A Following

A relatively late poem in Charles Bukowski’s extensive oeuvre, “A Following” relies on the scenic, dramatic irony of a late-night phone call its narrator relates to reflect wryly on the ways in which imperfect humans find fleeting connection amid life’s general bleakness. Within this general dramatic context, the poem also explores questions about fame and influence, as well as candor, intimacy, communication, and the ever-present Bukowskian topic of addiction. “A Following” relates an anecdote about a phone call the speaker receives from a drunken, would-be editor and his anonymous companion, as well as the speaker’s curiously restrained, ambivalent, and ambiguous response to the callers’ solicitations for poems to publish.

Written somewhat self-consciously in the aftermath of the postwar American literary renaissance that birthed the Beats, the Black Mountain Poets, the Black Arts Movement, the New York School, and many other small-scale literary cadres, the poem’s concerns with subcultures and artist communities resembles poems like Robert Creeley’s “The Conspiracy.” But Bukowski’s world-weary gallows humor also locates him in the line of misanthropic European modernist writers like Louis Ferdinand Celine, or even Charles Baudelaire in prose poems from Paris Spleen, like “Get Yourself Drunk” and “Let’s Beat Up the Poor!” More squarely in the American grain, Bukowski’s spare diction and unvarnished portrayal of working-class social reality resembles the work of Realist novelists like John Fante.

Note: This study guide contains language that some readers may find offensive.

Poet Biography

Henry Charles Bukowski was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski on August 16th 1920 in the town of Andernach, located in Rhineland, Germany. His father Heinrich Karl Sr., an American of German and Polish descent, had fought in the first World War and met Bukowski’s mother, Katharina (née Fett), while remaining in Germany after his service. Henry and Katharina relocated with Charles to the United States in 1923 to escape the economic devastation of interwar Germany. In 1930, the family moved to Los Angeles, California, where his father struggled throughout the Great Depression to find stable employment. Bukowski’s autobiographical novels like Ham on Rye recount the frequent beatings he received from his father during this period. At the onset of adolescence, Bukowski’s friend William “Baldy” Mullinax introduced him to alcohol; a discovery for which he would later claim he intentionally developed a strong dependence.

Bukowski’s writing career began in his early twenties with the publication of two short stories, “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip” and “20 Tanks from Kasseldown.” Following these initial publications, Bukowski withdrew from the literary world for nearly a decade, a period during which he drank heavily while working a series of odd jobs that would provide the subject matter for several later novels. Much of Bukowski’s income from the early 1950s through the 1960s came via his work as a letter carrier and filing clerk at the Unites States Post Office, experiences he describes in his novel Post Office. During this period, Bukowski published minor pieces such as poems and short stories in the various independent literary magazines cropping up as part of the broader postwar flourishing of avant-garde writing in the United States.

By the late 1960s, Bukowski’s increasing stature as a writer and literary figure became apparent in two opportunities he pursued. Beginning in 1967, he began writing the column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” for the underground newsletter Open City. The column was eventually picked up by the Los Angeles Free Press and the NOLA Free Express in New Orleans when Open City closed in 1969. In another life-changing event that same year, John Martin, the publisher of Black Sparrow Press, offered Bukowski a financial arrangement that would allow him to quit his post office job to dedicate himself to writing full time. Bukowski wrote his first novel, Post Office, a month after leaving his job; Black Sparrow Press would go on to publish almost all of his subsequent works. As Bukowski’s literary fame grew, he became involved in a number of romantic liaisons with women that, along with drinking and menial wage labor, would provide a central thematic focus for much of his semi-autobiographical fiction. Bukowski’s work has been frequently adapted to other media. In the 1980s, he collaborated with the celebrated cartoonist and comic book artist Robert Crumb on a series of comic books. Several of Bukowski’s novels have been made into films. Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9, 1994, in San Pedro at the age of 73.

Poem Text

Bukowski, Charles. “A Following.” allpoetry.com.

Summary

“A Following” is comprised of two stanzas, the first introducing the dramatic scene that the second presents in full. Bukowski’s lines of unrhymed free verse are written in a highly conversational, prosaic style that deliberately avoids elevating his subject matter to the status of something noble and lofty. The first stanza provides the bare minimum of narrative details necessary to appreciate the exchange that follows: The speaker receives a phone call from “Denver” (Line 2) at 1:30 a.m. (Line 1). It is unclear whether Bukowski intends Denver—hometown of Neal Cassady and subject of a number of Jack Kerouac’s novels, including On The Road—to have literary undertones, or whether this detail is meant merely to contextualize the poem’s setting in real-life America. Either way, the effect of the opening lines’ relative spareness is to place the reader in the same position as the speaker, knowing little about the phone conversation about to unfold.

The second stanza, which takes up the remainder of the poem, presents the exchange between the speaker and the other two men on the phone largely through direct discourse, using lines that, through quotation marks, indicate they are relaying the content of the conversation verbatim, word for word. These lines ironically undercut the suggestions of literary fame and countercultural community, seen in the title “a following” (Line 3), or a group of fans, and the self-appointed editor’s request for poems to publish, through the third individual’s frequent interjections of insults and profanity from the “background” (Line 9). The speaker gradually pieces together over the ensuing lines that the two men are drunk and questions them about their state of mind. The editor replies that their behavior resembles that of the speaker, Henry Chinaski (Bukowski’s fictional alter ego).

The speaker then acknowledges this resemblance (“that’s true…” (Line 20)), without offering the reader any further value judgment as to how they should understand this fact, before agreeing to the editor’s solicitation for written material, telling him “I’ll see what I can do” (Line 28) after writing down his address on the back of an envelope. The lines punctuate these narrative events with the third man’s recurrent outbursts of insult and profanity. The final lines offer an ironically restrained commentary on the two callers’ life situation by suggesting that they are representative of a more universal pattern of human experience marked by loneliness and boredom.