The Tragedy of the Leaves

CHARLES BUKOWSKI
1963

INTRODUCTION

“The Tragedy of the Leaves” is a narrative poem by Charles Bukowski, a German-American author who is noted for his heavily autobiographical stories of survival and his life as a heavy drinker existing on the fringes of society. His writing deals with raw emotion and harsh experiences, conveyed in simple, direct language and violent and sexual imagery. It is often set in the Skid Row areas of Los Angeles, the city that Bukowski called home for much of his life. “The Tragedy of the Leaves” first appeared in the collection It Catches My Heart in Its Hands: New and Selected Poems, 1955-1963 (1963). It is also available in Run With the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader (1993), and is the first poem in the collection Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (1983).

“The Tragedy of the Leaves” is reminiscent of Blues songs in that it describes a tragic and critical point in the life of the speaker, a probable alcoholic who is down on his luck. He wakes in a room surrounded by empty bottles: the potted plants are dead, his woman has left him, and his landlady is screaming for the rent, which is overdue. The poem is typical of Bukowski's work in that it explores the theme of “lowlife” existence through the persona of a downtrodden and marginalized individual.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

The American poet, novelist, and short story writer Charles Bukowski was born Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr., in Andernach, Germany, on August

16, 1920. He was the only child of an American soldier (Henry Charles Bukowski, Sr.) and a German mother, Katherine Fett Bukowski. In 1922, the family immigrated to the United States, settling in the Los Angeles area around 1925, where Bukowski spent most of his life. The city was later to become an integral part of his writing. He grew up in working-class neighborhoods where other children ridiculed him for his German origins, leading him to feel that he did not belong. Bukowski's father, who worked as a milkman, was sporadically unemployed in the Depression years (the Great Depression began with the stock market crash in 1929 and the economy only fully recovered after the end of World War II in 1945). Financial hardship did not improve his temper, and he regularly beat his son with a razor strop.

Bukowski hated his father and what he represented: the belief that economic and emotional success was won by hard work and patriotism—the American dream. Bukowski later depicted his childhood in his novel Ham on Rye (1982). In an effort to shield himself from his father's brutality, the young Bukowski began his lifelong preoccupation with alcohol. He also suffered from severe acne, which left scars on his face. He underwent painful and ineffectual hospital treatments that cemented his mistrust of authority figures (doctors, fathers, and gods), a theme that recurs in his writing. During his school years Bukowski read widely. He was particularly impressed by Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, as well as the work of D. H. Lawrence, and Ernest Hemingway.

After graduating from Los Angeles High School, Bukowski attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, studying journalism and literature. He left home in 1941 after an incident in which his father read his stories and then threw his belongings onto the lawn. He drifted across America, working in low-paying jobs such as gas station attendant, lift operator, truck driver, and post office clerk. By this time, his drinking had become habitual.

Bukowski began to write for publication in the mid 1940s, submitting short stories to the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. They were rejected. In 1944, the magazine Story published Bukowski's short story “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,” which features an alcoholic writer.

In 1944, Bukowski returned to Los Angeles. The city plays a large part in many of his writings. In the same year he met Janet Cooney Baker, with whom he lived for the next decade. She also drank heavily. In the mid 1950s, Bukowski was hospitalized with an alcohol induced bleeding ulcer and nearly died. In 1955, he married the wealthy publisher of a poetry magazine, Barbara Frye, but the marriage ended in divorce two years later. He returned to the post office in Los Angeles in 1958, where he continued to work as a clerk for over a decade. He lived for some years with Frances Smith, and in 1964 they had a daughter, Marina Louise.

Bukowski started to write poems in 1955, but his rise to literary recognition was arduous. Gradually he established a following for his depictions of down-and-out people. His first collection, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, was published in 1960, when he was forty. He was to follow this collection of poems with over forty others. It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, published in 1963, marked the first publication of “The Tragedy of the Leaves.” The collection dealt with topics typical of Bukowski's work, such as cigarettes, betting on racehorses, a call girl, and drifters. The book won a 1963 Loujon Press Award.

Between 1966 and 1973 Bukowski wrote a weekly column for the alternative newspaper Open City called “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.” The pieces were a mixture of realistic fiction, reportage, and anti-authoritarian opinion, and were collected in a book, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969).

Bukowski gained a wide readership in Germany and France, but it took longer to establish his reputation in his home country of the United States, where he remained virtually unknown beyond a small cult following. This impasse was broken in 1970, when his friend and publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press rescued him from wage slavery at the post office. Martin offered to pay the poet a monthly stipend of a hundred dollars if he would do nothing but write. In return, Martin would retain the right to publish his work. The arrangement proved a success for both publisher and author. By the time Bukowski died, his monthly payment had risen to seven thousand dollars, he had nineteen books in print, and he was a bestselling poet.

Bukowski's first collection of short stories, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972), covered similar subject matter to his poems: sex, violence, and the absurdities of life. Another collection of stories, the semi-autobiographical Hot Water Music, was published in 1983 to considerable acclaim. The protagonists of the stories are often underground writers, similar to Bukowski himself, living in hardship and violence. Bukowski's main alter ego, or autobiographical figure, is Henry Chinaski, a down-and-out writer and a modern version of the Underground Man of the Russian nineteenth-century author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky wrote his novel Notes From the Underground (1864) from the point of the view of the character of the Underground Man, an anti-hero who is hyperconscious, analyzes his own feelings and actions, feels himself a failure, and finds it impossible to engage fully in a life of action.

Chinaski also appears in many of Bukowski's novels, including Post Office (1971), where Chinaski emerges as a figure of rebellion against mean-minded bureaucrats, and Ham on Rye. The film Barfly (released 1987), for which Bukowski wrote the screenplay, stars Mickey Rourke as Chinaski. Bukowski used his experience of making Barfly as the basis of his novel Hollywood (1989), which portrays Chinaski as a successful old man leading a respectable life.

In 1973, the film director Taylor Hackford presented Bukowski to a wider audience in a documentary, Bukowski, for Los Angeles public television station KCET. The film won the San Francisco Film Festival's Silver Reel Award after being voted the best cultural film on public TV. Bukowski received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1974.

Bukowski's hell-raising personality did little to secure his reputation among the literary establishment. He was caught drunk on film praising the dictators Idi Amin and Adolf Hitler in a series of interviews shot by the French director Barbet Schroeder that ran on French TV in the mid-1970s.

