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Reviews:

Self Portrait, With Cigarette

by James McGoram

19 April 2008

LET’S go back in time a few years. Picture, if you will, a bookish young man who is desperately trying to be cool. He’d like to think that in some small way, much like his less bookish and hard-living brothers, he is a rebel too. He may not have tattoos, smoke weed, or ride a motorbike, but he does read Bukowski.

Bukowski is a poet of the streets, sleeping with whores, losing money at the track, drinking and raging at the establishment. A living icon of 20th-century hedonism and hard living. An anti-academic with a paradoxically refined taste in music.

To the young man he is a hero, who has used the power of his personality to raise himself from the sludge of the gutter to become one of the most rock’n’roll poets in recent American history.

The young man is older now, and has, ironically, been asked to review this latest release of Bukowski’s poetry. I’m not any cooler, but the good thing about age is that you stop caring. Which is an interesting thought to have in mind when approaching this collection. Bukowski was old when he wrote this. Old and rich (he even writes one poem about his gold card and his BMW). He was, perhaps, still a drunken bastard, but the myth that I, like so many ‘‘blue-eyed boys from English departments’’ fell in love with was only that, a tale of long ago.

Fully aware of this legend, it’s an amused, playful poet that jots these notes. The dirty old man is still there, but he seems less angry, less eager to prove his worth. And why should he have to? He’s dead now, and he writes as though he knows it.

The cover of the book bears a portrait reminiscent of Van Gogh. Self Portrait, With Cigarette? The idea of autobiography stayed with me, and it’s fitting, because you can’t ever read Bukowski’s poems without reading the man himself. He and his alter ego, Chinaski, live on the surface of these words, disingenuously frank about every thought and feeling, even to
the point of banality.

For a book of poetry it’s surprisingly easy to become absorbed in this narrative, even at its most humdrum, if only because of the confidence of his free verse. I found myself reading the book from cover to cover as though it were a novel, and, like a novel, it’s not about the
individual poems. His voice builds throughout the book, and one poem after another you devour the pages, until, hours later, you realise that among the smutty, selfish and self-aggrandising words are shards of brilliance. This is his greatest trick. To make you believe he’s nothing, to make you laugh at him, to make you detest him, and then to trip you with a
line such as this:

like
waiting for death
now
it was just an endless determination to
endure.

You can forgive the mediocre work, even enjoy it, because it frames so well the glimpses of something more heroic. I’ve got nothing else to say about it except that the leading quote on the cover is by Sean Penn. So maybe there’s hope, maybe it will make me cool after all.