1984

[To William Packard]
May 19, 1984

Well, since you asked . . . otherwise, talking about poetry or the lack of it is just so much “sour grapes,” a fruity expression of distaste used in the old days. Which is a rather crappy opening sentence, but I’ve only had one sip of wine. Old F. N[ietzsche] had it right when they asked him (also in the old days) about the poets. “The poets?” he said. “The poets lie too much.” This was one of their faults, and if we are to find out what’s wrong with or not right with modern poetry we’ll have to look at the past also. You know that when the boys in the schoolyard don’t want to read poetry, even laugh at it, look down at it as a sissified sport they aren’t entirely wrong. Of course there is a change in semantics through time that makes absorbing past works more difficult but that isn’t what put the boys off. Poetry just wasn’t right, it was fake, it didn’t matter. Take Shakespeare: reading him would dull you out of your mind. He only came up with it now and then, he’d give you a bright shot then go back to laboring up to the next point. The poets they fed us were immortal but they were neither dangerous or interesting. We spit them out and went about a more serious business: after school bloody-nose fights. Anybody knows that if you can’t get into the young mind early it’s going to be all hell getting into it late. People who turn out patriots and God-believers are very aware of this. Poetry never had much going and it still doesn’t. Yes, yes, I know, there was Li Po and some of the early Chinese poets who could compact great emotion and great truth into a few simple lines. There are other exceptions, of course, the human race is not so lame as to have not taken a few steps. But the vast bulk, pulp, ink and link of it all is treacherously empty, almost as if somebody had played a dirty trick on us, worse than that, and the libraries are a farce.

And the moderns borrow from the past and extend the error. Some claim that poetry is not for the many but for the few. So are most world governments. So are riches and the so-called class ladies. So are specially built toilets.

The best study of poetry is to read it and forget it. Because a poem can’t be understood I don’t think is a special virtue. Because most poets write from protected lives what they write about is limited. I’d much rather talk to a garbage man, a plumber or a fry cook than to a poet. They just know more about the common problems and the common joys of staying alive.

Poetry can be entertaining, it can be written with an astonishing clarity, I don’t know why it has to be the other way, but it is. Poetry is like sitting in a stuffy room with the windows down. And very little is occurring to let in any air, any light. It could be that the field has simply drawn the worst of the practitioners. It seems so easy to call yourself “a poet.” There’s very little to do once you’ve assumed your stance. There’s a reason why many people don’t read poetry. The reason is that the stuff is badly and limply done. Perhaps the energetic creators have gone into music or prose or painting, sculpting? At least once in a while in these fields somebody breaks through the stale walls.

I stay away from the poets. When I was in my slum rooms it was more difficult to do this. When they found me they sat about gossiping and drinking my booze. Some of these poets were fairly well known. But their rancor, their bitching, and their envy of any other poet having any luck was unbelievable. Here were men who were supposed to be putting down words of verve and wisdom and exploration and they were just sick assholes, they couldn’t even drink well, spittle drooled out of the edges of their mouths, they slobbered on their shirts, got giddy on a few drinks, puked and ranted. They bad-mouthed about everybody who wasn’t around and there was little doubt in my mind that my turn would come when they were elsewhere. I didn’t feel threatened. What mattered was after they left: their cheap vibes had settled under the rug and upon the window shades and all about and it was sometimes a day or two later until I felt all right again—I mean, my oh my:

“He’s an Italian Jew cocksucker and his wife is in a madhouse.”

“X is so cheap that when he goes downhill in his car he shuts off the motor and puts it in neutral.”

“Y pulled down his pants and begged me to fuck him in the ass and asked me never to tell anybody.”

“If I were a black homosexual I’d be famous. This way I don’t stand a chance.”

“Let’s start a magazine. You got any money?”

Then there’s the reading circuit. If you’re doing it for the rent, all right. But too many do it for vanity. They’d read for free and many do. If I had wanted to be on stage I would have been an actor. To some who’ve come by and sucked up my drinks I’ve expressed my dislike for reading poems to an audience. It reeks of self-love, I’ve told them. I’ve seen these dandies get up and lisp their limpid verse, it’s all so dull and tedious, and the audience too seems as flat as the reader: just dead people killing a dead night.

“Oh no, Bukowski, you’re wrong! The troubadours used to go down the streets regaling the public!”

“Isn’t it possible that they were bad?”

“Hey, man, what are you talking about? Madrigals! Songs of the heart! The poet is the same! We can’t get enough poets! We need more poets, in the streets, on the mountaintops, everywhere!”

I suppose there are rewards for all this. After one of my readings down south, at a party afterwards, at the prof’s house who had set up the reading, I was standing about drinking somebody else’s booze for a change when the prof came up.

“Well, Bukowski, which one do you want?”

“You mean, of the women?”