In 1976, Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle, a health-food restaurateur, and they became a couple, marrying in 1985. This marked a more stable and prosperous phase of Bukowski's life. He earned steady royalties in the low six-figure range, bought a home in San Pedro, California, had a swimming pool, and drove a black BMW.

Pulp, a parody of the pulp detective novel, is the novel Bukowski worked on just prior to his death from leukemia in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994. It was published posthumously in 1994.

POEM SUMMARY

Lines 1-12

The poem opens with the speaker awakening in his room. There is an atmosphere of dryness and the potted ferns have turned “yellow as corn” and are dead. The speaker's woman has left him, and he is surrounded by empty bottles of the alcohol he has drunk. In a simile (a comparison using like or as), the empty bottles are compared with corpses drained of their lifeblood. They have become symbols of “uselessness,” a word that comments on the speaker's own life.

Into this scene of bleakness, the speaker introduces one hopeful note: the sun, which is “still good.” His attention is drawn to a note he has received from his landlady, which has either been written on yellow paper or on paper that is yellowing with age, since its “yellowness” is mentioned. The note is an eviction notice, as the speaker has not paid his rent. The note being “cracked” has a double and possibly a triple meaning: the paper is cracked through age and being dried out; the paper makes a cracking sound as the speaker handles it; and musically, a cracked note is a break in tone, as might be heard in the voice of a singer of a jazz or blues song. In the case of this last meaning, there is an implicit identification of the landlady with a jazz or blues singer. These lines may encompass one, two, or all three of these meanings.

At line 8 the speaker distances himself from the scene he has described to make the wry comment that what is needed now is a comedian or jester to make jokes about the absurdity of pain. The comedian or jester is described as “ancient style” because he was a standard character in traditional stories and dramas dating at least as far back as the ancient Greek period (this period of history is variously defined, but some historians place it between 1000 b.c.e. and 323 b.c.e.). The jester was also found in literature, drama, and folk traditions of medieval Europe, and passed into the drama of William Shakespeare, where he is usually termed a fool. The figure of the jester can connote a variety of qualities: innocence; ignorance; heterodoxy; freedom from observation of cultural, social, or religious convention; joy; freedom from earthly desires; perversity; audacity; truth; confidence; or cultural power. Traditionally, a jester or fool was given unrivalled license by his powerful or wealthy patron to speak in a disrespectful or honest way to his superiors under the protective guise of comedy. Thus Shakespeare often used a jester or fool (as in King Lear) to utter truths to the King that nobody else would dare to broach. The jester is also used to comment on the characters or action in an ironic, detached, or mocking manner.

In this poem, the jester is invoked but then immediately dismissed by the speaker. The jester would be expected to comment on the absurdity of the speaker's pain, but the speaker overrules the jester, saying that the only absurd aspect of pain is its very existence. There is no more to be said on the subject of the absurdity of pain, the speaker says.

The speaker makes a shift back to the action narrated in the poem. He shaves carefully with an old razor.

Lines 13-25

As he shaves, the speaker describes himself as “the man who had once been young and / said to have genius.” The speaker juxtaposes the promise and hope that characterized his youth with the failure and disappointment he experiences now. He identifies the tragedy of his life with “the tragedy of the leaves,” the plants that were once alive but that now are dead. His use of the third person to talk about himself (“the man who”) emphasizes the yawning gap he feels between the promise of his youth and the reality of his life as a mature man who has not fulfilled that promise.

At line 17 the narrative of the poem shifts again as the speaker makes his first decisive move. He walks out of his room into the dark hall of the building where he lives. The landlady stands there waiting for him, cursing (“execrating”) him. The word “final” suggests that she is not going to give him a second chance: this is the end of his tenure here. The words “sending me to hell” have both a figurative and a literal sense. In the figurative sense, the words mean that she is cursing or swearing at him, or damning him. Literally, the words mean that she is sending him to hell, just as a vengeful God would send a sinner to hell. This particular hell would be homelessness, life on the streets, and all the dangers and hardships attendant on that state.

The landlady is described in dehumanizing terms: she is reduced to a figure “waving her fat, sweaty arms” and screaming for the rent. This is an ugly picture that does not convey any sympathy for the landlady. The tone, however, shifts markedly in the last two lines. The speaker gives the reason why the landlady is screaming and waving her arms: “because the world had failed us / both.” Here, the landlady is brought into the orbit of the speaker, and he identifies with her: both, he says, have been let down by the world. Both are unlucky, both are suffering.

THEMES

Disappointment, Disillusionment, and Failure

The main theme of “The Tragedy of the Leaves” is the disappointment and disillusionment attendant on failure and misfortune in life. The poem captures a moment in the speaker's life when he is down on his luck. He has been drinking; his woman has left him; and he is about to be evicted from his rented room because he has not been able to pay the rent. He contrasts his present situation with the promise of his youth, when he was “said to have genius.” That promise has come to nothing, and his life is as hopeless as the dead potted plants in his room. “The tragedy of the leaves” represents the tragedy of his life. Growth, lushness, and vitality have been replaced by decay, dryness, and death.

Alienation

The speaker of the poem is portrayed as being very much alone in his life. He no longer has the companionship of his woman, his supply of alcohol has run out, and his only companions are dead plants. He lives in a rented room from which he is about to be evicted by a hostile landlady. When he uses the phrase “the man who,” about himself, the speaker shows that he is even alienated from his younger and more promising self. Mainstream society, prosperity, and employment appear to have passed him by. The descriptors “fine” and “undemanding” applied to the landlady's note may have a sarcastic ring to them: there is nothing fine about the landlady and nothing undemanding about her note, as transpires later in the poem. But these words also emphasize the speaker's cynical, or perhaps even philosophical, detachment from his situation.

The only touch of human warmth in the poem lies in the last lines, “because the world had failed us / both.” On this level, the poet is joined to, and not alienated from, his screaming landlady. In their similar suffering and privation lies the only hint of belonging and commonality that can be discerned in the poem.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Interview someone who has experienced extreme poverty and/or homelessness. Find out the circumstances and events that led to their situation. To what extent, in their view, were these events beyond (or in) their control? If they were able to improve their situation at any point, how were they able to do so? Convey your findings in a class presentation.
• Read George Orwell's novel Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Write an essay in which you compare Orwell's treatment of poverty and dispossession with Bukowski's in “The Tragedy of the Leaves.”
• Research the causes, nature, and effects of homelessness in a particular region. Identify the main demographic groups that are affected, and why they may be especially vulnerable. Compile a report on your findings, including graphs, photographs, or other visual aids.
• Bukowski has been called a Beat writer (The Beats were a group of writers that reached prominence from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s). Research the Beat poets and the characteristics considered typical of their work. Write an essay discussing which aspects of the Beat movement “The Tragedy of the Leaves” reflects.

