BOOK: APPRECIATING CONTEMPORARY ART
Charles Bukowski: Nirvana
Great poems #5
(‘Nirvana’ reproduced in full at the end.)
If you travel hopefully, and interestedly, and observantly, and look out of the window — many people can’t be bothered (phones, sleep, earbuds, etc) — you will, sooner rather than later, get to see glimpses — snapshots — of other people’s lives, and they’re framed for you as passing and momentary imagery. You get to see people in their houses, or in other buildings, doing all kinds of things; and it’s almost impossible not to take the bait and, in the instant, to imagine the lives that might go with the scenes you are presented with. People cleaning, reading, watching television, cooking; people shopping, working, eating, queuing; the list is endless.
What Buk has done in this poem is capture one such moment in the life of an anonymous — but very likely Buk himself, in his youth — ‘young man riding a bus through North Carolina’, and then, very gently, let the scene play itself out. And what makes this a great poem is that its presentation is utterly artless and transparent — not a single word or image requiring a second thought, or the least interpretation — yet it finds a way to haunt you with its simple wistfulness; and ever more so on a second, or third or tenth reading. Would that some of other…
