spoken desire, it is…uncomfortable. I don’t like to be vulnerable. We know I have trust issues. I like to write about it, though, because, as always, it makes things clearer. I want to dig deeper into this, though, through one of Charles Bukowski’s pieces.
While some poets come crashing onto the stage (or skipping) like a fucking force of nature, washing you with a desire so tangible you feel faint (anyone else seen the charisma of Leonard Cohen live? Holy shit…). And Cohen, Cohen is clear, I believe, on wanting to be the patron saint of desire. But it does mean shouldering the vulnerable, and this can be found in his work, too. Others seem to dance around the subject. But it’s a thread I keep finding in Bukowski.
Much as I love the work, Bukowski often sounds like a bastard: the race-track attendee, the job-hunter, the drunk, the…bum? Well, I don’t know but he does complain about working, often enough. My introduction to Bukowski, as some of you know, came from the critical comparisons of bro MDSHall and bro Kurt. After that, it became a mad dash down the rabbit hole (to beat an old expression to fucking death). But, I find there’s undertones of uncertainty, through it all, something that smacks of vulnerability. It’s been a long time since I did any critical writing regarding a particular piece, so I may be rusty, but here goes.
In “what’s the use of a title” (which, itself, sinks into the head like an elegy for the death of usefulness), Bukowski begins with:
they don’t make it
the beautiful die in flame —*
This image already sets up a vulnerability, of course, for the beautiful, but there’s then this sadness that leaks through the rest of the poem, which gets set off by the next punch to the gut, Bukowski writes, jarring the image he opened with, with something…savage. Almost as if it were a knee-jerk reaction to the the vulnerability posed by the…
