1963

[To John William Corrington]
January 20, 1963

[ . . . ] Now that you are C[harles] P[ercy] Snow and Lion[el] Trill and T. S. and the vulgate desires of the frustrate hair-skewers will be listed, I had better stay on your best side, yr good side, God-side, where I imagine your .357 is tucked while you dance the saraband. All this quite interesting, for you are a hell of a lot better poet than you are a critic, and while you are talking about other people, other people should be reading you, you are steaming up like a truckload of dry ice filled on the San Berdo Freeway. Anyhow, that will take care of itself . . . On [Robert] Creeley, yes, it is more or less a trick; the poetry (his) is so white and dry and empty they figure, well, yes, Christ, I guess it is really something because there is nothing there and this man must BE so VURY SUBTLE AND INTEELIGENT, christ ya, because it appears I don’t understan wha he doin. It’s like a game of chess played in a sunny room with the rent paid ten years in advance, and nobody knows the winner because the winner makes the rules and doesn’t try very hard. If you wake up in a back alley with your shirt torn and you rise along the bricks, the cold wind coming in between your knees and your balls, and you’ve got a mouthful of blood and a couple of knots on your head, and when you reach in your pocket, the rear one, and you get that empty feeling of hand upon ass, wallet gone, all 500 bucks, driver’s license, phone number of Jesus, you aren’t a poet, you are just caught out of place and you don’t know how to act. When the bitch with big tits laughed at all your jokes youse shoulda jammed the glass right up her snatcher. The Creeleys will never know death; even when it arrives they will think it is for somebody else. [Gregory] Corso at least thinks about Death. And Corso. If his name were Hamacheck he never would have become known. The world of Art is like a bunch of fucking ivy growing everywhere. It’s all on the rain and the luck and where the building is and who walks by and what yr doing, like what ivy are you crawling with or sleeping with or what Black Mountain crew, or god, I must stop, I am sick.

[To John William Corrington]
March 9, 1963

[ . . . ] I don’t think there is such a thing as Outsider #3. I feel like I did when I was a kid in high school, when they made me sit in a phone booth while I waited to see the principal, a distinguished-looking fuck, grey-haired, long-haired, pince-nez, victorian voice, and he dressed me down after keeping me in that booth for an hour waiting with a copy of the Ladies Home Journal. I forgot what I did; it seemed something like murder. A couple of years later I read where they got the old boy for misappropriation of funds. Anyhow, with Outsider 3, now, I am sitting in the phone booth, waiting. You can’t blame me for getting edgy. It wasn’t over 8 months ago that I was sitting on the damned cliff’s edge testing razorblades with the edge of my thumb.

    Corrington wrote “Charles Bukowski: Three Poems,” published in The Outsider 3, as well as “Charles Bukowski at Midflight,” an introduction to Bukowski’s It Catches My Heart in Its Hands (1963).

[To John William Corrington]
March 19, 1963

Got The Outsider number 3, and fantoccini grapes and hail!!!—thair on cover I appear, torturer of rats and infants and old ladies, and the honor is heavy, almost too heavy to bear, so you know, I did the easy thing, I got drunk, but really the thing has yet to take the shape of reality, and I know this kind of talk gets tiresome, but they can never ever really again strike me down because this thing was done by these 2 people in the hardest sort of way, and no wonder they are interested in OUTSIDERS, for can’t you see, that’s what THEY are? And most pleasing of all, they did not mutilate me or freak me up, but let it just fall the way it is. This is what happens when editors have SOULS, and after battling and hating editors all my life, it has to come to this: an almost awe of the workmanship, manner and miracle of these 2 people—not because they put me on a cover, printed some letters etc.; but in the grand manner, they did it so god damned well that neither pride nor honor is lost. I am very aware that my mind will eventually go soft with drink and age—if I live—but nothing outside of death will ever quite bear this time away from me. All the walls and whores and days and nights of hell did not earn this for me. I was lucky. And since I have been . . . unlucky . . . I take and accept this #3, ages of my life gone, almost, everything gone, but this.

