Ordinary madness

Charles BUKOWSKI may be a Los Angeles icon, but reading "The Pleasures of the Damned" -- the new volume of his selected poetry edited by John Martin, his longtime benefactor at Black Sparrow Press -- it's impossible not to ask some hard questions about his status and whether it is deserved. I've often thought his place in this city's literary pantheon was more a matter of opportunity than of talent; when he started writing full-bore, in the mid-1950s, few people were creating an authentic local literature, which, for better or worse, is what he did.

Back then, most L.A. writing was the work of outsiders, with a small indigenous poetry scene, leftist and oddly formal in its aesthetics, centered around such journals as Coastlines and the California Quarterly. Although Bukowski published in such venues, he stood against all that; a loner, avowedly apolitical, he focused on the small degradations of daily life. "there is a loneliness in this world so great / that you can see it in the slow movement of / the hands of a clock," he wrote in "The Crunch," describing "the terror of one person / aching in one place / alone / untouched / unspoken to / watering a plant." He was trying to articulate a vision of Los Angeles as an urban landscape, not exotic but mundane, where we not so much reinvent ourselves as remain unreconciled.

And yet Bukowski was hardly the first writer to look at L.A. through this filter. One thinks of his great hero John Fante, whose superlative 1939 novel, "Ask the Dust," evokes the city in similarly existential terms. It's no coincidence that decades later, Bukowski was the one who brought Fante's work to the attention of Martin, or that when Black Sparrow reissued the then-long-out-of-print "Ask the Dust" in 1980, he would write the preface. "Yes, Fante had a mighty effect upon me," he wrote. "Not long after reading [his] books I began living with a woman. She was a worse drunk than I was and we had some violent arguments, and often I would scream at her, . . . 'I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!' "

Fante makes an appearance about three-quarters of the way through "The Pleasures of the Damned" in a pair of poems inspired by his death in 1983. "the writing of some / men / is like a vast bridge / that carries you / over / the many things / that claw and tear," Bukowski writes about his mentor in "The Wine of Forever," but the bulk of this 500-plus page collection highlights the fact that his own work is not up to such a standard -- not even close. Rather, the 274 poems here affirm a sense of the author as a hit-or-miss talent, capable of his own brand of small epiphany but often stultifyingly banal.