On Writing

by Charles Bukowski

loss—there’s music in everything, even defeat—but

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

manifesto. It is a painful confession but the art of poetry carries its own powers without having to break them down into critical listings. I do not mean that poetry should be raffish and irresponsible clown tossing off words into the void. But the very feeling of a good poem carries its own reason for being.

But primarily 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.

All of which is to say, I didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to grammar, and when I write it is for the love of the word, the color, like tossing paint on a canvas, and using a lot of ear and having read a bit here and there, I generally come out ok, but technically I don’t know what’s happening, nor do I care.

And, of course, James Joyce went even further. We are interested in color, shape, meaning, force . . . the pigments that point up the soul. But I feel that there is a difference between being a non-grammarian and being unread, and it is the unread and the unprepared, those so hasty to splash into print that they have not reached into the ages for a sound and basic springboard, that I take task with.

eltchl,

spalpeen

quodlibet.

There is nothing less sexy, though certainly there are things less brash. It is a tragedy of poetry and life, these flat breasts, and those of us who live life as well as write about it must realize that if we outstay our feelings on this we might as well ignore the fall of Rome, or ignore cancer, or the piano works of Chopin. And, “shooting craps with God” will be about the only game left when the air is regaled with purple flashes and the mountains open mouths to roar and the splendid rockets promise only a landing in hell.

desuetude?

We discussed Villon, Rimbaud and Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. (It seemed a very French night with both of my visitors being very careful to use the French title for B’s works.) We also discussed J. B. May, Hedley, Poots, Cardona-Hine and Charles Bukowski.

helminthagogun:

I’ve earned $47 in 20 years of writing and I think that $2 a year (omitting stamps, paper, envelopes, ribbons, divorces and typewriters) entitles one to the special privacy of a special insanity and if I need hold hands with paper gods to promote a little scurvy rhyme, I’ll take the encyst and paradise of rejection.

I have often taken the isolationist stand that all that matters is the creation of the poem, the pure art form. What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

Show me an old poet and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master. And, I suppose, painters too. I am a little hesitant here, and though I paint, it is not my field. But I suppose it is similar, and I am thinking of an old French janitor at one of the last places I was employed. A part-time janitor, bent of back, wine-drinking. I found he painted. Painted through a mathematical formula, a philosophical computation of life. He wrote it down before he painted it. A gigantic plan, and painted to it. He spoke of conversations with Picasso. And I had to rather laugh. 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.

Corrington tells me he thinks Corso and Ferlinghetti have it. I am not really as well read as I should be. But I think the modern poet must have the stream of modern life in him, and we can no longer write like Frost or Pound or Cummings or Auden, they seem a little off track as if they have fallen out of step. For my money, Frost was always out of step and has gotten away with too much malarkey.

There was the time in Atlanta when I could barely see the end of the light cord—it was cut off and there wasn’t any bulb and I was in a paper shack over the bridge—one dollar and 25 cents a week rent—and it was freezing and I was trying to write but mostly I wanted something to drink and my California sunlight was a long ways away, and I thought well hell, I’ll get a little warmth and I reached up and I grabbed the wires in my hand but they were dead and I walked outside and stood under a frozen tree and watched through a warm frosty glass window some grocer selling some woman a loaf of bread and they stood there for ten minutes talking about nothing, and I watched them and I said I swear I swear, to hell with it!, and I looked up at the frozen white tree and its branches didn’t point anywhere, only into a sky that didn’t know my name, and it told me then: I do not know you and you are nothing. And how I felt that. If there are gods, their business is not to torture and test us to see if we are fit for the future but to do us some god damned god good in the present. The future’s only a bad hunch; Shakespeare told us that—we’d all go flying there otherwise. But it’s only when a man gets to the point of a gun in his mouth that he can see the whole world inside of his head. Anything else is conjecture, conjecture and bullshit and pamphlets.