I can’t get over about how well they did it. They must understand more about me than I understand about myself.

And now, on top of everything, I get these notes from Jon, blue slips of paper etc.: “We will soon be into the book . . . Corrington coming down, busy, busy, busy . . .”

A book on top of all this seems almost impossible, but unless you think I grow soft—joy does seep through here—understand, that certain allowance with 2 or 3 people does not mean that I grow soft (yet?) in the head. I’m not like Frost: he had a lover’s quarrel with the world and he won; I had a fighter’s fight with the world and I lost. I intend to keep losing but I doubt that I intend to quit fighting. There is a difference and if I speak well of 2 or 3 people, it is done because the speaking breaks through and I am at a loss to guard it, do not want to. [ . . . ]

What I mean, Willie iz: you did good article on my 3 poems, and I hope you do intro for book, you are one of the luckiest things that has happened to me outside of Jane and a horse that paid me $222.60, or something like that for a deuce 2 or 3 years back. Putting it lightly. Jane is dead. The horse is prob. dead. You are here. I pray. You, like Jon and Louise, did me great honor, and knowing this is meant . . . without pressure, coercion . . . meant because it was only meaning to you, I take it gently and with warmth, you South bastard, and “The Tragedy of the Leaves” I remember (as a poem) the best of them all. “Old Man, Dead in a Room” may yet hold true. If I wrote my own epitaph (which is what I meant it to be), it was because sometime ahead of time I could see this truly becoming so, and I still hold to this. Fame or immortality will not be mine. Actually, I do not want it. I mean, it is grissly girly grizzly gouchey what??? He, who fucks wants to stick his cock of self into that long black dawn with INTENT must truly have something wrong with himself, or dirt under his fingernails.

[To Edward van Aelstyn]
March 31, 1963

Got your o.k. on the 2 poems “A Drawer of Fish” and “Breakthrough.”

About Outsider #3, Webb does it the hard way, of course, and pretty much alone, so that when he comes across some precious group with staff and walking shorts gathered upon a North Carolina mountaintop (or wherever the Black Mountain School originated), it brings a boil to the mind (this something already settled before we—the readers—get to it) and this time it exploded. Of course, all through the history of the Arts—painting, music, lit., these schools have existed, sometimes because the individual artist was too weak to fail alone (it’s much easier to succeed alone), or other times because groups of artists were made into schools by the critics; but hell, you know all this. What I would like to point out, however, is that Webb has given Creeley space and has given space to Creeleyites on the seeming weakness or strength of their work alone; but the objection that Webb voices is that they are unable to work alone, and there is a network of defense that is wrought up whenever (it seems) one of the holy members are criticized.

My criticism of Creeley is far more (seemingly) vicious: I don’t think he can write. I have no doubt that he thinks the same of me.

There is only one thing or 2 an artist can do: go on writing or stop writing. Sometimes he goes on and stops at the same time. Eventually, of course, the Impartial Critic gets us all and we stop pretty damned good.

I am glad you think of guarding the soul, this has been quite forgotten by many or is regarded as Romantic Rubbish of a more unimplemented past when it appeared that we did not know as much about ourselves as we do now. But the basics remain the same: if you roll in shit long enough you are going to look like it. The only thing we’ve got to do is find out what it is so we won’t roll in it. I would hate as much to teach a class in Freshman English as I would to turn bolts in a factory. Each is damning enough. And when you are through with that part, the leisure we have left waits upon us. This is the big trick to turn. And many times, no matter how well you turn the trick, the other part—turning the bolt, teaching Freshman English, eats you away. Some artists (more so in the past, I feel, than in the present) get more leisure by not working and therefore starving in order to gain Time, but this too often contains a trap with teeth: suicide or madness. I can now write better, I think, on a full stomach, but maybe it is because I remember all the years it was empty and that it will, most probably, be that way again. Saving the soul depends upon what you do—and not the obvious things—and what and how much you have to begin with and how much you might possibly even gain along the way. There are professional soul-savers, intellectuals, who go by standard formula and therefore are saved in only a standard sort of way—which is like not being saved at all. The few people I know sometimes ask me, “Why do you drink and go to the race track?” It would make far more sense to them if I stayed inside for a month and stared at the walls. What they do not realize is that I have already done this. What they do not realize is that if I do not hear the hard tack and rattle of words in my gut, I am done, and so I go where this helps it occur (the bottle) (the crowd), so far. Later, maybe, I won’t care.

