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This Old Poem #9:
Charles Bukowski’s My First Affair With That Older Woman
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 7/20/02

  Charles Bukowski would have long faded from the poetic scene had there not been such a perverse attraction, by poets, toward dereliction- in all its forms. CB- or Chuck Buk, as he was known in literary circles- was 1 of the last’s century’s premier vagrants. The film Barfly was his own self-absorbed & self-obsessed opus on the grandeur of inebriation. But none of that would matter if the man were capable of effectively conveying thoughts & emotions via the written word. His prose is largely generic & forgettable- although it inspired legions of wannabe losers in the 1960s & 70s. His ‘poetry’ is arguably worse- but I will say of the 2 ways to go CB would have been better off working on his poetry- it’s the more salvageable of the 2 endeavors. That said, it’s as universally horrible as it is available- thanks in part to the damnable Black Sparrow Press. Along with fellow doggerelist Wanda Coleman, these 2 kept that press afloat for over 30 years, until its recent- & overdue- demise.
  The poem below- handily formatted to give you a side-by-side comparison with its sleeker, better rewrite- is 1 of CB’s more well-known pieces. In a sense, CB was in a category unto himself. He is Confessional- but not a Confessionalist. He is hipster- but no Beatnik. He is self-indulgent- but no PC Elitist. Basically, he’s poetry’s premier schlub. Let’s read & dissect:

  The simplest approach often being the best (Bless you William of Occam!) let us merely go straight through the chronologic sequence of the poem. I will not so much refer to my version as what I damn in CB’s version is manifestly addressed in mine.
  The 1^st long stanza is the ‘background’ which lets stanzas 2 & 3 ostensibly bring the poem home. The title is adequate, if obvious. But there are worse, & more pretentious titles which could have been appended. I imagine a typical Academic having a title in a foreign language with, perhaps, a totally irrelevant epigraph, as well. Let’s look at the opening of the poem: 

                                                             What follows are needless & unmusicked repetitions:  ‘desertion, other/men;/she brought me immense/pain,/continually;/she lied, stole;/there was desertion,’other men’. Repetition is done to pound home an important point or develop a rhetoric to be of service later in the poem- this does neither. & let’s count the actual & narrative clichés: when I look back, I feel shame, that I was so
innocent, but I must say, she did match me drink for drink, ruined along the way, mortally hurt by the past, she treated me badly, she brought me immense pain, we had our moments, our little soap opera, I sat at her bed for hours talking to her, she opened her eyes, I knew it would be you, she closed her eyes, the next day she was dead, & I drank alone. Literally, about 75-80% of the words in this poem are a cliché. As bad are the redundancies. The longest, of ½ a dozen or so, is the whole ‘she treated me badly’ trope. This is pure & unfettered laziness. The whole poem veers from melodrama to the worst sort of bathos.
  The last 2 stanzas are deliberately short. There is nothing innately wrong with this- in principle. But you need a hell of a set up to get away with this sort of thing. Stanza 1’s string of clichés & redundancies does not fit the bill. Here is stanza 2: 

the next day she was
dead.

  What possible purpose does the break at ‘was’ serve? We know she’s dying, so there is no drama, nor is there any existential ‘heaviness’ in stating, ‘the next day she was’. Again laziness I correct by making it a 1 line stanza. As for stanza 3?: 

I drank alone
for two years
after that.

  ‘I drank alone’ is not so profound that it deserves to be by itself. Nor is ‘for two years’. But ‘after that’ has a bit of a twist coming after both. Let’s just slap the 1^st 2 lines into 1 & we will have the best possible stanza to end the poem with- at least with this combination of words.
  I was prompted to look back at the shit of this poet by 2 recent things. 1 was the DVD I bought of the film Chuck & Buck- an underrated gem of a film about another type of loser- this 1, however, ultimately succeeds. The 2^nd thing was a nasty little post on Cosmoetica chiding me as an ‘idiot’ because I did not recognize CB’s genius. Naturally, I challenged the oaf to produce an essay in defense of his hero. I’m still waiting. The boob is probably doing his best CB impersonation as you read this. Nonetheless, this poem is so bad that even by a severe technical tightening I can, at best, claim it as a barely passable poem- even though I’d never publish the thing. It’s still generic- but, now, a proficiently generic piece of tripe. Regardless, if this piece prods you to do something after reading it, let that act be renting Chuck & Buck, let Chuck Buk’s books gather a much-deserved dust. 

Final Score: (0-100)

Charles Bukowski’s My First Affair With That Older Woman: 45
TOP’s My First Affair With That Older Woman: 65