Slouching Toward Nirvana
Bukowski's Book Includes Reflections on His Place in Literature.
Slouching Toward Nirvana presents his thoughts on growing old. Many of the poems are written in his 70s, but he still conveys a sense of adventure in his life.
Charles Bukowski wrote poems to be published after his death, and a number of them are presented in the 2005 collection Slouching Toward Nirvana. Bukowski died in San Pedro, California in 1994 at the age of 73. He had achieved world wide fame by that time and writes many of the selections about life in his seventies, looking back at a difficult life through it all.
He says he took up writing twice in his life. Starting out writing short stories, Bukowski wrote his first poems when he was 35 and continued writing both poetry and fiction until the end of his life. His last novel, Pulp, was published a year after his death.
Bukowski and the Canon
Bukowski presents a solid story teller with a flair for humor and survival instincts. For instance, he writes of meeting up with William Burroughs at a reading featuring the two of them and how they ignored each other. Afterwards on the plane home, Bukowski shoots double shots of vodka 7s the whole flight back. Bukowski has his own poison to pick, and it’s alcohol; he even says the airplane food tastes good that time.
Bukowski tended to ignore more canonical contemporary poets in general. He writes that he has read Auden, Pound, Jeffers, and Lawrence - but he will distinguish himself from other writers and poets of the present day.
If his readership is not complaining about his place in the literary canon, Bukowski seems to be a little sensitive about it still even in his later ages. He writes in the poem “it’s strange,” “tonight I spoke to a man on the telephone who is / coming from Germany to take photos and to interview me / for a weekly magazine, for my / 70th birthday. / and when I hung up I was sure I could hear / Pound, Jeffers, Auden and Lawrence / laughing in the / dark.” The last lines are not funny (as Bukowski often is), but rather surprises the reader with its candor.
Meter
His free verse meter leads the eye down the page with shorter length lines given to words of particular importance. For instance, “70th birthday” or “dark” in the poem above, are stressed by his line construction. The eye gravitates naturally down the page with shorter lines.
Slouching Toward Nirvana
The title of the collection, Slouching Toward Nirvana, comes from “poem for nobody.” In this poem, Bukowski looks back over his life and sees “old shoes abandoned in old corners like half-forgotten / voices that once said love but did not mean / love.” He goes on to say, “we are all / museums of fear.” The last lines of the poem indicate Bukowski, the rebel against the poetic canon, striking out against the loss of form and decency: “with each morning less than zero, / humanity is a hammer to the brain, / our lives a bouquet of blood, you can watch / this fool still with his harmonica / playing elegiac tunes while / slouching toward Nirvana / without / expectation or / grace.”
This poem appeals by reminding readers of the foolishness of human endeavor. Bukowski examines the process toward enlightenment in Sloughing Toward Nirvana, and brings his irrepressible self forward even more so in the process.
Bukowski’s forty-five books of poetry and prose have been translated into over a dozen languages.