Life and Death

The speaker's journey into disillusionment and failure is described in terms of the life that he once embodied versus the death that seems about to engulf him. Death is not seen as a fulfillment but as a negation: of hope, achievement, youth, talent, companionship, and vitality. Death is only mentioned explicitly with regard to the dead potted plants, but the speaker is surrounded by imagery of death and emptiness. The landlady herself becomes a figure connoting death: she stands in a dark hallway, “execrating” or cursing the speaker and sending him to hell, just as an angry God might do. She is momentarily transformed into a dark angel of death, a judging and vengeful figure who has come to tell the speaker that his tenancy-perhaps not just of her room, but of life itself-is at an end.

Tragedy and Comedy

The poem's title alerts the reader to the tone of the poem. The tragedy of the leaves is that they were once alive but now they are dying. The leaves are equated with the speaker's life, which once showed promise but which has since turned into a tragedy.

A tragedy can be defined as a work of literature, often a drama, dealing with a serious or sorrowful theme. It typically involves a great person doomed to destruction through a flaw of character or conflict with some external force, such as fate or society. A comedy is a work of literature, often a drama, of light and humorous character with a happy ending. The narrative of a comedy involves the protagonist's triumph over adverse circumstances, resulting in a successful conclusion, often a life-affirming romance or marriage. The genres of tragedy and comedy are often mixed for dramatic effect. Comic characters or jesters may appear in tragedies in order to offer a novel perspective on the tragic story that is unfolding, or to show that even in the midst of suffering, joy has its place.

Bukowski exploits this tradition of introducing a jester to comment on the tragic story of his poem, to make jokes about absurd pain. But he then goes on to subvert the tradition, when the speaker immediately dismisses the jester as having nothing to contribute to this story. The speaker goes on to explain that his life is a tragedy as final as that of the dead potted plants. The tragedy encompasses not only himself, but also his seeming adversary, the landlady: life has “failed” them both equally. However, whereas most tragedy is grandiose in scale, telling the story of the fall of great people, the tragedy of the speaker's life is small, domestic, even mundane: his life has been no more significant than the withering leaves on a dead house plant.

STYLE

Informal Style

“The Tragedy of the Leaves” is written in an informal, conversational style, relatively free from poetic ornament. The sense is that the poet is speaking directly to the reader in the cadences of everyday speech, a technique perfected by the poet William Carlos Williams. Bukowski was also influenced by the novelist Ernest Hemingway's abrupt, spare style. This style is maintained in spite of the poem's tragic theme: there is a complete absence of melodrama.The speaker describes his predicament in a detached, unemotional tone that is all the more moving because it is somatter-of-fact. The poem is written in free verse, with irregular meter and line length, which adds to its informality.

Off Rhymes, Repetition, and Alliteration

While the poem does not rhyme in the traditional way, with words at the ends of lines sharing the same final sounds, it is full of off rhymes, or half rhymes, as they are sometimes called. The off rhymes may fall in the middle of lines, as with “uselessness” and “yellowness”, or at the ends of lines, as with “hall” and “hell.” There are also repeated words, such as “dead” and “screaming,” which produce a chiming effect that creates a sense of foreboding and helplessness against inevitability. Alliteration, where the same initial sound of a word is repeated, is used in “a jester / with jokes,” where the j sound is repeated. All these effects set up an internal musicality and rhythm that adds to the vibrancy and emotional effect of the poem when read aloud.

Squalid Setting

The poem's setting is typical of Bukowski and the Beat Generation of poets with whom he is sometimes associated. It is a seedy, down-at-heel, rented room in a building populated by poor and desperate people: himself and a land-lady who is as deplorable as he. The speaker is surrounded by the detritus of a decayed, barren, and futile life: emptied bottles of alcohol, dead plants, an old razor. The hallway is dark, and the only other person in the poem besides the speaker is not a friend or relative (his woman has left him), but the landlady who wants his rent and is about to evict him. It is a dehumanized and isolating environment that reflects the sense of alienation in the poem.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Beat Generation and Subculture

The American author Jack Kerouac is generally thought to be responsible for introducing the

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1960s: The rise of public questioning of the political establishment in the United States is galvanized by the public's disenchantment with the government's involvement in the Vietnam War. “The Tragedy of the Leaves” is told from the point of view of a disenchanted and dispossessed speaker, who stands outside the social and political system and criticizes it because it has “failed us / both.”

  Today: Public questioning of the political establishment is widespread in certain circles, fueled by the free exchange of information on the Internet. Examples include opposition to the war in Iraq and the continuing discussion of the events that have unfolded following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

• 1960s: Many towns and cities in the United States contain an area mostly populated by the poor, as well as transients, the mentally ill, and alcoholics. The slang term for any such area is Skid Row.

  Today: According to a 2004 press release from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, over any one year “2.5-3.5 million people are homeless; of this number, 1.35 million are children.” The Center identifies “increasing rents, destruction of existing low-income housing, and cuts in federal housing programs” as contributing factors. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, in 2005, the proportion of homeless people who are addicts is 30 percent.

• 1960s: The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 exacerbates homelessness in the United States. Long-term psychiatric patients are released from state hospitals into the community. Support systems are absent or inadequate, and a large sector of this population is subsequently found living on the streets with no support system.

  Today: According to 2005 figures cited by the National Coalition for the Homeless, “approximately 16 percent of the single adult homeless population suffers from some form of severe mental illness.”

• 1960s: Between 1966 and 1968 in San Francisco, a group calling itself the Diggers opens free stores, where everything in the store is given away, and serve free food to homeless people and others. The Diggers also provide free medical care, transport, and temporary housing. The movement recognizes the rise of a subgroup of peoplewho are homeless or poor out of political choice rather than misfortune.