This writing the poem often brings strange ladies to the door, knocking, and they think the poem means love, so I have to give them love, and that may be—haha!—what’s left of the soul . . . going there. I guess part of it is down around the belly. The last one just left this afternoon after 4 days and nights, and I sit down to write you this thing upon . . . aesthetics, and the Black Mountain School, and that I got your o.k. on the 2 poems, and sure, I can use the check too. It has been a warm afternoon and a long one, in a way, the eyes all splotched with love . . . peeking at me from between the rungs of the bed as I read the race results . . . god damn, god damn, is this living? Is this the way it’s done? With 9 bottles of beer and 16 cigarettes left, on the last night of March in 1963, Cuba and the Berlin Wall, and these walls here cracking, me cracking, a brittle 42 years wasted . . . van, van, the Beast is not Death. . . .

    Corrington published “Charles Bukowski and the Savage Surfaces,” in Northwest Review in 1963. The lines Bukowski quotes almost verbatim below belong to “Westron Wynde,” which is believed to be a fragment of medieval poetry.

[To John William Corrington]
May 1, 1963

red flags draped all over; red shorts anyhow . . . 3 rejected poems back from [Sergio] Mondragón, very curt. all now normal and I see through my 2 front eyes.

—on poetry of the surfaces, I am glad I am savage as accused, glad not to belong, and you understand this, of course, because you seem to see pretty well beyond the obvious. I’ve spent my hours in the library with Schope[nhauer] and Ari[stotle] and Plato and the rest, but when some kind of teeth are digging into you it doesn’t set for calmness and meditation. Twice today at the track I had people walk up to me, the first asked: “Hey, didn’t you once work in a Studebaker factory?” The other guy was worse; he said: “Tell me, didn’t you once drive a bread wagon?” I haven’t done either of these things but I have done many things of this sort that have sort of slugged my head into frogshape undazzle, and they figure I’ve had it, which I have had, only they are thinking in terms of some other poor fuck who’s had it. Fine and lacy poetry & thoughts are for those who have time for them. God’s pretty far away from me, maybe inside a beerbottle somewhere, and sure I’m crude, they’ve made me crude, and in another sense I am crude because I want to work things down to where they are—that is, the knife going in, or staring at a whore’s asshole, that’s where the work is going on, and I don’t want to be fooled too much and I don’t want to fool anybody else. Let’s say, even subconsciously, that this self of mine is thinking in terms of CENTURIES, which is pretty tough stuff. A lot of my playing dumb or crude or boorish is done to eliminate horseshit. 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. I keep remembering a poem I read with a lot of other poems quite some centuries old, quite old, and it’s true that when you go back far enough things become simple and clear and good because maybe that’s what was saved, maybe that’s all the years could stand, or maybe they were better men then, maybe all that heavy false creamy 18th and 19th century part was a reaction to truth, men get tired of truth just as they get tired of evil, but who knows—anyhow, in all these aged poems there was one went something like this, bill:

oh god

to have my love in my arms

and back in my bed

again!

that’s crude. I like it.

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 and a county grave, like a garbage pit, waiting. 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.

[To Marvin Malone]
August 5, 1963

Well, I walked upstairs with the heavy envelope, thinking, well they are prob. still all in here, it’s tough like sending elephants through mud, but I opened the thing and found you had taken ELEVEN, which is a lot no matter how many I had sent. I don’t know much about the ratings you 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. [ . . . ]

I hope when your co-editor gets back into town he is feeling good . . . Writing is a damn funny game. Rejection helps because it makes you write better; acceptance helps because it keeps you writing. I will be 43 years old in 11 days. It seems o.k. to write poetry at 23 but 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.