by Charles Bukowski
Ecco Press 2009
Reviewed by Joseph Goosey
“drinking. yeh.”
I am often among the first to hop on the wagon and buy a new Charles Bukowski collection. On whole, I have looked forward to and more or less enjoyed even the posthumous collections many Bukowski fans rail against. So naturally, I’ve been waiting around for the release of The Continual Condition for awhile.
First time through, I consumed the entire 127-page collection – a group of “never-before-collected,” and mostly later pieces constructed of sparse, one- or two-word lines – in the amount of time it took to drink five Budweiser American Ales. Some poems reward scrutiny; the vast majority are depressingly interchangeable. Bukowski essentially summarizes the collection with four words in the almost memorable “my soul is gone”: “screenplay, horses, drinking. yeh.”
While it’s true that these themes would be expected (perhaps even relished) by readers familiar with Bukowski, they come across as flabby and repetitive in The Continual Condition. Generally, his insights edge dangerously toward platitude; in “died 9 april 1553,” our poet declares:
life is not what
we think it
is, it’s only what we
imagine it to
be
and for us
what we imagine
becomes
mostly so.
This borderline greeting card-verse represents neither the hard-luck wisdom of Bukowski’s best work nor an insight we can’t get from NYC Transit’s “Train of Thought” series (the series, which consists of literary quotations posted in subway cars, recently offered this pearl from Schopenhauer’s “Studies in Pessimism: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”) Bukowski’s spare lines dramatize what is a fairly predictable conceit.
There is some return on this $27 hardcover investment. Upon finishing my fifth beer, I arrived easily and indifferently to the end of the collection – and suddenly it was as though the editor (or the book itself) knew that I’d be clamoring for something that would last. The final poem, “bayonets in candlelight,” is electric, filled with absurd, desperate energy that shucks mortality:
you can take my bones and paint them green
and hang them out the window like letters from Spain
but
I will be running down the hall of your granite heart
for years
Do what you like to him. The poet is dead, yes, but he stops somewhere waiting for you. The only question is what he’s going to do with you when you get there; if “to kiss her long dark hair” serves as any indication, perhaps he’s not the type that means to inflict harm. At least, not to abstract things:
I don’t want to murder art.
He didn’t, and hasn’t here. Some say Bukowski slipped in his old age. Maybe. But a book like this might also have to do with corporate common sense: spread every ounce of work by a popular name to as much of the public as possible. It’s a slippery slope, but it has yet to murder art, and in this case, certainly won’t afflict Bukowksi’s legacy.
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