in a charity ward slowed me somewhat, gave me the old pause to think. I found myself writing poetry: hell of a state. I had been, in my earlier days, working with the short story, getting quite a bit of encouragement from Whit Burnett discoverer of W[illiam] Saroyan and others and founder of the then famous Story magazine. Whit finally took one—I used to send him 15 or 20 stories a month and when they came back, I would tear them up—back in 1944 when I was sweet, fiery and 24. I landed 3 or 4 stories in Matrix and one in an international review of the time called Portfolio, and then I more or less tossed everything overboard, until a couple of years back when I began writing poetry exclusively. For the first year nobody bit and then I was published (and this brings us up to date) in Quixote, Harlequin, Existaria, The Naked Ear, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Hearse, Approach, The Compass Review and Quicksilver. I have work accepted for future publication in Insert, Quixote, Semina, Olivant, Experiment, Hearse, Views, The Coercion Review, Coastlines, Gallows and The San Francisco Review. Hearse is bringing out a chapbook of my poems Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail early next year . . . I went to L.A. City College when I was a kid and took a course in journalism but the nearest I’ve gotten to a newspaper is every 2 or 3 days when I flip through one without too damned much interest. Went back to night school there about a year ago and took some art courses, commercial and otherwise but then too, they moved too slow for me and wanted too much obeisance. I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic. That’s about it—you can take the few lines you need out of here.
1959
[To Anthony Linick]
March 6, 1959
[ . . . ] I should think that many of our poets, the honest ones, will confess to having no 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. I am aware of the New Criticism and the Newer Criticism and the Blue Guitar school of thought, the English school forwarded by Paris Leary, the strong image school of Epos and Flame, etc. etc., but all these are demands on style and manner and method rather than on content, although we have some restrictions here also. 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.
Bukowski’s “Manifesto: A Call for Our Own Critics” appeared in Nomad 5/6 in 1960.
[To Anthony Linick]
April 2, 1959
[ . . . ] While writing, I should mention that the “manifesto” essay I sent yesterday (I believe) is now bothering me. Although I do not have the script around, I believe I used the phrase “leave us be fair.” This has been keeping me awake upon my hot lonely pad (the whores are laying with less involved fools as of now). I believe “let us be fair” is more correct. Or is it? Any grammarians on Nomad? In my youth (ah lo, swift the years!) I received a D in English I at dear old L.A.C.C. for showing up every morning at 7:30 a.m. with a hangover. It wasn’t the hangover so much as the fact that the class began at 7:00 a.m., usually with a rendering blast from Gilbert and Sullivan, which, I am sure, would have killed me. In English II I received an A or a B because the teacher was a female who caught me constantly looking at her legs. 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. Let us be fair. let us be fair. Let us . . .
[To Anthony Linick]
April 22, 1959
[ . . . ] I must rush off now to catch the first race. Thank you for lessening the blow on my weakness of grammar by mentioning that some of your college friends have trouble with sentence structure. I think some writers do suffer this fate mainly because at heart they are rebellious and the rules of grammar like many of the other rules of our world call for a herding in and a confirmation that the natural writer instinctively abhors, and, furthermore, his interest lies in the wider scope of subject and spirit . . . Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Saroyan were a few that reshaped the rules, especially in punctuation and sentence flow and breakdown. 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. And most certainly the Kenyon Review school has the edge on us here, although they have gone so far overboard on this point that their creative edge is dulled.
James Boyer May edited and published Trace, where excerpts from Bukowski’s correspondence appeared in several issues.
[To James Boyer May]
Early June 1959
[ . . . ] As to those who have some doubt as to my psychological fitness, I feel this stems from a misconception of my poetic intent. I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize, at times, but this only for the grace and élan of the dance.
The four Bukowski poems published in Nomad 1 were unfavorably reviewed in Trace 32 by William J. Noble (1959).
[To Anthony Linick]
July 15, 1959
Privately now, I would like to comment to you on the Noble Bitch in Trace 32. Why this eltchl, this conservative from the halls of the ikons and holy rollers, the pluckers of rondeaux and smellers of lilies, why this spalpeen should set himself up as a special critic of literary know-how is more than I can dispense with with a quodlibet. I need a stronger antiseptic.
The field boils with literary journals, a great slough and pot-wash of them for those who wish to continue on the descensive, whether they be gnostics, pansies or grandmothers who keep canaries and goldfish. Why these reactionaries cannot be content with their lot, why they must lacerate us with their yellow-knuckled souls, the looming kraken of their god-head, is beyond me. I certainly do not give a magniloquent damn what they print in their journals: I beg no alms for modern verse. Yet they came bickering to us. Why? Because they smell life and cannot stand it, they want to plunge us into the same spume and sputum that has held them daft with the deism of stale 1890 verse.
Mr. Noble believes I am being brash and sexy when I speak of “fumbling with flat breasts.” 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.
Perhaps