  Today: The gift economy, in which goods and money are given away without any agreement of repayment, continues in the form of philanthropic acts by individuals, groups, foundations, and corporations. The Freecycle Network is a nonprofit organization registered in Arizona that oversees a worldwide network of gifting groups, aiming to divert reusable goods from landfills.

phrase Beat Generation around 1948. The term described a group of writers who reached prominence from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, and who shared many of the same themes and ideas. Kerouac introduced the term to the novelist John Clellon Holmes, who published a novel about the Beat Generation, GO!, in 1952, and a type of manifesto in the New York Times Magazine titled “This is the Beat Generation” (published November 16, 1952). The novel was a thinly disguised account of the lives of key Beat figures, including Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg. In the novel, as in life, they present themselves as moral pioneers who reject materialism and the values that support it, in favor of adventurous lives involving a search for deeper meaning.

The adjective Beat is thought to have been introduced to the group by the American subculture icon Herbert Huncke, who used the word to describe someone living roughly with little money and prospects. Though it seemed that Kerouac initially used the term Beat to suggest that he and his circle were beaten down by conformist society, he later added positive connotations, insisting that the word meant upbeat, beatific, and musically on the beat, in correct rhythm. All these connotations of the word passed into the term Beatnik, which originally meant a follower of the Beat Generation but came to describe anyone who rejects conventional behavior.

The original group of Beat writers was based in NewYork, but later,writers based in San Francisco were also identified as part of the Beat movement. The movement was a twentieth-century version of Romanticism, a literary protest movement that emphasized a spontaneous expression of the individual's vital energies and subjective experience. Beats were disaffected people who rebelled against what they saw as the rigid, outdated, and discredited views and conventions that characterized post-World War II American society. They coined a word, square, that summed up everything they opposed: conventional morality, received wisdom, authority, racism, imperialism, being out of date or out of touch. Their stance frequently involved alienation, an opposition to war, drug-taking and addiction, inter-racial relationships, an interest in Eastern thought and religion, an ecological sensibility, and decadent, alternative, and self-destructive lifestyles. All these elements permeated their literature.

Other Beat characteristics that passed into the work of poets such as Bukowski include a direct, conversational, and informal style, employed in an attempt to communicate directly to the reader; gritty depictions of unconventional and visceral experience; and the use of antiheroes and low characters. Beat writers tried to show the underbelly of life, the flip side of the American dream.

Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg's epic poem “Howl” (1956), and William S. Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch (1959) are considered some of the most important works of the Beat Generation. The role of the Beat writers as subversives was confirmed in 1957, when Ginsberg's collection Howl and Other Poems was the subject of a landmark obscenity trial. Its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was charged with disseminating indecent writings. The charges centered around supposedly obscene words and images in the poem “Howl.” The judge ruled that Ginsberg's poem was not obscene, and stated that freedom of speech and of the press depended upon an author's right to express his thoughts in his own words.

Bukowski was never closely associated with Kerouac, Ginsberg, or other major Beat writers, and has tried to distance himself from them. However, his conversational style, nonconformist stance, and subcultural subject matter have led some readers and critics to identify him with the Beat movement. His poem “The Tragedy of the Leaves” is characteristic both of his own work and of the Beat tradition. It is written in free verse and in an informal style; it features a poverty-stricken and probably alcoholic speaker who lives on the margins of society in a state of alienation from the mainstream; and it points an accusing finger at a society that allows such privation to exist (“the world had failed us / both”). The speaker also shares the Romantic Beat tendency of viewing himself as superior to, and more acutely conscious of truth than, mainstream society. He was once “said to have genius,” and he sends away the jester who is ready to dispense conventional wisdom because he himself knows better: “pain is absurd / because it exists, nothing more.”

Confessional Poetry

Confessional poetry became popular during the 1950s and 1960s. It is characterized by the poet's revelations of raw, intimate, and often unflattering information about himself or herself, particularly to do with sex, illness, addiction, and despair. Poets who have been classed as confessional include Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. “The Tragedy of the Leaves,” can be said to fit into the confessional genre, as it entails the speaker laying bare the disappointments of his life: alcohol addiction, an unfulfilling sexual liaison, poverty, and alienation.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

The collection in which “The Tragedy of the Leaves” first appeared, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, was published in 1963 to an enthusiastic response from Bukowski's loyal cult following. The poet Kenneth Rexroth, in his 1964 review for the New York Times Book Review,

however, is more guarded in his response. He warily distances himself from the “small but loudly enthusiastic claque” that views Bukowski as “the greatest thing since Homer.” Nevertheless, he is generous in his praise of the collection. Rexroth judges the collection to be “simple, casual, honest, uncooked.” He adds that Bukowski writes about what he knows: “rerolling cigarette butts … the horse that came in and the hundred-dollar call girl that came in with it, the ragged hitchhiker on the road to nowhere.” Noting Bukowski's outsider status, Rexroth writes that Bukowski “belongs in the small company of poets of real, not literary, alienation.”

Several decades later, Bukowski has become a bestselling poet and his literary reputation has solidified, though some critics remain ambivalent. A 1993 Publishers Weekly review of the collection Run with the Hunted, which also contains “The Tragedy of the Leaves,” notes that the “stunning directness and infamous ‘bad attitude’” of Bukowski's autobiographical poetry and fiction are “as captivating as they are repugnant.” In a comment that could be applied to “The Tragedy of the Leaves,” the reviewer praises the immediacy and candor of Bukowski's work, along with his “singular blend of cynicism, misanthropy and unexpected sentimentality.”

In her review of Run with the Hunted for the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth Young calls the collection “poignant and moving,” with an acerbic edge and a sense of the frailty of human endeavor. An obituary by William Grimes in the New York Times, written after Bukowski's death in 1994, sums up the poet's literary reputation in words that reflect the flavor of “The Tragedy of the Leaves”: “Mr. Bukowski was a bard of the barroom and the brothel, a direct descendant of the Romantic visionaries who worshiped at the altar of personal excess, violence and madness.”

CRITICISM

Claire Robinson

Robinson has an M.A. in English. She is a former teacher of English literature and creative writing,and is currently a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, Robinson explores how Bukowski uses symbolism and imagery in “The Tragedy of the Leaves.”

