A Following

A relatively late poem in Charles Bukowski’s extensive oeuvre, “A Following” relies on the scenic, dramatic irony of a late-night phone call its narrator relates to reflect wryly on the ways in which imperfect humans find fleeting connection amid life’s general bleakness. Within this general dramatic context, the poem also explores questions about fame and influence, as well as candor, intimacy, communication, and the ever-present Bukowskian topic of addiction. “A Following” relates an anecdote about a phone call the speaker receives from a drunken, would-be editor and his anonymous companion, as well as the speaker’s curiously restrained, ambivalent, and ambiguous response to the callers’ solicitations for poems to publish.

Written somewhat self-consciously in the aftermath of the postwar American literary renaissance that birthed the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, the Black Arts Movement, the New York School, and many other small-scale literary cadres, the poem’s concerns with subcultures and artist communities resembles poems like Robert Creeley’s “The Conspiracy.” But Bukowski’s world-weary gallows humor also locates him in the line of misanthropic European modernist writers like Louis Ferdinand Celine, or even Charles Baudelaire in prose poems from Paris Spleen, like “Get Yourself Drunk” and “Let’s Beat Up the Poor!” More squarely in the American grain, Bukowski’s spare

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