On Writing

by Charles Bukowski

I’m not one to look back on wanton waste as complete loss—there’s music in everything, even defeat—but coming up on a death bed in a charity ward slowed me somewhat, gave me the old pause to think. I found myself writing poetry: hell of a state.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic. That’s

Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.

A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper. And if I can see more poetry in

There we were, a shipping clerk and a janitor discussing theories in aesthetics while all about us men drawing 10 times our salaries were lost out on the limb reaching for rotten fruit. What does this say for the American way of life?

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.

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.

The politicians and newspapers talk a lot about freedom but the moment you begin to apply any, either in Life or in the Art-form, you are in for a cell, ridicule or misunderstanding. I sometimes think when I put that sheet of white paper in the typer . . . you will soon be dead, we will all soon be dead.

They want to hear what they have always heard. But they forget that it takes 5 or 6 good men every century to push the thing ahead out of staleness and death. I am not saying that I am one of these men but I am sure as hell saying I am not one of the others. Which leaves me hanging—OUTSIDE.

Maybe I figure that this stuff is going to smell pretty bad if I say a lot of things I think might be true in conjecture. I think I could fool the boys. I think I could come on pretty heavy. I can toss vocabulary like torn-up mutual tickets, but I think eventually the words that will be saved are the small stone-like words that are said and meant. When men really mean something they don’t say it in 14 letter words. Ask any woman. They know.

Then I’ve had people say, “Why do you go to the racetrack? Why do you drink? This is destruction.” Hell yes, it’s destruction. So was working for 17$ a week in New Orleans destruction. So were the piles of white bodies, old ankles and shinbones and shit strung through the sheets of L.A. County General Hospital . . . the dead waiting to die . . . the old sucking at the mad air with nothing but walls and silence

There’s a guy down at work, he says, “I recite Shakespeare to them.” He’s still a virgin. They know he’s scared. Well, we’re all scared but we go ahead.

gave the remainder; I am not addicted to reading my stuff after writing it. It’s like hanging onto faded flowers. They say Li Po burned his and sailed them down the river, but I figure in his case he was a pretty good self-critic and that he burned only the bad ones; then when the prince came up and asked for some stuff he plucked the good ones from close to his belly—down by the painting of the Manchurian doll with blue eyes. [ . . . ]

when you’re going at it at 43 you’ve got to figure there’s a little something twisted in your head, but that’s o.k.—another smoke, another drink, another woman in your bed, and the sidewalks are still there and the worms and the flies and the sun; and it’s a man’s own business if he’d rather fiddle with a poem than invest in real estate, and eleven poems are good, glad you found so many. The curtains wave like a flag over my country and the beer is tall.

It’s hell to be poor, that’s no secret; it’s hell to be sick without money, hungry without money; it’s hell to be sick and hungry forever down to the last day. The God-forsaken jobs which most of us must hold; the God-forsaken jobs which most of us must hunt for, beg for; the God-forsaken jobs which we hate with all our tiring spirit and must still engage in . . . my god, the alcoholics, the poets, the suicides, the addicts, the madmen all this vomits up! I do not understand why we must live in such horrible, dreary and obviously abject fashion in a century where a civilization has devised through all its energy the force large enough to kill us all.

Once you polevault 17 feet they want 18 and it ends up you might break your leg trying.

You know, the main problem, so far, has been that there has been quite a difference between literature and life, and that those who have been writing literature have not been writing life, and those living life have been excluded from literature. There have been breakthroughs through the centuries, of course—Dos[toyevsky], Celine, early Hem[ingway], early Camus, the short stories of Turgenev, and there was Knut Hamsun—Hunger, all of it—Kafka, and the prowling pre-revolutionary Gorky . . . a few others . . . but most of it has been a terrible bag of shit,

The first atrocity on the moon, the first war won’t be long in coming. Perhaps the first atrocity was the human foot upon the untouched.