John William Corrington, in his 1963 critique of It Catches My Heart in Its Hands in the Northwest Review, challenges those academic critics who decry Bukowski's “poetry of surfaces.” Corrington acknowledges Bukowski's concern with the concrete, observed in minute detail, but interprets it as an aspect of the work's “savage vitality.” He notes that the middle stage between act and art, of intellectual analysis and synthesis, simply does not exist in Bukowski's poetry: “Act moves into image directly; feeling is articulated as figure and intellection is minimal.” Corrington adds that if there is symbolic value in the work, “the reader is spared a kind of burdensome awareness of that symbolism on the part of the writer.”

Singling out “The Tragedy of the Leaves” for illustration, Corrington writes that it would be folly to read the poem as simple description, but an equal folly to suggest that the poem's surface is simply an excuse for its symbolic significance: “Symbol rises from event … Bukowski's poem is symbolic as all great work is symbolic: the verity of its surface is so nearly absolute that the situation it specifies produces the overtones of a world much vaster than that of the landlady's dark hall.”

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• Hot Water Music (1983) is a highly acclaimed collection of short stories by Bukowski. The stories examine all manner of dysfunctional relationships. One such story, “The Death of the Father,” is a funny yet tragic and moving analysis of the days following the death of Bukowski's father.
• Readers who enjoy Bukowski's tales of womanizing and drifting may like the work of Henry Miller, to whom Bukowski is often compared. Tropic of Cancer (published in Paris in 1934) recounts the adventures of a vagabond American who lives on Paris's West Bank, welcoming poverty and ostracism in pursuit of erotic pleasure and his soul's freedom.
• Allen Ginsberg's epic poem “Howl,” first published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956, is a masterpiece of innovation and dissent. It exercised a major influence on the Beat writers and other antiestablishment figures, including Bukowski. The poem is both a cry of rebellion against conventional society and an expression of sympathy for human suffering.
• Bukowski and the Beats: A Commentary on the Beat Generation (2002), by Jean-Francois Duval, is an examination of Bukowski's life and work in relation to other Beat writers. In spite of Bukowski's attempts to disassociate himself from the Beats, Duval finds many historical and thematic links between them, as well as some philosophical and aesthetic differences. He includes anecdotes about Bukowski's meetings with Beat writers, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, andWilliam Burroughs.
• Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness (1991), by Peter H. Rossi, offers a comprehensive picture of homelessness. It explains causes, proposes solutions, and draws contrasts between the homeless of the 1950s and 1960s and the homeless population of today, which is younger and contains more women, children, and African Americans.

Corrington draws attention to an unusual strength of Bukowski that is perfectly exemplified in “The Tragedy of the Leaves”: his ability to suggest meaning through symbols and imagery in a way that is so subtle as to be almost invisible. The poem can be read purely in terms of its surface meaning. It makes perfect sense as an observed scene from the life of a down and out man, but it also richly repays a deeper reading.

The images are used to convey the stark opposites in the poem: life and death, hope and despair, comedy and tragedy. It is significant that these opposites are not given equal weight: the balance always comes down on the side of death, despair, emptiness, and tragedy.The jester, a symbol of life-affirming comedy, is introduced but summarily dismissed by a speaker.The speaker, it is suggested, knows more of the reality of life than the jester, a traditional purveyor of wisdom, and he knows it to be unqualified tragedy. Another example of the imagery of opposites is that of the potted plants. These were living once (symbolic of the speaker's life, which was once characterized by growth and promise), but are only presented in the poem as yellow, withered, and dead, like the speaker himself. The concept of death is forced home by the frequent repetition of the word “dead,” chiming like a bell ringing the death toll.

Life and death are symbolized in the poem by the opposites of wetness and dryness. The speaker has “awakened to dryness,” and the plants have dried up and died. The speaker is surrounded by bottles of alcohol, which he has drained dry. The resonance of this image is reinforced by the simile in which the bottles are compared with “bled corpses,” bodies that are not only dead but drained of their life fluid. Thus everything that was once lush and wet with living sap is now dried up and dying or already dead. This idea is echoed by the fact that the speaker's woman has left him. Relationship, which defines so much of a living human being's identity, is no more. The overall feeling conveyed is that the speaker's own life has dried up and is heading fast towards death: he is “the man who had once been young and / said to have genius.”

The images of dryness may also symbolize the drying up of the poet's inspiration or flow of creativity. While the speaker is not explicitly described as a poet, the strong autobiographical nature of Bukowski's work, along with the fact that this poem was written at a point in his life when he was struggling in low-paying jobs and finding it difficult to publish his poetry, suggest that he is writing about the death of creativity as well as death in its literal sense. This interpretation ties in with the beginning of the poem, which describes the poet's awakening, a word that connotes the arrival of vision or realization as well as the literal meaning of the end of sleep. In a typically Bukowskian irony, this poet's awakening is to a realization of the death of his creativity. But an awakening it is, and there is the sense that the significance of this point in the speaker's life stretches far beyond the question of whether he can pay his rent.

Certainly, Bukowski believed that drinking alcohol to excess produced a series of deaths and rebirths, as he describes in an interview with Robert Wennersten in London magazine:

Drinking … joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life … It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you up against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn.

Bukowski is describing a transcendent experience, reminiscent of the descent of a mythical hero into the underworld (the home of the dead), to emerge reborn, transformed in some way. Such a reading is supported by the “dark hall,” symbolic of the underworld, and the suggestion of the symbolic role of the landlady as a type of guardian of the gate to the afterlife who judges the speaker's life.

The razor, too, is a discomforting image that emphasizes the proximity of death. The speaker shaves “carefully,” raising an implicit question as to what would happen if he were not being careful. The line between his careful shaving and the desperate act of slitting his throat is a fine one. The fact that he is taking care not to slit his throat is almost redundant because the man he used to be, who had “genius,” is long gone. In effect, that man is dead, and the man who is left may as well be.

Is there no glimmer of light in this poem? Robert Peters, in Where the Bee Sucks: Workers,Drones, and Queens in Contemporary American Poetry, believes that the speaker mentions the sunlight as a sign that he is “sensing the positive.” This is thrown into doubt, however, by what follows. Sunlight is golden, but everywhere else in the poem, yellowness is not a life-affirming quality; usually, it connotes death. The landlady's note may be characterized by “fine and / undemanding yellowness,” but it later transpires that it is anything but undemanding. It is an eviction note, which marks not only the end of his tenancy in the building, but also symbolically, the end of his tenancy of life. This notion is reinforced by the all-pervading symbolism of death in the poem. The ferns are “yellow as corn,” which would normally be a cheerful image of harvest, but here, it merely means that they are dead. In Bukowski's world, therefore, sunlight and the color yellow are not to be taken at face value.