happened? At eight o’clock one Sunday morning—EIGHT O’CLOCK!!! gd damn it—there was a knock on the door—and I opened it and there stood an editor. “Ah, I’m so and so, editor of so and so, we got your short story and thought it most unusual; we are going to use it in our Spring number.” “Well, come on in,” I’d had to say, “but don’t stumble over the bottles.” And then I sat there while he told me about his wife who thought a lot of him and about his short story that had once been published in The Atlantic Monthly, and you know how they talk on. He finally left, and a month or so later the hall phone rang and somebody wanted Bukowski, and this time it was a woman’s voice, “Mr. Bukowski, we think you have a very unusual short story and the group was discussing it the other night, but we think it has one weakness and we thought you might want to correct the weakness. It was this: WHY DID THE CENTRAL CHARACTER BEGIN TO DRINK IN THE FIRST PLACE?” I said, “Forget the whole thing and send the story back,” and I hung up. When I walked back in the Indian looked up over his drink and asked “Who was it?” I said, “Nobody,” which was the most accurate answer I could give.

Let’s allow ourselves space and error, hysteria and grief. Let’s not round the edge until we have a ball that rolls neatly away like a trick. Things happen—the priest is shot in the john; hornets blow heroin without arrest; they take down your number; your wife runs off with an idiot who’s never read Kafka; the crushed cat, its guts glueing its skull to the pavement, is passed by traffic for hours; flowers grow in the smoke; children die at 9 and 97; flies are smashed from screens . . . the history of form is evident.

She had a large bookkeeping book, a beautiful thing, and in it she had a list of magazines, and the magazine list crossed screw-wise or blue lines over orange or something and she made little asterisk **** that webbed it all together. It was one hell of a beautiful thing. She could run the same poem down thru 20 or 30 magazines just by ******************* *********** and never send to the same mag twice, hurrah. She had a book for me but I drew dirty pictures and things in mine. And when she wrought a poem, each one she wrote wd be typed again on special paper and then pasted in a notebook (with date). I could use a little of this moxie but really I think it would make me feel a little too much like I was selling form-fit bras from door to door.

[To John William Corrington] April 1962 [ . . . ] Fry once egged me on to make a bunch of cartoons with captions, the joke bit, and I stayed up all night, drinking and making these cartoons, laughing at my own madness. There were so many of them by morning that I couldn’t get them in an envelope, none large enough, so I made a big thing out of cardboard, and mailed it to either the New Yorker or Esquire, putting another cardboard thing inside with proper postage. Well, hell, they could prob. see I was either amateur or mad. It never came back. I wrote about my 45 cartoons and they never came back. “No such item rec. from you,” wrote back some editor. But sitting in a barbershop a couple of months later I came across one of my jokes in some mag, I believe Man, showing a guy, a jock whipping a horse with one of those round balls with spikes on the end of a chain, and one guy along the rail is telling another, “He’s a very rude boy but somehow effective.” The words were changed just a little and the drawing a little, but it sure seemed just like mine. Well, hell, you can imagine anything if you want to imagine anything. But I don’t know, I wasn’t even looking, I usually don’t even look into magazines or maybe I do but don’t realize it, but I kept popping across my same ideas and drawings just altered a touch; it was all too close, all too much the same to be anything but mine, only I felt that mine were better executed, and I do not mean killed, they killed that. And when I c...

“Very true—the artist must certainly go from one creation to the next, but none of them are entire new beginnings—nothing ever really has a new beginning. One creation evolves from another. One purpose turns into ten thousand others. When you find an inspired thought, in your head, surely you can not believe it is breathlessly new? It came from centuries of submerged creations of ideas. But I do not mean to get started on a long dragged out ‘essay’ . . .”

4-f

Unfit for military service.

If you write a poem that escapes the mass-hypnosis of 19th century slick-soft poesy they think that you write badly because you do not sound right. 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.

