Don't Try: What Teaching Bukowski is Teaching Me

It’s a beautiful thing, to meet old words with new eyes.

This year, I’ve been lucky enough to teach some high school literature classes in addition to my bailiwick, middle school. I'm pleased to say I'm enjoying the experience - it's entirely different content, and I get to share books and stories and poems I haven’t picked up in decades! I find myself approaching these selections, not as the passionate idealist I was in the 90s, but as someone who’s been through a little more life.

Recently, I built a poetry unit that led me back to Charles Bukowski. I hadn’t read Bukowski in thirty years. When I first encountered him, I was drawn to his edge, his grit, and his nonchalance about polite society. However, I also used to pity him in the way privileged twenty-somethings sometimes pity those who live hard lives. I felt sad for him about his alcoholism, his getting beat so badly when he was so small, the grinding poverty, the loneliness. I also worried he was glorifying those things.

Excerpt from "Roll the Dice" 1991

isolation is the gift,

all the others are a test of your

endurance, of

how much you really want to

do it.

and you’ll do it

despite rejection and the

worst odds

and it will be better than

anything else

you can imagine.

Read the full poem here.

Charles Bukowski: raw, weathered, and unmistakable.

When Bukowski died, I was 20 years old and enthralled to learn that his tombstone reads: "Don’t try." It was so moody and enticingly dangerous! (But deep down, I judged the sentiment as nihilistic. Lazy, even. I mistook detachment for cowardice, thinking, Real artists try. )

At the onset of my third decade, I I had certainly suffered in my life as we all do, but I hadn’t yet lived the kind of struggle that threatens your survival and recodes your mind. I hadn't personally experienced what it means to fail hard and keep going anyway. In The People Look Like Flowers at Last, Bukowski wrote, "You have to die a few times before you can really live."

Now at the onset of my sixth decade, I understand that Bukowski wasn’t glorifying, he was surviving and reclaiming. For those who have struggled, suffered, been stripped of everything but your survival instinct - you may know what it means to lose a version of yourself and them meet a new you.

Bukowski wasn’t saying don’t try. He was saying: Don’t fake it.

Don’t perform.

Don’t do it half-assed.

If it’s in you, it will come out.

For me, the mask began to fall away in my forties. That's when I realized being anyone but my essential self is spiritual death.

But let’s not sugarcoat it. "People are not good to each other," Bukowski chants. We all feel that. Many days we live it. And we can't fix it. We can’t make the world safe enough or kind enough for everyone to show up as they are. Not yet, anyway. That’s the heartbreak.

What we can do is make choices. We can choose, sometimes, to walk a little closer to what’s true. We can be kind without being false. We can be open without being naive. We can be discerning without being cruel.

I won’t tell my students to “be authentic.” That would be unfair. It’s not always safe. It’s rarely easy. And who am I to say what's a universal good? But I do hope that someday, in some corner of their lives, they find the space and courage to try it. To see what happens when they stop performing and start listening inward. To find what’s real in themselves. Hold it. Nurture it.

If my students try authenticity, they will certainly find it hurts. to be true. Their actions may be grossly misunderstood. But their effort might be worthwhile because - well, what's the alternative?

So instead of telling, I ask:

• What is your fire?

• What are you fanning?

• What are you running from, and what would happen if you turned to face it?

• Who are you without the mask?

  
  

I’m learning that compassion is not pity. Compassion is seeing someone’s scars and not turning away. And it’s realizing you’ve judged people way before you had any right to do so.

I now know now that judgment is easy. Compassion is harder and more worthwhile. I know that authenticity is terrifying — but pretending is so much worse.

So no, I'm not here to tell people, you have to be real. But you could be.

🤎Meridith