Wandering Stiff ~mainstem~

Bukowski & his little bluebird. What gets me about this poem is his reference to “book sales in Europe.” Is this really what he cares about & can’t share with the world? If so, there’s not much to like about him, or, to grant distance between him & the poem, about the poem’s speaker. And who can’t he share his feelings with? Family & close friends? No, with the “whore and the bartender.” So, the bluebird is just more hiding, a sentimental red herring to keep the real questions from being asked: externally, perhaps, but internally especially. The poem, then, is the actual bluebird here, with its pretending to sing a sad song it never quite touches. It is this distance between the attempt & its target that is sense-able in the poem & that touches without expressing directly those feelings of grief. Language, the elusive bluebird, cannot ultimately encapsulate either grief or a bluebird. Both ultimately escape it…

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