In addition, it should be remembered that the final image of the poem is of the speaker walking out of the room from which he can see the sun, into the “dark hall.” Where is the golden sun now? For the speaker, it has vanished, as darkness envelops him. It is not a peaceful, blessed darkness, either: the landlady is “execrating” or cursing him, “screaming” at him, “waving her fat, sweaty arms,” and sending him “to hell.” The idea is one of damnation. The landlady becomes symbolic both of an angel (herald) of death and of a judging, godlike figure. She is able to decide the fate of the speaker's soul, and has determined that it does not deserve redemption. Her decision is “final.” The dark hallway is reminiscent of the dark tunnel of near-death experiences, except that most of these describe a light at the end. Here, there is no light.

As a comment on modern society, dominated as it is by the capitalist economic model, the poem is bitter in the extreme. The condition of having no money is deemed worthy of damnation. The speaker is, in essence, being thrown into the eternal dustbin because he cannot pay the rent.

The poem's vision would be unremittingly bleak were it not for a single redeeming element. It comes in the final line and a half, and as such is reminiscent of the final couplet of a sonnet, which marks a shift in perspective. Until this point, the landlady has been the villain of the piece: hostile, ugly, loud, and screaming for rent. But in the final lines, the speaker explains why she is as she is: “because the world had failed us / both.” This is a recognition of the common humanity that the speaker and the landlady share. Finally, even this angel of death is caught in the same trap as the speaker, and is as much a victim as he. On this level of sympathy and love, the landlady is no godlike figure damning him to hell, but only another human being who shares his predicament: the desperation of the powerless, the suffering, and the dispossessed.

As Corrington points out, this vast story, in all its depth and resonance, is told without intellectualizing, and without analysis. Rather, it is communicated directly in images that allow the overlying surface description to maintain a perfect integrity and to be understood purely on its own level. So exact is the match between the surface and the deeper symbolic meanings that the deeper level may barely be visible on a first or quick reading. The symbolic meaning does not impose itself on the reader; on the contrary, it whispers, only emerging fully when the reader's mind is quiet enough to let the images speak.

Source: Claire Robinson, Critical Essay on “The Tragedy of the Leaves,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008.

Jean-Francois Duval

In the following excerpt, Duval attempts to disconnect Bukowski somewhat from his association with the Beat writers, and to reconnect him with a more politically active and socially conscious form of countercultural art.

In 1994, the year that saw the renewal of interest in the Beat generation, Charles Bukowski died in San Pedro, California. He was a notable figure of the counterculture. Many newspapers—in Europe particularly—were a bit too quick to present him as Kerouac and Ginsberg's successor. Charles Bukowski would probably better rank in the third section of Leary's classification (as discussed above)—the post-Beat punk era. There is no doubt that Bukowski's “destroy” mythology—dirty and perpetually drunk, surrounded by a pile of beer bottles and boxes—matched the punk aesthetic more closely, and it is probably no accident that Buk's international recognition in the '70s coincided with the advent of No Future philosophy.

When he was interviewed in 1978 in Paris by the chief editor of Paris Me'tro, Bukowski made this clear: he declared “that he felt closer to the punks than to the beatniks,” and he added: “I'm not interested in this bohemian,Greenwich Village, Parisian bullshit. Algiers, Tangiers that's all romantic claptrap.” Back in 1967 when an American magazine associated him with the beatniks’ heroes—”Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, LeRoi Jones, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Dylan, Bertolt Brecht, John Cage, Eugène Ionesco, W. H. Auden, Anaï“s Nin, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski”—Buk felt an affinity with only a few of these big names. He clarified this in a letter to his German translator, Carl Weissner: “Genet in portions when he doesn't creampuff out in love with his writing, Brecht in portions, and the very early Auden.”

Let's take for instance the way he reports his “encounter” with one of the most famous Beats. In his novel Women he tells of a reading that Chinaski, his alter ego, agreed to give in the North. “It was the afternoon before the reading and I was sitting in an apartment at the Holiday Inn drinking beer with Joe Washington.”

Suddenly Joe, the event organizer, glances through the window and calls out: “Hey, look, here comes William Burroughs across the way. He's got the apartment right next to yours. He's reading tomorrow night.”

Chinaski gets up, goes over to the window and says: “It was Burroughs all right …We were on the second floor. Burroughs walked up the stairway, passed my window, opened his door and went in.”

Joe suggests a meeting with Burroughs. Chinaski declines. All the same Joe goes to Burroughs and thinks he is doing the right thing in telling him that Chinaski is in the next room; he doesn't have much success. Burroughs barely gives a terse “Oh, is that so?”

A little later, when Chinaski leaves his room to look for an ice machine, he cannot fail to catch a glimpse of the great Bill: “As I walked by Burroughs’ place, he was sitting in a chair by the window. He looked at me indifferently.”

Fact or fiction (but more fact than fiction, according to his last wife Linda Lee Bukowski), the whole scene is very accurate and the two men are perfect in their respective roles. Burroughs and Bukowski have just one thing in common: a completely mutual indifference. Buk hits home in his description: Burroughs in an armchair in his motel room, stripped of expression, as silent and still as a figure in an Edward Hopper painting.

Burroughs appears here as if in a photographic negative (no meeting, nothing, zero communication). To a certain extent the “Burroughs motif” in this piece has no other function but to give Bukowski the opportunity to explain his link with the Beat writers, via the link's very absence. Burrough's personality, at that moment, reinforces this void: Victor Gioscia described Burroughs at that time as entirely cerebral, becoming more and more like “a vast computer running all the time, making arcane comparisons silently.” This is the Burroughs that Buk/Chinaski probably saw through the motel room window.

Bukowski certainly didn't think too much of the Beat writers.

For this reason it seems incongruous to come across him years later, in 1992, on a film and a CD-ROM entitled Poetry in Motion principally devoted to the Beats. It is a collection of readings given (sometimes in front of 3000 people) by poets like Ginsberg, Burroughs, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, and most unexpectedly, Charles Bukowski. The CD-ROM is even introduced by Bukowski who “after drawing a passionately eloquent sketch of Beat poetry, regained his self-control to say that everything is just beer shit. Then he knocked back a glassful of port & got pixelated Quick Time.” According to the poet Anne Waldman, Bukowski's role in the film was to represent the opposite standpoint: “He is kind of the voice of dissension, in that film documentary, he is used in this way, as a kind of gallery commentaire, and that commentary is amazing, it's funny his role in there, that kind of growl, it is the slightly bitter but very funny commentator on the scene.”

