HELP ME WITH MY HOMEWORK.

[shoeless]

background information: i have to do a research paper on charles bukowski. my teacher has a very specific process regarding this paper, where we have to turn in notecards. but not just any notecards! notecards where you take a bit of information and analyze it to shit. essentially we're writing our entire paper on these notecards before we do an outline/first draft of the paper. we have to have 70-100 of them by the end of the quarter. it sucks.

okay, so charles bukowski is a writer from LA. he was a nasty old man who wrote about drinking, sex, and the blue-collar working class, mostly. he was a raging alcoholic who based most of his fiction off his own life (supposedly). he also wrote thousands and thousands of poems. he was also kind of a liar. also he was a nasty, nasty old man. (but when he wasn't drunk he was supposed to be very sweet and gentle... who knew.)

anyway, HELP ME ANALYZE AND INTERPRET THIS GODDAMN QUOTE (from a critic):

[FONT=&quot]That his poems get an F for craft doesn’t bother him; since his life gets an F too, he achieves an extraordinary correspondence between word and action … with the headlong effort to kill himself with drinking and brawling – pummeling his life into simple enough terms to be within reach of a limited art.

i mean, i know what it means, but how the fuck do you analyze that? really?
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[Da Blob]

First of all, I would go to the school admin and complain, just because your teacher like C.B., doesn't mean s/he can impose personal taste for the writing of an obscure mediocre talent upon vulnerable students. Unless you actually picked such a loser for a topic.

It sounds as if He is being described as an anti-poet and not a true poet. One that views poetry as a sadistic effort at destruction of readers, that reflects his own acts of self-destruction...

 

[walfin]

Hey! That's not fair to the teacher. A challenge is always good.

How does your teacher want that quote to be analysed?

You could talk about the social context of the critic, the possible reasons behind that statement?

Maybe about how attitudes towards Bukowski have changed?

It's hard for us to help unless we know what your teacher means by "analyse".

 

[Chronomar]

That his poems get an F for craft doesn’t bother him; since his life gets an F too, he achieves an extraordinary correspondence between word and action … with the headlong effort to kill himself with drinking and brawling – pummeling his life into simple enough terms to be within reach of a limited art.

If I were to analyze this...

The use of the grade, "F" to describe how Bukowski is being described reminds the reader of school, which creates the idea that this "failure" of Bukowski and the Bukowski's life is a judgment, not necessarily a truth. It is a judgment by society, just as grades are a subjective judgment by society on one's own self worth and ability. This, then, easily corresponds to the way in which Bukowski does not care about his "failures" because even if they are wrong and even if they are failures in the broadest sense of the word, his life is still his own, not societies. He felt the need to express that life in prose, to convey his take on the world, though so much different from the average individual, indeed, in spite of and especially because his life was mediocre, wrong, a failure.
This critic seems to realize this--that though there is/was a lot wrong with Bukowski, although his writing's topics are crass and simplistic, and although his writing style is, in that critic's opinion, "a limited art"...Bukowski does effectively achieve his purpose with his writings.
His writing style itself conveys meaning, and just as a good public speaker should be understandable even without sound (simply through facial expression), so should a good writer even be understandable simply by what style they choose to write in.

...

I don't know if that helps (I really just wrote what came off the top of my head), but it is a start. Simply focus on the relationship between Bukowski and society, and how that critic makes the point that Bukowski's style of writing, though limited and though about crass topics, conveys exactly what it was meant to, thus rendering his writings (ironically) a success.

 

[shoeless]

nah man, i totally picked bukowski myself, upon the recommendation of my brother. my teacher hates him.

and even i don' tknow what my teacher means by analyze, so...

thank you though!

 

[juturna]

I don't really see how you can grade a poet's craft because it's a personal thing....buuuut if you want to go along with the critic for the sake of getting it done, you can take a poem like "I'm In Love" and talk about how the simple stream of conscience lacks any purposeful structure or poetic devices. Bukowski outright says in the poem, "there was no living creature as foul as I / and all my poems were / false." That's his word, and you seem to know quite a bit about his life to tie that into his action. Bleh I'm just a high school student so you should take what I say with a sieve