Poetry/Punk/Production: Some Recent Writing in L.A.

james 127 David E. James Poetry/Punk/Production: Some Recent Writing in L.A.1 "I don't like Los Angeles," Ruth Rae whimpered. "I haven't been there in years. I hate L.A." She peered wildly around. "So do I," the pol said as he locked the rear compartment off from the cab and dropped the key through a slot to the pois outside. "But we must learn to Uve with it: it's there." Philip K. Dick "In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary" Anon. The photograph in Charles Bukowski's most recent collection of poetry, Dangling in the Tournefortia, shows him casual in a t-shirt, now late in middle age, but still "grizzled," belligerent and apparently unchanged by the international success which, more than that of any other single writer, made a place for Los Angeles on the map of contemporary poetry and in doing so identified him as its exemplary practitioner. The mutual ratification in his work of a determinedly vulgar diction, a refusal to construct the line as a metrical or conceptual unit, and a limited repertoire of banal activities (drinking, vomiting, betting, pissing) enacted in a similarly limited terrain of stucco apartments and streets from the track to the liquor store produced a fully articulated model ofpoesis that has been available for general use. It does no disservice to the vigor of Bukowski's originality and the importance of his example also to recognize that the primary stance of the mode he uses is so widespread that it can be properly thought of as a public production, a social inevitability that he seized upon and clarified; and so we can redefine his achievement as in part entrepreneurial, the negotiation of that mode into a literary establishment which the time of his intervention was constituted in quite different terms. And while that stance embodies the alienation that is so central to the modern experience as a whole, still the contemplation of an alien and self-destructing environment by an alienated and self-deprecating narrator has proven a particularly useful and appropriate means of situating sensibility in Los Angeles, a city that has typically had little occasion for poetry. Though the notion of a school overstates the commonality of those poets who write in Bukowski's mode, as well as being contradictory to 128 the minnesota review the resolutely isolated stance that is its basic premise, still it can be seen everywhere. Wanda Coleman's change of key, to take a particularly dramatic example, easily segues from the white male to the black female version. "Where I Live" features the same working class streets and businesses, the same casual violence and sexuality, the same problems with landlords and police and the sideswiping of the same cars that comprise Bukowski's world and, apart from the inversion in color and gender, celebrates them with the same wry machismo: the country is her pimp and she can turn a trick swifter than any bitch ever graced this earth she's the baddest piece of ass on the west coast named black los angeles (p. 14. Coleman reads this on Koices of the Angels) Given the peculiarly powerful identification between the place and the persona, and the degree to which this composite "20 Century Fox" all but totally occupies the poem it is right that in her moments of selfconsciousness Coleman will reflect on the dependence of her voice upon the world she creates, inevitably drawn to wonder whether she is "poet writing a poem / or a poem writing a poet" (p. 97). With a similar concern , Bob Flanagan, finding himself telling his girlfriend in a bar that her poems are no good, going to the icebox for a beer and then going to the john, attempts to escape the codes that reach out from the genre to strangle life; he fails and knows it when his girlfriend beats upon the bathroom door, demanding to be let in to piss in what, inevitably, announces itself as a "Bukowski Poem." The stance that began as a rejection of rhetoric and artifice, an attempt to affirm the sufficiency of plain speech and the everyday situation, itself became...