Last Call: The Bukowski Legacy Continues

 
Last Call: The Bukowski Legacy Continues

Editor: RD Armstrong

Lummox Press

www.lummoxpress.com

ISBN: 978-1-929878-86-4

$18.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Here you will find shit jobs, mad women in miniskirts, junkies, cigar smoke, insomniacs, booze, broads, swollen testicles, and despair.  Sound like the world of the late writer and poet Charles Bukowski. Well it’s not. But it is an anthology inspired by him and Bukowski remains the central reference point throughout.

RD Armstrong edited this ambitious book (apparently his second attempt to get it just right) hoping to lay out the legacy and influence of Bukowski for all to see.  Like their mentor’s own work many of these pieces are angry and defiant in both style and subject matter. One of their repeated targets, and deservedly so, is academia.

Michael Ford’s poem, Not Celebrity Bowling: Cerebrally Bowling, goes right to the heart of it,

spare me the hypocrisy of the gutless rituals of

anthologized poetry; English Department ivory

tower cowards publishing what they have turned

the art of poetry into: bubbles on a fat vat full of

bland oatmeal.

Mark Terrill puts it another way, but no less effective, in his poem Bukowski: 3/10/94,

..there are the

Great Living Poets

the Great Dead Poets

and then there’s me

another two-bit guttersnipe.

In an obscenity- laced poem, appropriate to the book, FN Wright’s Bukowski and Me makes the point that the underside of culture where Bukowski  found his muses is not only alive and well but still a suitable setting for intense poetry,

I attract bad women

drunks

junkies

whores…

catholic girls gone bad

& Baptist minister’s

daughters

are particularly

fond of me

unlike Bukowski

I am not

a great poet

but I’m damn good…

My Comrades, a poem by Joe Speer with a provocative title, needles the literary establishment. Speer allies the underclass, non-elite writers with luminaries such as Sir Thomas Malory, a prisoner, Cervantes, impoverished, Thomas Hardy and Emile Proust, self-publishers, William Faulkner, a rum smuggler, and others. He details his points of comparison thusly:

this one teaches

that one lives with his mother and cat

another pencraft master takes drugs, non-prescription

and cleans house as his wife earns a living.

In other words, here are poets from the real world, not that rarified artificial world of artsy-fartsy elitism.

Poets, who emerge from this seamy world of damaged creative people, have advantages. In order to measure out the truth, they lie better than most. And that is only the beginning of it. Ellaraine Lockie in her clear-eyed telling poem, Poets at Any Price, says,

They’ll exploit

confessor, friend or family …

And,

I tell you

Because I’ve been truth’s victim

Verbal accounts reiterated

verbatim in someone else’s poem

Secrets exposed as sonnets

Composites as transparent

as the silk panties I wore…

Plato was right: never trust poets.

The world of Bukowski and his acolytes is reduced to a piece of bruised fruit in an interesting piece by Doug holder entitled, It Is Late and the Fruit Is Bad. Beware there is a little bit of DH Lawrence’s poem Figs here. Holder’s persona chooses to eat in a way not acceptable in polite society. He says,

I take its flesh

deep into my mouth

digest the ferment

of its rotten skin

cut the lights

Cutting the lights seals the deal. We are among the vulgar. Not just everyman seeking satisfaction and a high, but an artist, who, even in miniature, meticulously records the truth of his appetites. If eating rotting fruit this way seems vaguely licentious, eating rotting fruit in the middle of the night in the dark seems downright obscene. 

Another all-nighter was had by G. Murray Thomas. In his poem, To the Editor Whose Name Will Appear on my Next Rejection Slip, the poet says,

I sat up all night

drinking beer

and going over my

unpublished poems

searching for one written

in the cheap…

The poet tries to match expectations of a Bukowski –like poem. He finally gives up, becomes himself again and writes this poem chronicling the process. I wonder if the rejection letter he expected was from this very anthology.

Breaking the mood, but not the context, the short story by RD Armstrong, Two Drink Minimum, grabs you with its great musically obscene refrain. The refrain breaks up the story of a construction job gone bad. Add the battle of the sexes and the result is a hilarious read.

Another one of the stories is an odd but serious piece by John Macker, called Not Too far From the Maverick Bar. The protagonist has packed his dead dog’s body in dry ice and trekked into the desert to bury him and seek redemption. The story takes a neat and satisfying turn at the end with Bukowski doing a cameo.

I found all the essays interesting, but one was especially memorable, A Buk Remembrance by Michael Meloan. Three quarters of the essay describes the legendary Bukowski alit with booze and on a rampage. The last quarter portrays a thoughtful, workaholic, with more than a touch of irony in his pronouncements.

That Charles Bukowski would really get a kick out of this book.