The Dead and Bukowski

by Nathan Gale

Charles Bukowski remains one of the few poets who do not fit into any type of poetic mold or genre. Through his lifestyle and the manner in which he wrote, he seems to be a second wind of the Beat generation. Yet his distance from them characterizes him as a sort of poetic outcast who strives to be a poet as well as a common blue-collar man. His only poetic references come from his keen observations through a life of cheap rooming houses and drunk escapades. In turn he captures this lifestyle and romanticizes it in way that other poets could only read about. At once he seems to become an existential character from a Camus novel, and yet is able to reiterate that experience into a form of poetry. Using himself as the very protagonists and anti-heros that are described in his own poetry and novels. His poetry speaks about the working-stiff, not in way that makes him feel like a pre revolutionary proletariat, but as something more genuine from the very heart and soul of a man who is forced to work terrible jobs under impoverished circumstances. The condition in which his life was lead was not a literary experiment, but something he could only escape from by writing about it.

In Bukowski’s poem “I am dead but i know the dead are not like this” he starts out with what seems like an alliteration to James Joyce's “The Dead”, as he states: “the dead can sleep they don’t get up and rage they don’t have a wife.” Here he seems to be speaking about a generation of men who work, drink and rarely are able to hold onto families because of their condition, in a sense they have become nonexistent, existing only in their low-wage jobs. This gives the feeling of men (himself) that are always in the background, who are simultaneously there but unnoticed by the world at large. Like Gabriel in “The Dead”, Bukowski feels as he is not truly living, by living a life where everything is centered around work and routine. The next stanza continues this image as he describes himself as a “the curtain smokes a cigarette” like he has faded into the objects that surround him, lifeless in appearance. The poem takes a slight leap from his ethereal personal reflection into an almost surrealist voice as he compares an owl to a baby clock.

The last two stanza remain the most haunting and hard to penetrate, his first line “the 5 a.m. grass is nasal now, in hums battleships and valleys.” Here he is exploring the suburban world of time set morning sprinklers. Describing how as Americans we have fought numerous wars in a number of distant lands or “valleys” that have brought us the comfort of watering our lawns, without stress of drought or tyranny. The “fascist birds” may be the strict conservatism of post WW2 America, in which he hold onto our suburban lifestyle with an almost fascists pretense of keeping it that way. This portrayal of America lends to the first and last part of the poem, in which he creates a feeling that although the facade of freedom enables us, it creates an invisible cast of dead-like men and women who exist as the servants to the ideology of “the American Dream.” Constantly trying to strive for that dream, but failing at every opportunity. As the poem ends, he states “I put out the lamp and get in bed beside her, she thinks I’m there mumbles a rosy gratitude” again his character becomes non-existence, yet his supposed lover feels comforted by his presence, sharpening his form into something solid. As It closes he seems to “swim away from frogs and fortunes” this references to the Grimm fairytale “The Frog and the Princess” where the princess discovers a prince by kissing a frog. Bukowski is distancing himself away from the “happily ever after” that with his status he could never occupy. Where the only extent of comfort for him comes from gently rubbing up against another in bed. Being “dead” he feels he can only give comfort and never really receive, as his modes of expression are limited to the type of life he must lead.