Oh yes, I must say, anyhow, that it is dangerous for a poet to pose as prophet, a poet/writer to pose as prophet. Here in the U.S. most serious writers write for many years before they are heard from or recognized, if ever. Unfortunately, many damn fools are recognized because their minds are close to the public mind. Generally a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation, so therefore he starves, suicides, goes mad, and is only recognized if portions of his work are somehow found later, much later, in a shoebox or under the mattress of a whorehouse bed, you know.

So you’ve got the good old U.S.A. At this moment there are probably only a dozen writers who can write with verve and the grand fire. Of these, let’s say, two have been recognized (somehow, luck), 8 will go to their graves without ever being published anywhere. The other 2 will be found and dug-up later by some accident of chance. So what happens when one of the dozen greats finally lucks it into the limelight? Easy. They kill him. He has lived in those small rooms and starved for so long that he believes he deserves everything that is coming to him—so he sells out, trying to fill in the blanks of the lonely years . .

No book at City Lights has inflamed as much excitement since Ginsberg’s Howl as this just released jumbo volume of Bukowski stories—478 pages. Bukowski is the Dostoyevsky of the ’70’s. Bukowski doesn’t only write stories—his whole maniacal and loving soul is embedded in them. The writing is raw but pure laughter through pain. Many of these stories are love stories

but hardly common love stories. This is writing from the blood and soul of agony rather than from the intellect. Bukowski also writes of tragedy with humor—the blood-stained cities, the lonely walls, the loves that didn’t work are often approached through a comical grace that is almost saintly. There might even be hatred and/or indecency in some of these tales but Bukowski is a gambler—he never strains to please, either in person or in his work.

Besides, good and evil, right and wrong keep changing; it’s a climate rather than a law (moral). I’d rather stay with the climates. I think that’s what a lot of revolutionaries fail to see about my work: I’m more revolutionary than they are. It’s only that they’ve been taught too much. The first process of learning or creation is the undoing of teaching. To do this it’s much easier to be a dirty old man than a human being, all right? fine, how are you today?

I’m not a true revolutionary. I just write words down. But the idea of replacing one govt. with another govt. hardly seems a major gain to me. we’ve got to begin with the individual. we’ve got to replace the individual we’ve got now with another type, or if we can’t do that we’ve got to patch him up a bit anyhow. and I don’t have the answers to that. more words, probably. words, words, words, words. the building of the flow.

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way, I don’t want it smoothed out. Also large sections of the novel have been eliminated. When you get the total manuscript you will be able to choose what you want in or out. This way your choice is narrowed; I mean the way the novel reads now.

Also, it is curious that people who rail against my work seem to overlook the sections of it which entail joy and love and hope, and there are such sections. My days, my years, my life have seen ups and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the “light” and never mentioned the other, then as an artist I would be a liar.

But I am hurt, yes, when somebody else’s book is censored, for that book usually is a great book and there are few of those, and throughout the ages that type of book has often generated into a classic, and what was once thought shocking and immoral is now required reading at many of our universities.

On Burroughs, I never had much luck with him. And I’m sorry that he has dimmed for you. That whole gang: Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, so forth, they long ago dimmed for me. When you write only to get famous you shit it away. I don’t want to make rules but if there is one it is: the only writers who write well are those who must write in order not to go mad.

Then at night, sometimes it’s there on the computer. If it isn’t, I don’t shove it through. Unless the words jump out of you, forget it. Sometimes I don’t get near the computer because nothing’s buzzing and I’m either dead or resting and only time will tell. But I’m dead until the next line appears on the screen. It’s not a holy thing but it’s wholly necessary. Yeah. Yes. Meanwhile, I try to be as human as possible: talk to my wife, pet my cats, sit and watch tv if I am able or maybe just read the newspaper from first page to last or maybe just sleep early. Being 72 is another adventure. When I’m 92 I’ll look back at that and laugh. No, I’ve gone about far enough. It’s too much like the same movie. Except for all of us it’s getting a little uglier. I never thought I’d be here now and when I go, I’ll be ready.