Charles Bukowski and Poetry

Ok.  I'm in a writing mood and I want to dump my thoughts out on my lovely blog page.  Whether you read or pass it by quickly to view another blog post, is of no consequence to me.  Seriously.  I write for me.  I'll touch base on that a little further in this post if you stick around.
    
So I was doing a little internet surfing and reading some interesting pages centering around poetry.  A particular web comment page caught my eye "Bukowski..."  Blah, blah, blah.  Just the very mention of Bukowski catches my attention.  So I bopped right in and started reading the comments.  The commenters were young poets.  Early 20's, I'm guessing, judging from their avi pics.  What I read was very interesting and completely unexpected.

So many negative comments on Bukowski's video interview, in which his comment of "Letting the poem flow through you" and how "writing poetry becomes easier" when a poet does that.  Sounds so poetic, I could hardly believe any poet would disagree with him.  But they did.  A good 10 out of the 12 commenting on that post.  One viewer of Bukowski's statement focused only on his looks.  Her comment completely swaying away from the point of the article.  Another commenter made writing poetry sound like a gruesome painful task.  She honestly did not sound like she enjoyed writing poetry and I sat and wondered why she even attempted to write it in the first place; if it was so gruesome, painstaking, and hard for her. 

Bukowski, if you've seen his picture, is eccentric and hard.  Hard, deep wrinkles trailing all over his face.  Cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, and a full cup of coffee sitting on a table full of scraps of paper left over from his writing.  Funny.  I more notice his childlike, boyish grin that suddenly softens those hard wrinkles.  His poetry is his life.  His observations.  His ingenious way of pointing out the human emotion...all of them. 

I love Bukowski and Walt Whitman and many poets like them, for their freestyle verse.  Reading a poet that cuts straight to the bleeding vein without apology is so refreshing.  Now it means I can stop limiting my own poetry and get down to honestly expressing myself.  Bukowski's hard edge poems grab me and keep me and make me think.  I like to think.  Bukowski's unexpected softer side is also beautiful to read and I hope these young poets continue to study him so they will also see this side of him; where he unabashedly laments about the love of his life or the girlfriend that got away. 

It appeared to me that the young poets on this web page were more focused on the tanka rather than the words in that tanka.  More focused on the stanza, rather than the mental picture that comes into the reader's head while reading that stanza.  Big, flowery words don't always have to be used and long, drawn-out poems are not necessary.  Both Bukowski and Hemingway were big believers in "doing away with unnecessary words." 

It all comes down to the poet's own personal style.  I read from several poets, both past and present, to draw a comparison and learn.  I play around with different styles not really focusing on whether my poem can be classified as a tanka, haiku, or free verse.  I tend to lean more toward free verse because it frees me to experiment more.  That's just me, though.  I never write a poem with the thought of whether it will offend or gain more fans.  If I do that, I miss out on the whole purpose of writing poetry in the first place. 

Of course I enjoy encouragement and praise and even tactful criticism.  But when it boils down to it, when I'm writing a poem, all thoughts are deleted except me and that poem.  It does "flow through me".  My best poems are when I'm willing to just relax and honestly feel the feeling of a particular poem I want to write.  And yes, it's extremely easy.  I don't worry about if anyone will even like it.  Guess what.  More people like the poems that I write without thought or care what someone might perceive. 

I find it funny, too that the young poets are more worried about getting published than they are about the sheer simplicity of writing a poem.  There's richness in just allowing a poem to be written - whether it's comical, edgy, drastic, sad, or uplifting.  We get so caught up sometimes of what other people and poets might think of our work - when all we really need to do is just write.