Indeed, the whole of Buk's correspondence between 1960 and 1970 reveals his ambiguous attitude towards the Beat writers (the first volume, Screams from the Balcony, was published in 1994, and the second, Living on Luck, in 1995). But there was a dilemma-how could he stand apart and remain aloof from a movement that was the basis of a counterculture to which he subscribed? How could he claim a similar aesthetic and state of mind, when there was no way he would fit into a group that had been seminal to the whole underground movement? On one side there was the constellation of Beat writers—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Gregory Corso,Michael McClure,Philip Lamantia, etc.—a literary movement that linked the West coast to the East coast. On the other side there was a loner, a rebel for all causes, a total dissident even within the counterculture. Bukowski alone embodies the most deprived, most hardworking, most popular fringe of the system's rejects, of the poor in spirit, in literature and in poetry.

Russell Harrison, the author of Against the American Dream: Essays on Charles Bukowski, a study that mostly refers to Post Office and Factotum, notes that Buk was probably the only American poet who addressed the nonintellectual classes and whose poetry related to the concrete and everyday realities of the world of work (although, it was pointed out, he was not really interested in the working class as a group, only as individuals). Those realities he experienced through the hundreds of dead-end jobs, reluctantly toiled at for forty years around the country. It is no surprise his first novel told of his life at the post office (writing Post Office inspired Buk in 1969 to leave his job of the past 11 years): the sorting office, the horrors of routine work with no creative outlet, hell for the soul of an artist …

The Beats were more up-market; bums, but heavenly bums. They, too, put their hand to a range of jobs, led a bohemian lifestyle and spent time in prison. Kerouac went to sea with the Merchant Marines, worked in a ball bearings factory and was a brakeman for Southern Pacific Railway as was Cassady. Ginsberg was involved in journalism and advertising. Like Buk, they were no angels. Herbert Huncke was a junkie and notorious thief. Neal Cassady boasted of stealing more than five hundred cars before he was twenty; not for the money but for the pleasure of going for a spin in the Rockies near Denver. Burroughs inadvertently gunned down his wife Joan while acting out William Tell in Mexico, and spent two weeks in prison before being released on bail. Lucien Carr was imprisoned for two years for the murder of a professor who was sexually harassing him. And Kerouac, who helped Carr conceal the knife, only narrowly avoided prison by marrying Edie Parker with two policemen as witnesses.

But the perspective was different. Bad boys, shady environments and the world of crime attracted the Beats, particularly under the influence of Burroughs. The constraints of work took second place, even if they often had only a few dollars in their pockets. These constraints were also relegated to the back seat in their writing. The essential reality, in which they lived and evolved, was primarily literary, poetical, and musical. Influenced by his reading of Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac considered America principally as a poem. When Ginsberg, aged 17, first met Kerouac he confided that he wanted to study law to help the working classes, Kerouac gently pointed out: “You have never worked a day in your life in a factory, you have no idea about labor.”

Kerouac himself was rather removed from the hardships of the world of work, to which he looked at primarily as a poet. In a long article about the Beat revival which appeared in 1996 in the French newspaper Le Monde, Samuel Blumenfeld wrote: “During a reading of ‘October in the Railroad Earth’ in a piano bar in 1959, Kerouac openly scorned the commuters with their tight collars obliged to catch the 5:48 train at Millbrae or San Carlos to go to work in San Francisco, while he—a son of the road—could watch the freight trains pass, take in the immensity of the sky and feel the weight of ancestral America.” Carolyn Cassady in Off the Road tells of “the extent Kerouac was really keen on the comfort of her home, perfectly ordered, with a bourgeois interior, whose view,” Blumenfeld reports sarcastically, “looked over the same Bayshore Freeway that took these commuters with tight collars from their homes to San Francisco.” In fact, Kerouac romanticized the people at the bottom, as James Campbell put it rather severely: “The difference between the Beats and the bums they imitated is that the latter would have got off skid row if only they could: their failure had made them beaten, and they wouldn't have cared anything for ‘beat,’ which it would have been their rights to consider a white middle-class invention.”

Bukowski lived in a totally different world to the Beats, alternating long periods as a bum with temporary work. At the beginning of the '70s he said: “At one time I had this idea that one could live on a bus forever: travelling, eating, getting off, shitting, getting back on the bus … I had the strange idea that one could stay in motion forever.” But he worried about work all the time and he was unable to apply the Beats’ carefree attitude to his obligations. He wrote about it (starting his sentence as usual in the lower case, a question of aesthetics): “the years I have worked in slaughterhouses and factories and gas stations and so forth, these years do not allow me to accept the well-turned word for the sake of the well-turned word.” He would often tell journalists ironically: “It beats the eight hour job, doing what you are doing. It's better than the eight hour job. Don't you think?” In many respects writing was a way out of this fate. While the Beats danced along the road composing a hymn to their freedom from social proprieties, Buk put in forty years to free himself from the shackles which alcohol and poetry alone helped him to forget at times. As an echo to Kerouac's lyrical motto “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk,” Bukowski, in a letter reproduced in Reach for the Sun, in 1992, two years before his death, states: “Thank the gods that the first 50 years of my life were spent with the Blue Collars and the truly mad, the truly beaten.” There is no lyricism in his vision of the road. The same year, he writes to an unknown correspondent: “I didn't want the road, I wanted to write so I needed some walls for that.”

For Bukowski, America was much more unsentimental than a lyrical poem in Kerouac's style. When he got off the bus in New York, he thought the city seemed more brutal than anywhere else in America. “When you have only $7 in your pocket and look up at those huge buildings … I went to every town broke in order to learn that town from the bottom. You come into a town from the top—you know, fancy hotels, fancy dinners, fancy drinks, money in your pocket—and you're not seeing that town at all.” …

Source: Jean-Francois Duval, “Bukowski: The Counter-culture's Dissident,” in Bukowski and the Beats, edited by Alison Ardron, Sun Dog Press, 2002, pp. 21-36.

