Bukowski’s Future: Old Man, Dead in a Room

In a letter to John William Corrington, Charles Bukowski assigns temporal positions to three of his poems. He writes, Old Man, Dead in a Room is my future, The Tragedy of the Leaves is my past, and The Priest and the Matador is a dawdling in between. Corrington had earlier proposed a lineage in which Bukowski stands as the American representative of a tradition of literary outsiders. It is a tradition that stretches from Villon to Rimbaud, composed of figures for whom literature is inseparable from dispossession, for whom the act of writing requires the forfeiture of belonging.

It is not clear whether Bukowski’s alignment with Old Man, Dead in a Room as a future was offered in irony or with resignation. The poem does not reach forward. It settles. It names what remains. There is no pretense of transcendence, and no performance of despair. The opening line asserts that what lies on the speaker is not death, but something equally real. The poem gathers objects, gestures, bodily states: landlords, walnuts, window shades, cat-mouthed sparrows, women breaking into steam. These details are neither ornamental nor illustrative. They do not stand in for anything else. The reader is not instructed how to feel about them. They appear, and then they remain.

The force at the poem’s centre is never fully identified. It is compared to windmills, to a foe turned by the heavens against one man. Bukowski calls it Art. He also calls it Poetry, but the naming does not settle anything. The experience described is not one of inspiration or expression. It is one of persistent imposition, a presence that cannot be invited and cannot be dismissed. To name it is already to misrecognise it. The poem seems to know this, which is perhaps why it continues to return to the phrase, this thing upon me, as if the only accuracy possible lies in repetition.

It is not a death poem, although death is invoked. It is a poem that considers what will be left behind, and what will not. The speaker imagines a cheap room, a dropped pen, grey hands. What is left behind is not a reputation. It is not a name, or a meaning. It is something else, which the poem calls a treasure, and which is defined only by the fact that it remains unclaimed. They will find me there, Bukowski writes, and never know.