On Writing

by Charles Bukowski

For my money, everything went to hell with World War 2. And not only the Arts. Even cigarettes don’t taste the same. Tamales. Chili. Coffee. Everything’s made of plastic.

A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

I am not exactly knocking Eliot, I am knocking education and its false teeth.

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.

How can these boys stand a chance, these 4-f hairy poets and practitioners when they drink goat’s milk, punch clocks, raise families, move to Glendale, vote for Nixon, wax their cars, bury grandma, take vitamins, how can they make it. haw how can they make it???? standing outside the fire? You tell me, please, if you can play it safe and still sing the madman’s beautiful song? No. I’ll tell you. It’s impossible.

the literary type is the last type to trust, remember that. ants, pygmies, hand job artists, cocksuckers, motherboy snot swallowers, the whole lot of them—almost, almost. you’ve got to remember I’ll be 46 in August and even tho I only began in the game at 35, I’ve seen enough in eleven years to store a napalm kiss for all of them. almost.

they come back after the sanitary men have scrubbed the bones clean.

so, I read. my last reading, Cal State Long Beach, I vomited first, then read with drops of sweat dripping down on the table, which I wiped away with my fingertips.

I lick my god damn soul out with my typewriter tongue.

and the old bartender with the cadmium red face in Philly

So I sit about drunk squeezing paint tubes onto paper and placing them on the floor and the cats walk over them. I don’t stop them.

I like to make the words bite into the paper not so much like Hemingway did but more like scratches in ice and also attended with some small laughter.

he repeatedly claims that letters are as important as poems.