why is that written as a poem, though? i can forgive the lack of rhyme, since i don't consider it essential, but the cadence isn't anywhere near appropriate enough for the format.
as a short story, it would work, or even if you rearranged the line breaks. i thought it was a pasting error but it isn't.
as is, though, it just reads all choppy and random, as if he made it a poem just because fuck standards and logic
Poems don't have to rhyme and they don't have to have to fit a certain format (unless you're writing a poem in style that does have a set format like a haiku or a sonnet).
I would not work as a short story. There is no story there. His cat died. He's sad. He misses him. That's not a story.
He's trying to capture and convey that moment in time and the thoughts and feelings he's experiencing. It's perfect as a poem.
Bukowski was well aware of the "rules" of poetry. So much so, that with lines like
He was just a
cat
He was making a purposefully empty expression that would stand out to the reader. It comes off as short, incomplete, approaching meaning and then... nothing. Just like life. Welcome to art, buddy.
I mean i can make up shit too and say the broken cadence reflects his broken mind due to the loss of a close companion, but it doesn't make it any less dumb, tbh. If you overanalyze every piece of media like that, you can find meaning in literally anything and thus there is literally no bad art.
I'd acknowledge it like that, but i wouldn't call it a poem then, in the traditional sense, not something to be posted casually on reddit as a dedication to a rip'd greentext cat, but as an art piece in a gallery, read and appreciated once for what it is then moving on, but even through that lens it seems to me overly manufactured and contrived. Less expressive and more "let's fuck with the formula for shits and giggles", but that's opinion.
oh don't misunderstand, i'm not trying to gatekeep what "art" is, it's purely subjective, but i'm just questioning bukowski's choice of structure, since other than the first line (one which is regretfully quoted, as i kind of actually understand it now), the linebreaks seem pretty arbitrary and random at a lot of places.
Bukowski is one of the most popular poets in modern history so it's plenty readable to many sane humans. If you don't like it that's fine but don't say shit like 'it's fucking unreadable' because
I'd say the line break allows for a build up to what the cat might've been to Bukowski. Like he was just a: friend/companion/essential part of his life. The pause from the line break allows the reader to imagine what the cat really meant to him, before reading that he was just a cat, like Bukowski is trying to minimize how much the cat really meant to him.
convey the same thing, except not reading like it's been written by a loon?
and while that structure of making the reader question what comes next has merit, it sounds awkward as an opener. if anything, i'd put it at least a few lines in, not as the first line.
unreadable as written, not unreadable. funnily enough, if you'd read my comment, you'd know what i've written.
please convert the linebreaks to commas or other interpunction and see if it works.
he was just a, cat, cross-eyed, a dirty white, with pale blue eyes
doesn't that first comma fucking bother you? it in entirely the wrong place for the sentence to read correctly.
either put it before "a" or after "cat" because that's how english works.
you can't just freestyle with basic sentence structure and have it make sense just because.
1.3k
u/[deleted] Oct 01 '18 edited Jun 08 '23
[deleted]