On Writing. Charles Bukowski

with an ex-mistress [Sheri Martinelli] . . . There’s still, however, [Robinson] Jeffers. Eliot seemed to me an opportunist, going where the slickest gods gave the quietest gifts, which is great and gentile, but not human and the roar of blood or some bum dying on skid row in underwear which has not been washed for 4 weeks. I am not exactly knocking Eliot, I am knocking education and its false teeth. I could and can get more knowledge of life by talking to a garbage man than I could by talking to T.S., or for that matter, to you, Jon E. W. Where were we? [ . . . ]

      Look, Jon, I hope you can fin’ a pome. Somewhere among the bloody tunes . . . I dunno, I’m tired . . . everyplace people water lawns . . . good deal. Well, look, this was the bio.

      lost my pen,

      let’s knock ’em dead with Alcatraz ramble . . .

      Stefanile published a Bukowski poem in The Sparrow 14 (1960).

      [To Felix Stefanile]

      September 19, 1960

      No “bookworm or sissy” am I . . .

      Your criticism correct: poem submitted was loose, sloppy,

      repetitive, but here’s the kernel: I cannot WORK at a poem. Too many poets work too consciously at their stuff and when you see their work in print, they seem to be saying . . . see here, old man, just look at this POEM. I might even say that a poem should not be a poem, but more a chunk of something that happens to come out right. I do not believe in technique or schools or sissies . . . I believe in grasping at the curtains like a drunken monk . . . and tearing them down, down, down . . .

      I hope to submit to you again, and believe me, I far more appreciate criticism than “sorry” or “no” or “overstocked.”

      [To Jon Webb]

      Late September 1960

      [ . . . ] Also got your new card today, must agree with you that one can talk poetry away and your life away, and I get more out of being around people—if I have to—who never heard of Dylan or Shakey or Proust or Bach or Picasso or Remb. or color wheels, or what. I know a couple of fighters (one with 8 win streak going), a horseplayer or two, a few whores, x-whores, and the alcoholics; but poets are bad on the digestion and sensibility, and I could make it stronger, but then they are probably better than I make them, and there is a lot of wrong in me. [ . . . ]

      Agree with you on “poetic poetry,” and rather feel that almost all poetry written, past and present, is a failure because the intent, the slant and accent, is not a carving like stone or eating a good sandwich or drinking a good drink, but more like somebody saying, “Look, I have written a poem . . . see my POEM!”

      [To W. L. Garner]

      November 9, 1960

      [ . . . ] I believe that too much poetry is being written as “poetry” instead of concept. By this I mean we try too hard to make these things sound like poems. It was Nietzsche who said when asked about the poets: “The Poets? The Poets lie too much!” The poem-form, by tradition, allows us to say much in little space, but most of us have been saying more than we feel, or when we lack the ability to see or carve, we substitute poetic diction, of which the word STAR is nabob and chief executor.

      [To Jon Webb]

      December 11, 1960

      [ . . . ] You long ago told me that you were rejecting “names” right and left. It appears then that you are selecting what you like, which is only what any editor can do. I was once an editor of Harlequin and have an idea of what comes along in the way of poetry—how much poorly written amateur unoriginal pretensive poetry one can get in the mails. If printing “names” means printing good poetry . . . it is up to the non-names to write poetry good enough to get in. To merely reject “names” and print 2nd. hand poetry of unknowns . . . is that what they want? . . . a form of new inferiority? Should we throw away Beethoven and Van Gogh for the musical ditties or dabblings of the lady across the street because nobody knows her name? While I was with Harlequin we were only able to publish ONE formerly unpublished poet, a 19 year-old boy out of Brooklyn, if I remember. And this . . . only by cutting away whole sections of the 3 or 4 poems he sent in. And after that, he never again sent in anything even partially worthwhile. And we got our letters too, bitter letters of complaint from known and unknown too. I would stay up half the night writing 2 or 3 page rejections of why I felt the poems wouldn’t do—this instead of writing “sorry, no.,” or the out of the printed rejection. But the sleep lost was in vain; the poems I did not write, I should have written; the drunks, the plays, the racetracks I missed, I should not have missed; the operas, the symphonies . . . because all I got back for TRYING, trying to be decent and warm and open . . . were snarling bitter letters, full of cursing and vanity and war. I would not have minded a solid analysis of my wrongs—but the sniveling, snarling missives—no, hell no. It’s very odd, I thought, how people can be so very “shitty” (to use one of their terms) and write poetry too. But now, after meeting a few of them, I know that it is entirely possible. And I do not mean the clean fight, the rebel, the courage; I mean thin-minded glory-grabbers, money-mad, spiritually dwarfed.

      In “Horse on Fire,” published in Targets 4 in 1960, Bukowski puts Pound’s Cantos down.

      [To W. L. Garner and Lloyd Alpaugh]

      Late December 1960

      [ . . . ] Old Ez[ra Pound] will probably spit out his teeth when he reads “Horse on Fire,” but even the great can sometimes live in error and it is up to us smaller ones to correct their table manners. And Sheri Martinelli will wail, but why did they blubber over their precious canto and then tell me about it? I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

      1961

      [To Jon Webb]

      Late January 1961

      [ . . . ] It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems but let them go at first sitting, because if I have lied originally there’s no use driving the spikes home, and if I haven’t lied, well hell, there’s nothing to worry about. I can read some poems and just sense how they were shaved and riveted and polished together. You get a lot of poetry like that now out of Poetry Chicago. When you flip the pages, nothing but butterflies, near bloodless butterflies. I am actually shocked when I go through this magazine because nothing is happening. And I guess that’s what they think a poem is. Say, something not happening. A neat lined something, so subtle you can’t even feel it. This makes the whole thing intelligent art. Balls! The only thing intelligent about a good art is if it shakes you alive, otherwise it’s hokum, and how come it’s hokum and in Poetry Chi? You tell me.

      In 1956 when I first began writing poetry at the doddering age of 35 after spitting my stomach out through my mouth and ass, and I have sense enough not to drink any more whiskey although a lady claimed I was staggering around her place last Friday night drinking port wine—in 1956 I sent Experiment a handful of poems that (which) they accepted, and now 5 years later they tell me they are going to publish one of them, which is delayed reaction if I ever saw any. They tell me it will be out in June 1961 and I guess when I read it, it will be like an epitaph. And then she suggested I send her ten dollars and join the Experiment Group. Naturally, I declined. Christ, an extra ten today on Togetherness in the middle races would have had me whistling dixie through my anus.

      Corrington tells me he thinks Corso and Ferlinghetti have it. I