If Bukowski were alive, that would probably be fine with him too. Bukowski relished his image as a swaggering outsider, the kind of man who, having consented to read his poetry at a college, “put down my poems and asked if anybody wanted to arm wrestle.” (Someone did; naturally Bukowski won.) In “On Drinking,” his escapades are entirely typical and roughly as follows: He goes to, copes with or barely avoids jail. He mouths off to cops. He gets into unprovoked fistfights that take three pages to describe and that involve dozens of barehanded punches to the head. He offers to clean a bar’s dirty blinds for money and whiskey, and then, Tom Sawyer-style, persuades the other patrons to do the job for him. He is coated in vomit and/or blood with the regularity of an E.R. nurse. He pleasures, or fails to pleasure, scores of women, none of whom are dissuaded by the foregoing vomit or blood. And he wants nothing to do with modern writers who “lecture at universities / in tie and suit, / the little boys soberly studious, / the little girls with glazed eyes.”

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This boozy, cartoon machismo has generally served Bukowski well, in the sense that 25 years after his death he still has a sizable audience by the standards of a fiction writer and a colossal audience by the standards of a poet. As you might expect, that readership is not there for displays of technical prowess. The poems in “On Drinking” are distinguishable from the prose mostly by virtue of line breaks that are inserted in why-not fashion; as in, “once in Paris / drunk on national TV / before 50 million Frenchmen / I began babbling vulgar thoughts / and when the host put his hand over my / mouth / I leaped up from the round table …” There’s basically no difference between these lines and the prose narrative that precedes them, except that the prose involves an extended brawl while the poem includes Bukowski pulling a knife on some French security guards.

But to say that Bukowski doesn’t care about technique is not to say that his work is uncalculated. His relentlessly autobiographical approach leads to a dilemma that American poets in particular have been familiar with for well over half a century. This is the fact that, as the poet and critic Donald Davie once put it, a writer who trades on the raw facts of a rough life often “confesses to discreditable sentiments or behavior, but in doing so he demands credit for having the courage or the honesty of his shamelessness.” Or in Elizabeth Bishop’s slightly tarter formulation, such a writer is constantly saying, “I do all these awful things — but don’t you really think I’m awfully nice?”

And Bukowski does want to seem awfully nice — very much so. It’s interesting to go through “On Drinking” and note the many things that Bukowski either omits or wants the reader to avoid thinking about. Consider “night school,” which is set in “the drinking driver improvement school” and involves “the test / to see if we have been listening / to the instructor.” During a break, Bukowski naturally goes to get a beer, and later discovers he’s the only person to have gotten all the test questions right, making him, the poem wryly concludes, “the class / intellectual.” But why is he in the class? Because he was driving around drunk. Did he hurt anyone? Did he kill anyone? This is one of several times in “On Drinking” that Bukowski talks about plowing around hammered in a car, yet every episode carefully avoids any sense of the possible horrific consequences for other people and returns us instead to the comfortable presence of that charming rogue, Charles Bukowski. He’s so funny, so honest. You want to hang out with him, maybe have a few cold ones.

But this artfully contrived camaraderie is fragile. When a writer focuses more on forming a community with his readers than conveying the fact of an experience, he can be left high and dry when the assumptions undergirding that community change. People think about drunken driving much differently in 2019 than in 1981, when “night school” was published. They also think differently about gender — and the women in “On Drinking” only occasionally get names, although they do sometimes get ages. In a poem titled “who in the hell is Tom Jones?,” we’re told that Bukowski was “shacked / with a 24-year-old / girl from New York / City” when suddenly “this 34-year-old / woman / arrived,” after which there was naturally a “whirling of wildcats” that is delightful to Bukowski, because “it’s not often at the / age of 55 / that such splendid / action occurs.” Readers in 2019 may well be blinded by the force of their eye roll.