Andrew J. Madigan

In the following article, although Madigan focuses on another of Bukowski's poems (“I Met a Genius”), the critic's brief explication does a wonderful job of discussing the theme of autonomy generally found in Bukowski's poetry. Many of the points made in this essay can be applied to “The Tragedy of the Leaves.”

One of the central ideas in the works of Charles Bukowski, particularly in his poetry, is that of the individual's need to have total control over his or her ideas, actions, and sensations. The artist, of course, must be especially sensitive to, and maintain dominion over, the self. In a mass society that attempts to systematically strip the self of autonomy, individuality, dignity, and expression, one must be continually wary. For if the Other—either overtly or through the covert mimesis of social behavior—instructs the self in the small details of existence, it might begin to tell that self how to experience the world and, ultimately, how to be.

Quite often, Bukowski portrays this “hegemony of normality” to betray his aesthetic stance. (Although he frequently assumes a native, ignorant, or anti-intellectual posture, Bukowski's odes to the autodidactic ecstasy of the Los Angeles Public Library argue strongly against this.) He seeks autonomy not only with regard to life, but also concerning art. The short poem “i met a genius” explores this theme eloquently:

I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
as he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty
 
it was the first time I'd
realized
that.

With the brevity and poignancy of Li Po, Bukowski deftly implies what would be ineffective if directly asserted. The narrator is almost certainly a writer, the Bukowski-Chinaski who preoccupied the author. One would imagine that Bukowski could have decided for himself whether the vista was beautiful or not, but even the archindividualist is conditioned to accept unconditionally that which society posits as true. Anesthetized by the literary convention of embracing the physical charms (if not always the power and danger) of nature as absolutely good, the narrator has never pondered the opposing view. Why is a “beautiful” pastoral scene beautiful, true, or good? If we do not question this assumption, we are enslaved by it. The writer, Bukowski would adamantly agree, needs to become free of these prejudices to create an authentic, individual, and formidable art.

These concerns are not original to Bukowski, but they are often overlooked or misunderstood in his works. Bukowski is frequently aligned, incorrectly, with the postmodern movement. Whether this is due to the author's wholesale rejection of conventional behavior, morality, and human values, or because critics too often seek to interpret and divide writers by chronology alone, one cannot be certain. One can be quite certain, however, that Bukowski continually and significantly fails to deconstruct the traditional concept of “self.” In this respect Bukowski represents a “new defiant individualism” His body of work seeks not to submerge, deny, or obfuscate the self—as with the postmodern critique of the individualist hero and his struggle—but rather to elevate the self, its personal ethos, and its predilections above all else. In fact, Bukowski makes of this search for self a raison d'être, a direction, a religious quest. Thus, it is clear that Bukowski—despite his ethical ambivalence and rejection of form—has more in common with the heroes of premodern American literature (Ahab, Hester Prynne, Huck Finn) than with the antiheros of postmodern fiction.

Source: Andrew J. Madigan, “Bukowski's ‘I Met A Genius,’” in Explicator, Vol. 55, No. 4, Summer 1997, pp. 232-33.

SOURCES

Basinski, Michael, “Charles Bukowski,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 169: American Poets Since World War II, Fifth Series, edited by Joseph Conte, Gale Research, 1996, pp. 63-77.

Bukowski, Charles, “The Tragedy of the Leaves,” in Run with the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader, edited by John Martin, HarperCollins, 1993, pp. 172-73.

Corrington, John William, “Charles Bukowski and the Savage Surfaces,” in Northwest Review, Vol. 6, No. 4, Fall 1963, pp. 123-29.

Grimes, William, “Charles Bukowski Is Dead at 73; Poet whose Subject was Excess,” in the New York Times Book Review, March 11, 1994.

Holmes, John Clellon, “This Is the Beat Generation,” in the New York Times, November 16, 1952, p. SM10.

“Homelessness and Poverty in America,” National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2007, http://www.nlchp.org/hapia_causes.cfm (accessed September 10, 2007).

“Increasing Homelessness in the United States Violates InternationalLaw,” National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, January 2004, http://www.nlchp.org/view_release.cfm?PRID=26 (accessed September 10, 2007).

Peters, Robert, “Gab Poetry, or Duck vs. Nightingale Music: Charles Bukowski,” in Where the Bee Sucks: Workers, Drones, and Queens in Contemporary American Poetry, Asylum Art, 1994, pp. 56-66.

Review of Run with the Hunted, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 240, No. 13, March 29, 1993, pp. 34-36.

Rexroth, Kenneth, “There's Poetry in a Ragged Hitch-Hiker,” in the New York Times Book Review, July 5, 1964.

Wennersten, Robert, “Paying for Horses,” in London magazine, Vol. 1, No. 15, December 1974-January 1975, pp. 35-54.

“Who Is Homeless?,” National Coalition for the Homeless, August 2007, http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/facts/Whois.pdf (accessed September 10, 2007).

Young, Elizabeth, Review of Run with the Hunted, in New Statesman & Society, June 17, 1994, Vol. 7, No. 307, pp. 37-39.

FURTHER READING

Bukowski, Charles, Ham on Rye, Ecco, 2007.

This acclaimed novel by Bukowski is the first installment of the life story of his alter ego, Henry Chinaski.

Cherkovski, Neeli, Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski, Random House, 1991.

This biography, by a friend and colleague of Bukowski's, gives fascinating insights into the wild man of contemporary American poetry. Cherkovski analyzes fragments of Bukowski's poetry and prose, relating them to the writer's life.

Conley, Dalton, ed., Wealth and Poverty in America: A Reader, Blackwell, 2002.

This is a readable collection of essays by contemporary and historical authors on the complex relationship between the rich and the poor in the United States. It presents theories of where wealth comes from and why it tends to concentrate in the hands of the few.

Farber, David, and Beth Bailey, The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s, Columbia University Press, 2003.

This book provides an accessible overview of the 1960s, the turbulent decade in which Bukowski wrote “The Tragedy of the Leaves.” Essays are included on the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the women's movement, the sexual revolution, the environmental movement, landmark legal cases, and religion.

Hoffman, John, and Susan Froemke, eds., Addiction: Why Can't They Just Stop?, Rodale Books, 2007.

In this overview of the epidemic of addiction in the United States, Cheever examines the impacts of chemical dependency on addicts and their families, and explores scientific discoveries about why addicts find it so hard to quit.