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by R. C. (RCat) Arquette
I was hooked on him from my first reading; I had to have more. I started picking up his older books that were still available and added newer publications as they arrived. Charles, Hank to those who were close to him, was an amazing writing machine. He must have spent half his waking life, and a good deal of his intoxicated life, transferring images to the blank page. He was totally obsessed with his writing and driven to keep the words flowing in spite of all the critics that dismissed him as just another drunken poet with no concept of poetry. Hank died in 1994 and the argument over his place in poetic history is still going on. There are those who have written of Hank and his writing career much better than I can. The information on the man is all over the web. For anyone interested in finding out more about his history and what collegians, educators, editors, and writers have to say about him, there is no end to opinions. I'm sure you've heard it said more than once that 'opinions are like assholes, everybody has one'. With that in mind, I too will keep my personal opinions on my bookshelf next to Hank's books. What I can tell you is that the man writes simply, economically, and directly from the mind to the page. His gritty upbringing in Los Angeles left him with a library of film noir images of urban life from the last century. His acne as a teen left him an outsider, feeling shunned, he developed a hard resilience to the world around him. His father beat him with a razor strap almost everyday as a boy, so he grew up angry and hurt. He moved from job to job as he grew older, finding himself in cheap apartments, cheap bars, with a variety of cheap women and hangers-on that surrounded him on a daily basis. Hank was often picking fights in these bars not really caring whether he won or lost, he was use to the ass-kicking that life and his father had doled out. Yet through it all, Hank continued to bang out images of his life in stark little slices. Profiling his lifetime in unflattering words and illustrations. Real, naked, and often ugly to the ear and eye, Hank would be the first to tell you he was not a loveable individual. He could be rude, crude, and lewd, but always straight from the hip with his thoughts, whether you liked them or not. I grew up in middle class or lower middle class American culture, Hank was not someone who occupied my world, so I have to think that it was for that very reason this caustic Don Quixote that drew me in. He described a gray, shady, city of concrete and steel and he did it so well I could smell the garbage on the street or the shrinking urinal cakes in the men's rooms of all those sleazy little bars. The smell of cigarette smoke and beer, the sound of classical music (his favorite) playing over the neighbors fighting next door, the sirens in the streets, sweaty sheets, and long hot nights in canyons with no breeze, all of this comes alive each time I pick up his poetry. Maybe we're attracted to our cultural opposites, or maybe it's because we were taught this isn't the way 'good people' live their lives that pulls us in like a magnet to steel, something taboo that makes us want to peer into Pandora's Box. Buk has been an inspiration to me. He has shown me how to cast off the unnecessary, write it like you think it, like you would tell it to someone face to face. Put down the sticky details that others might leave out in favor of a more flowery or flattering set of images; tell it like it is. I'm sure Hank was a real pain in the ass so I'm not going to harbor any melancholy ideals about how he and I could have hung out and been grand chums, no, he would have run me off after the first night I slept on his couch. I will keep the toolkit he gave me full of poetic ideals and use them to bang away at my own version of Bukowski and I will try and tell others about the man as often as I can. This is something Hank wrote about poetry. It's not the most shining example of the man's art, but it does have something to say to all we would be poets: RCat - Your Faithful
Reporter
Poetry it Charles Bukowski
Who is this Guy RCat? Currently, his duties include acting as the head of a family consisting of an overworked wife, a vibrating teenaged son, and an over stimulated housecat. An elder daughter resides at some distance with her own family; a husband, two sons, and a daughter. As head of this merry band of pranksters, the illusionary aspects of his carefree life are played out on the stage of daily routine. RCat is a self described "survivor," having lived through the "flower power" promises of the 1960's with the goals of world peace, universal brotherhood, free-love, and the legalization of certain organic herbs. Contrary to what others might say, he can still remember parts of it quite vividly. Sadly, those cosmic issues have now been reduced to the cliché. He now, more realistically, understands the world has gone quite mad and no longer cares to be a part of the continuing descent into oblivion. The thought of putting on a loincloth to venture forth and live out his days meditating in a tall tree in a distant forest sounds appealing. Of course, he isn't kidding himself. Chances are a noisy bunch of cretins will quickly invade the tree next to him. Ah well, such is the way of this planet we call home. In the meantime, he scribbles poetry, short stories, and essays, as well as a choppy stream of drawings, cartoons and works of art. All done with a grin as meditative mental therapy in an effort to hold onto what little remains of his sanity. Enjoy him while you can, he is the quintessential endangered species.
For more from RC visit his columns: February, January, Decmeber, November, October; and his poetry or his home. |
Nothin' Better
Songs
of
I don't remember when it was I first heard of Charles
Bukowski, but as is my fate, the man had already lived a life
and died by the time I found his words. Needless to say I was
depressed when I learned this, more depressed than usual, thinking
that the man had so much more to offer; his poetic life had been
cut short. This is what I thought, but on my next trip to the
bookstore I discovered the man had been writing since he was
13, writing through the 1940's and published in the late 1950's
and the list of his published works is as long as my arm.
R.
C. Arquette, "RCat" to friends and fellow writers,
is an aging hippie and practicing curmudgeon. He was dragged
into the world, kicking and screaming, back in the middle of
the last century; 1950 to be exact. His outburst clearly showed
his disdain for reality at the earliest of stages. He grew up
living in the sub-tropical splendor of the "Sunshine State,"
Florida, US of A, where he attended Jr. College and after twenty
years received his AA degree; what can I say, life kept getting
in the way.
