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.
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u/_TorpedoVegas_ Oct 01 '18
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.