A Following

"Writing" by Charles Bukowski (1991)

Another late-period poem reflecting on the significance of writing, in “Writing” we learn that this human practice “blasts the / darkness” and

is the

ultimate

psychiatrist (Lines 21-23).

“Writing” also provides insight into some of the tricky ironies, ambiguities and representational sleights of hand that turn up in “A Following,” such as when it affirms the following:

writing

laughs

at itself,

at pain (Lines 31-34).

Does “writing” in this line refer to the act of jotting something down or to the result left on the page? How is it possible for writing—an inert material object—to laugh at itself? Crucially, the poem leaves open-ended the question of whether it defines “writing” in terms of the act of representation or as the specific content of a given representation, inviting audiences to reflect upon the transformations both aspects perform between the real world and the fictional world created for readers.

"Alone with Everybody" by Charles Bukowski (1977)

One of Bukowski’s most famous poems, “Alone with Everybody” addresses the problem of human loneliness more directly and with fewer consolations than “A Following.” As its title suggests, the problem of loneliness or aloneness here is not as simplistic a matter as merely finding other people to spend time with, as Chinaski’s callers do in “A Following,” but is built into the singleness of the human mind or subjectivity. In other words, no one else can peer through one’s own eyes. Bukowski explores this dynamic in “Alone with Everybody” through the images of the mind’s encasement in the body, beneath layers of “flesh” and “bone.” The poem also similarly relies on a paronomastic use of the term “fill” to describe what “junkyards,” “madhouses,” and “graveyards” do—in other words, fill up with humans—but what nothing else can do for the fundamental human need for connection.

"The Conspiracy" by Robert Creeley (1955)

A sunnier sentiment in a poem that, like “A Following,” addresses the do-it-yourself ethos of the postwar literary culture can be found in Robert Creeley’s “The Conspiracy.” The poem, directly addressed to another poet and potential collaborator, requests poems by mail from its addressee and celebrates the value of small-scale collaboration, explaining, “things tend to awaken / even through random communication.” Independent journals like Origin and Black Mountain Review, with whom Creeley was closely involved, helped establish the basic template for independent publishing in the United States that Bukowski takes as a given in presenting his editors’ banter with Chinaski in “A Following.” Creeley’s poem also, like Bukowski’s, expresses the general irreverence and mischievous puckishness that defined much of the period’s independent work operating outside the bounds of the academic literary world that Charles Bernstein called “official verse culture.”