[To the editors of Coastlines] Late 1962 Biog.? I am insane and old and driveling, smoke like the forests of hell, but feel better all the time, that is—worse and better. And when I sit down to the typer it is like carving tits on a cow—a great big thing. Then too, I realize I gotta run in the Latin, and the poise, and the snob and the Pound and the Shake[speare], and hello hello hell—anything that makes the thing run, hurrah! But I am thin as a fake, so I often write a bad poem written mostly by myself rather than a good poem written mostly by somebody else. Though, of course, I cannot swear by this. Examination and re-examination. Why try? Those who sit constantly in symphony halls adore creation but cannot create. I go to the racetrack where they also have bars. All hail the mad gods who have created these fine spinning things.

A lot of my playing dumb or crude or boorish is done to eliminate horseshit.

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. I keep remembering a poem

They think I don’t give a damn, they think I don’t feel because my face is done and my eyes are poked out and I stand there with a drink, looking at the racing form. They feel in such a NICE way, the fuckers, the pricks, the slimy smiling lemon-sucking turd-droppers, they feel, sure, the CORRECT WAY, only there isn’t any correct way, and they’ll know it . . . some night, some morning, or maybe some day on a freeway, the last rumble of glass and steel and bladder in the rose-growing sunlight. They can take their ivy and their spondees and stick them up their ass . . . if something is not already up there.

Besides, it pays to be crude, buddy, it PAYS. When these women who have read my poetry knock on my door and I ask them in and pour them a drink, and we talk about Brahms or Corrington or Flash Gordon, they know all along that it is GOING TO HAPPEN, and that makes the talk nice because pretty soon the bastard is just going to walk over and grab me and get started because he’s been around he’s CRUDE And so, since they expect it, I do it, and this gets a lot of barriers and small-talk out of the way fast. Women like bulls, children, apes. The pretty boys and the expounders upon the universe don’t stand a chance. They end up jacking-off in the closet. 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.

depressive—but the book, the book, yes, it went well, and what interested me was that it showed how it was mostly for people like me and you and people we knew and know; how it was, and for my money, how it still is. 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. I think that if it is possible to destroy life completely then, by Christ, it is also possible to allow life to live completely.

know about the almost-impossibility of survival. I worked for $17 a week in Louisiana and was fired when I asked for a 2 dollar a week raise. This was in 1941. I’ve worked in slaughterhouses, washed dishes; worked in a fluorescent light factory; hung posters in New York subways, scrubbed freightcars and washed passenger trains in the railroad yards; been a stock boy, a shipping clerk, a mailman, a bum, a gas station attendant, coconut man in a cake factory, a truck driver, a foreman in a book-distributing warehouse, a carrier of bottles of blood and a rubber tube squeezer for the Red Cross; crapshooter, horseplayer, madman, fool, god, I can’t remember them all, but reading your book a lot of it came back to me. I used to sign up for track gangs in order to travel about the country. I once went from New Orleans to Los Angeles this way; another time from L.A. to Sacramento.

Writing is like most writers think fucking is: just when they start thinking they are doing it pretty good they stop doing it altogether. I hope to go a few more rounds but I know that thing is waiting there, that thing that tears most of us apart long before we’re dead, that tiger, that whore, that black cloth, that toenail.

What I mean is the kind of dependence that leaves you free to operate widely because you don’t need a kiss on the cheek from the old lady next door, you don’t need praiseology or to lecture before the Armenian Society of Pasadena writers.

Anyway, from his letter, the Franklyn thing really got to him. I did not buy a copy to look up my burial and demise. let the dogs worry each other. I’ve got things to do like sleep, and pick hardened snot from my nostrils, and say like now—watch this thing dressed in grey pants and she has spider legs and yet an ass like a washtub, she walks past this window and my limp pecker twitches as bellies full of worms in paradise sing out of birds in this warm Los Angeles evening.

listen, baby, you can get Jeffers in almost any library . . . try his Such Counsels You Gave to Me, and his Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, esp. Roan Stallion. Jeffers is better on the long poems. I also think that Conrad Aiken, in spite of being a more or less comfortable poetic almost bitch-like type, did manage to plow through some points. His main fault was that he wrote too well; the silk-cotton sounds almost hid the meaning, and, of course, this is the game of most shit-poets: to appear more profound than they are, to sneak in little delicious delicate darts and then retire to their safe comforts.

