"Sometimes You Get So Alone It Makes Sense" review

Charles Bukowski was a barfly who lived a trashcan life and wrote about it.

Beautifully.

Skid row. Whorehouses. Rooming houses. Horse tracks. Crass, crude words. Poems often written naratively, suffused with simplistic dialogue, one word per line.

“Sometimes You Get So Alone It Makes Sense” is one of several poetry collections and novels published since Bukowski’s death at age 74 in 1994.

With humor and pathos, Bukowski chronicled his downtown Los Angeles life of sleeping on park benches, scrounging dumpsters for the daily paper and panhandling for rent money.

He also gave readings at colleges and coffeehouses and gained a following. Women wrote fan letters, inviting Bukowski to hook up when he came to their towns. Fellow writers offered constructive criticism of his work.

Bukowski’s taste for art and literature comes through without pretension or affectation. Reading Dostoevsky and listening to Beethoven were as common to Bukowski’s life as working the assembly line at a Nabisco factory or sharing a bottle with derelicts in a rundown room.

I wouldn’t want Bukowski’s life for myself and definitely not for my children, but I respect his talent and integrity. Anyone can go slumming’ and scrawl vulgarities, but it takes a thoughtful mind to unearth meaning in existence. Bukowski didn’t romanticize the low life. He humanized it. He gave a voice to the man who lost at the card table and the prostitute he’s fighting with in a cheap motel.

Some would look down on Bukowski, joyful at sitting drunk before his typewriter at 3 a.m., but he radiated contempt for the writer, drunk on the word, “poet.” He hated affluence and effeteness in writers who “understand nothing but the ends of their fingernails and their delicate hairlines and their lymph nodes.” He believed substance was only possible through living hard times and “regathering.”

Occasionally, a poem promises more and falls flat, but more often he pulls off simplicity. Bukowski wrote for the psychological gaps caught in the white noise of modern, impersonal life.

“The freeway is a circus of cheap and petty emotions. The freeways are a lesson in what we have become and most of the crashes and deaths are the collision of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented lives,” he writes in the poem, “drive through hell.”

Beyond the brothels, garbage cans and puke in Bukowski’s poetry, there’s something like…humanity.

Gateway literature: A friend introduced me to Bukowski around 18 years ago at about the same time he introduced me to “Naked Lunch” by William Burroughs so I recommend that.