Charles Bukowski, Undisciplined Satirist

By Johnny Payne

Yes, the man was prolific, having written some 5000 poems and scads of prose. Does that count as virtue, or logorrhea? I find myself wishing he’d have spent more time editing and less generating endless lines. His famous aphorism “Don’t try” too often seems to have been tantamount to “First thought, best thought.” Spontaneity has its advantages. Wordsworth, that genius of reordered retrospection, had his “spots of time,” letting the creative unconscious body forth moral feeling, insight, and the disquietude of a spectrum of emotion. And the “lowlife” for which Bukowski, the illustrious barfly, is notable could, hypothetically, have been made available for a less merely self-involved half-canter among friends in low places. In the right hands, the lowlife feels like the high life.

Bukowski, who sometimes cites Villon but without achieving that famous reprobate’s outrageous, poetically savvy grandeur, didn’t invent representation of the down and dirty; he just downgraded it, robbing it o…