the trouble with us is that we buy their seeming superiority and therefore they BECOME superior. yet they end up writing for The New Yorker and dying and we end up working the coal mines and dying, so does it matter?

anyhow, he gave me a copy of Celine’s—what’s it called?—Journey to the End of the Night. now listen, most writers make me sick. their words don’t even touch the paper. thousands of millions of writers and their words, their words don’t even touch the paper. but Celine. made me ashamed of the poor writer I am, I felt like tossing it all. a god damned master whispering into my head. god, I was like a little boy again. listening. there’s nothing between Celine and Dostoyevsky unless it is Henry Miller.

Celine was a philosopher who knew that philosophy was useless; a fucker who knew that fucking was almost a sham; Celine was an angel and he spit into the eyes of angels and walked down the street. Celine knew everything; I mean he knew as much as there was to know if you only had two arms, two feet, a cock, some years to live or less than that, less than each or any of those. of course, he had a cock.

[Jean] Genet,

he calls my poems “real sadistic.” god o mighty, what a world of whammy halfpeople.

YOU MUST LOVE is pretty much the thing now, and I think that when love becomes a command, hatred becomes a pleasure, what I am trying to explain to you is that I have rather cracked grains and that a visit from you would not solve anything, especially with a jug of red eye when my stomach is gone.

Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

if the world changes at all it will be because the poor are fucking too much and that there are too many fucking poor and the few rich power boys will get scared because if you get enough poor and they are poor enough not all the propaganda newspapers in the world will be able to tell them how lucky they are and that poverty is holy and that starvation is good for the soul. if these people have the vote, things are going to change and if they don’t have the vote the riots are going to get bigger redder hotter heller. I have no politics but this is easy enough to see. but the power boys are clever too, they will attempt to give them just a nibble, just enough alms to hold them back. then the bomb could solve a lot of things too. all the chosen have to do is wait until there’s a hiding place in space and let the thing go. in the right places. they come back after the sanitary men have scrubbed the bones clean.

Seems like this mentality is going strong in 2019

they can have their club, their way, but why force me to join? not feeling well, anyway, I wrote them about it. then there are dozens of other mags who have accepted my poems, only never to come out with an issue, and NEVER returning the work. I don’t keep carbons. nor do I believe that my work is that precious, but it is a disgusting thing, the way these high-ideal little mag boys turn out to be pricks, fags, fakirs, fuckups, sadists, so on and so forth. the problem is that most of the boys are very young. a little mag seems like a dramatic thing to them, Art, smashing old barriers, hurrah for bravery, so forth. but to begin with, most of them are bad editors, no money, expect money somehow out of the setup; don’t like work, most of them, and are bad writers, most of them; and then just get tired, say fuck it. I’ve lost a book of poems and drawings to the shits, along with 300 poems. sometimes I think I’d rather deal with the telephone co., the gas co., the police.

Think of all Bukowski’s work and drawings that have been lost due to his not making copies and idiots who lost or whatever what he sent them. Makes me sad to think of all the lost work.

Evergreen 50 today with my short poem in there, way in the back, the thing is shot through with the famous, so there they are: Tennessee Williams, John Rechy, LeRoi Jones, Karl Shapiro, William Eastlake . . . but the writing is all bad, except mine and a really good play by Heathcote Williams, The Local Stigmatic, which first played at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh

but all this I learned a long time ago—the now famous did some good writing at one time and now no longer do good writing but go around attached to their names, their labels and the public and the magazines eat their shit. the gods have blessed me by not making me famous: I still shoot the word out of the cannon—which beats drippings from a limp cock. for it all, though, getting into Evergreen did me good because it taught me that everything is nothing and that nothing is everything and that you still have to lace your shoes if you have shoes and make your own magic if there is any to be made.

Fame + immortality are games for other people. If we’re not recognized when we walk down the street, that’s our luck. So long as the typer works the next time we sit down. My little girl likes me and that’s plenty.