Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame
The title of this post is taken (yet again, shamelessly) from a collection of Charles Bukowski's selected poetry from 1955-1973. After days of working on applications and statements and grading and the like, I returned to one of my favorite poets. And, not at all to my surprise, discovered once again just how much he amazes me. Oftentimes, heads spin around, noses turn up, meaningful glances are exchanged between mutually understanding parties at the mere mention of his name, and even more so at the rather absurd suggestion that I think his stuff is worth reading again and again. So, underneath all the violent, alcoholic, womanizing, ranting, raving, tumbling, drunken, depressing, aggresive, sexist (indeed, misogynist), inappropriate, scatalogical, tiresome, deprecating, egotisical, rambling, nonsensical bullshit, sometimes one finds beauty of the most rare and mysterious persuasion.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, that's fine. Chances are that Bukowski wouldn't have either. Here's a poem. I hope you'll consider it as much as I have...
sway with me
sway with me, everything sad --
madmen in stone houses
without doors,
lepers streaming love and song
frogs trying to figure
the sky;
sway with me, sad things --
fingers split on a forge
old age like breakfast shells
used books, used people
used flowers, used love
I need you
I need you
I need you:
it has run away
like a horse or a dog,
dead or lost
or unforgiving.
posted by Patty @ 1:39 PM
4 Comments:
I've always found it odd that the very poets I find interesting and write about are often the very poets I dislike most intensely (read Emily Dickinson). Bukowski is one of those poets; I have all sorts of things to say, but it would largely ring in my mind as disingenuous because it might imply a like where there in fact is none.
But I think you're right, Pacchan, Bukowski is one of those poets who seems have flown well below the critical radar and yet turns heads at the most random moments, but i think that has largely to do with the fact that Romanticism is the new vogue in the Academy (blech).
I read "The Raven" eight times today, sometimes aloud, and the second stanza is stuck in my head.
"Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor."
yeah, that's pretty good. i guess. (kidding, obviously obvious) i wish i could say i knew it by heart, but, alas, i hadn't read the raven in quite some time and thus had to look it up. thank you for that sensei.
i agree with you about having the most to say about poets that we tend to dislike the most. strange how that works, isn't it? altho' i hadn't given much thought to romanticism being the new vogue (buuuurrrrrb!). would it be "neo-romanticism" then? or just straight up gardens and flowers and the like?
tsktsk, shame on me for making such lavishly absurds generalizations! (bUrb!)
thanks again nicholai!
Well, I prolly shoulda been more specific with what I meant by romanticism; the birds and trees and what not are part of it but I meant more the philosophical and aesthetic tradition that came about in the late 18th century as a critique of Enlightenment "thinkiness." Guys like Hegel, whose progeny I hear you live with, Blake, Wordsworth, and even to a certain extent Marx. So now you have peeps like Jameson, Hartman, and so forth who largely look back to the thinky Romantics for objects of study.
Of course, there is that other Romanticism, usually compartmentalized as Gothic (or emo, if I'm using that word correctly), so as to keep it's far more cynical view of the world from polluting the massive monolithic worldviews of the mainstream thinky Romantics. I'd put Poe in this category.
Dear Patt(a)y --
I just saw your photo of the mosaic floor in the main hall of the Frieze Building (that is, AAHS ... R.I.P.) and I'm wondering if/how I can acquire a print of it. Please reply by email, to: dhsh@umich.edu. Thanks in advance!
-- Dot Shields (AAHS 1954, UM 1959)
PS: Sorry to use this "sideways" means of reaching you, but I didn't find any other way to do it on the Flickr site where I spotted "the photo in question".
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