Great God Pan

This doesn't mean it's all Bukowski's fault. He did inspire bad poets, and he damn near invented the Five Pillars of the Very Modern Poet (How Much I Drink, How Much I Smoke, My Penis, My Reflection in the Mirror, My Sitting Here Trying to Think Up Something to Write About Next), but to his credit he never forced, or even recommended, anyone else to write.

Even so, one questions the merit of his posthumous book, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, which is a series of journal entries written at the computer about sitting at the computer writing a journal. Here's some of the worst of it: "Writing is when I fly, writing is when I start fires. Writing is when I take death out of my left pocket and catch him as he bounces back . . . I know why Hemingway used the bullfights."

But even amidst the bad writing, Bukowski makes the honest, funny, humble sentences of a good writer. "I see enough of humanity at the racetracks, the supermarkets, gas stations, freeways, cafes, etc. This can't be helped. But I feel like kicking myself in the ass when I go to gatherings, even if the drinks are free."

Now that you've pictured the old man puttering in his study, patiently tapping at the computer and waiting to die, imagine something else. Think of dim Hollywood movie actors weeping over semen-stained Bukowski books on the verandas of obscenely swank hillside mansions, scribbling sincere doggerel about cigarette lighters and pussy.

Michael Madsen, movie actor, is a bad writer, so bad of one in fact, that if not for the foreward to Madsen's Burning in Paradise by fellow movie actor Dennis Hopper, I would have difficulty bringing to mind a worse one. Writes Hopper:

Madsen.
Poet.

I like him better than Kerouac.
Raunchier, more poignant.

He's got street language.
Images I can relate to.

Here is just one of the poignant images that Dennis can relate to:

She walked around the room naked,
picking up roomservice plates
and cigarette butts

I was standing in the bathroom
washing off my cock and looking
at my reflection in the mirror.
I don't know who I saw,
but at least I recognized him.

Madsen, who before writing this book appeared in Free Willy and Free Willy 2, composes verse in the "street language" he has learned over the years.

Snorting cocaine with C.B.
and firing off a handgun through the roof
on New Year's Eve.
Standing alone on the beach
and fucking up my leg
in a motorcycle accident

Alone in a room full of people

And alone writing all this stuff

One million tears over 35 years.

Theodor Adorno said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. One wonders how he might have liked poetry written not only after Auschwitz, but also after "Barfly."

At first glance, the contributors to Scream When You Burn appear eager to carry the torch of the poet-as-barbarian. The back jacket proclaims them "literary terrorists" and "established rule-breakers." A contributor who calls itself "Roland Poet X" is trumpeted simultaneously and without irony as "one of America's most innovative poets" and "L.A.'s first poetry slam champion."

"A rock and roll magazine chock full of poetry!" exclaims editor Rob Cohen, explaining the short-lived success of his poetry magazine, Caffeine, which was "not in your parents' typeface," but, rather, "dynamic in appearance and concept."

Cohen proposes that the contributors to Caffeine are part of a poetry "scene" which exists, or at least existed for a time, "on the street corners, in coffee houses, and on the Internet."

"Bukowski and Ginsberg," he writes, "are arguably the two most important poets to the coffee house writers."

Fearing the worst, this reviewer opened the book and set out to learn what a coffee house writer was. Here's what he found:

So I strap on my own phallus
My own power
As I flip him over to put my six inch manhood
into his virginal ass

But don't think that this is just a book of smut. The back cover even disparages poseurs "shouting poetry about their genitals." And a hasty inventory of Scream When You Burn reveals that of the 101 entries, just 15 make explicit reference to sex organs (13 human, 1 canine, 1 latex).

What, then, makes a coffee house writer?

After genitals, which, for the record, appear more frequently than any other single subject, the most commonly discussed topics are: murder and suicide (in 11 pieces), sex (9), guns (7), and masturbation (5). Also popular are hospital death scenes and ethnic/gay identity pieces, but surprisingly under-represented are looking in the mirror (1) and getting your head shaved (1).

16 poems include profanity; six utilize "Gen X shorthand" (e.g., "yr" for "your," "2" for "to," "2night," etc.); the word "mantra" appears in three works; five poems cite popular musicians by name, and one refers to SE Hinton's teen classic, The Outsiders.

Upon reading, there seems no common thread between Caffeine poets save that they like to press RETURN before the end of the paragraph. To this reviewer's surprise and delight, many of the those anthologized here show no interest in being in a scene or in terrorizing anybody, least of all their readers. For the best of them, the purpose, as dull and unmarketable as it may seem, is to arrange words on the page in a meaningful and beautiful manner. Consider these elegant lines from Matthias Rosenthal's "The Swastika."

Take a walk with me
come, I will lead you
past the barn
under the chestnut tree
out the northern gate
through fields of barley
on a dirt road
past the power station
and the beekeeper's house
I will lead you
to the quarry
where Dora drowned.
Don't be afraid
it happened 50 years ago
on a warm September night
before the harvest moon was full
she filled the pockets of her coat
with rocks she picked up
on the same dirt road
where we now walk.

Of course, there is no "poetry scene"?never was?and the idle fools who populate coffee shops will soon find something more exciting and remunerative to pretend to be than a writer.

Perhaps editor Cohen's most trenchant remark in his introduction is that the true purpose of his magazine was "creating a new market for poetry." Typefaces notwithstanding, there's nothing cutting-edge or rule-breaking about it. His "ideal audience," he admits, is the rather hum-drum "people like me trying to get along post-college," and his contributors are "writers with day jobs."

To Cohen's credit, a number of those writers turn out to be good ones, and they offset this collection's clenched-fist gestures of rebel hipness. It is they who will likely still be at work years from now when the scene is elsewhere and the tattoo-removal parlors outnumber the Starbucks on the streets of our fair cities.