“Yes, southern hospitality, you know.”

There must have been between 15 and 20 women in the room. I glanced about and feeling it would save my god damned soul just a bit I selected an old one in a short red dress showing lots of leg, she was smeared with lipstick and booze.

“I’ll take Grandma Moses there,” I told him.

“What? No shit? Well, she’s yours . . .”

I don’t know how but word got around. Grandma was talking to some guy. She looked over and smiled, gave a little wave. I smiled, winked. I’d wrap that red dress around my balls.

Then the tall blonde came up. She had ivory face, the moulded features, the dark green eyes, the flanks, the mystery, the youth, ah, all that, you know, and she walked up and puffed out her enormous breasts and said, “You mean, you’re going to take that?”

“Oh yes, mam, I’m going to carve my initials into one of her buns.”

“YOU FOOL!” she spit at me and whirled off to talk to a young dark haired student with a delicate thin neck which bent forward wearily from his imagined agony. She was probably the leading poet-fucker of that town or maybe only the leading poet-sucker but I had spoiled her night. It does sometimes pay to read, even for 500 and air . . .

Which leads further. During this time with my little travel bag and my ever-widening sheath of poesy I met others of my ilk. Sometimes they were leaving as I was arriving or the other way around. My god, they looked just as seedy, wild-eyed and depressed as I. Which gave me some hope for them. We’re just hacking it, I thought, it’s a dirty job and we know it. A few of these were writing some poetry that gambled a bit, screamed, seemed to be working toward something. I felt that we were hustling our shit against the odds, trying to stay out of the factories and the car washes, maybe even the madhouses. I know that just before my luck changed a little I was planning on trying to hold up some banks. Better to get fucked by an old woman in a short red dress . . . What I’m getting at, though, is that some of these few who began so well . . . say, almost with the same splash as an early Shapiro in V-Letter, now I looked around and they’ve been ingested, digested, suggested, molested, conquested, quiddled. They teach, they are poets-in-residence. They wear nice clothing. They are calm. But their writing is 4 flat tires and no spare in the trunk and no gas in the tank. NOW THEY TEACH POETRY. THEY TEACH HOW TO WRITE POETRY. Where did they get the idea that they ever knew anything about it? This is the mystery to me. How did they get so wise so fast and so dumb so fast? Where did they go? And why? And what for? Endurance is more important than truth because without endurance there can’t be any truth. And truth means going to the end like you mean it. That way, death itself comes up short when it grabs.

Well, I’ve already said too much. I sound like those poets who used to come around and puke on my couch. And my word is just another word in with all the others’ words. Just to let you know I’ve got a new kitten. Male. I need a name. For the kitten, I mean. And there have been some good names. Don’t you think? Like Jeffers. E. E. Cummings. Auden. Stephen Spender. Catullus. Li Po. Villon. Neruda. Blake. Conrad Aiken. And there’s Ezra. Lorca. Millay. I don’t know.

Ah, hell, maybe I’ll just name the son of a bitch “Baby Face Nelson” and be done with it.

[To A. D. Winans]
June 27, 1984

[ . . . ] I think one of the best things that ever happened to me was that I was so long unsuccessful as a writer and had to work for a living until I was 50. It kept me away from other writers and their parlor games and their backbiting and their bitching, and now that I’ve had some luck I still intend to absent myself from them.

Let them continue their attacks, I will continue my work, which is not something I do to seek immortality or even a minor fame. I do it because I must and I will. I feel good most of the time, especially when I’m at this machine, and the words feel more and more as if they are coming out better and better. True or not, right or wrong, I go with it.

[To Carl Weissner]
August 2, 1984

[ . . . ] The work you’ve done over the years for me and the Sparrow, your translations and your efforts to always get the best for us has to be one of the most remarkable things I know of. Two of the luckiest things that ever happened to me were when Martin picked me up and you decided to be my translator and agent, and friend. Then too, I think of old Jon Webb who published me in those splendid editions when I was virtually unknown. There are magic people in the world, and you are most surely one of them. [ . . . ]

Here, well, I get so many books of translation from so many places I hardly know what’s going on. The book case can’t hold them all. They are all over the rug. Need another bookcase in the bedroom. Maybe soon. It’s all very strange. To think that people in all these far away countries are sitting about reading Women, Factotum, South of No North, Ham on Rye and on and on . . . I get love letters from ladies in far off places. A lady in Australia sent me the key to her house. Long letters from others. And here, in the U.S., I get offers from girls from 19 to 21 to come see me. I tell them, nothing doing. Nothing is free. There is a price on everything. I tell them to go fuck somebody their own age. [ . . . ]

Martin has me on the paintings for War All the Time. I try to tell him that the paintings come from the same place the writing comes from and that I’d rather write. I can’t make him see this. 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.