9, 1960
[ . . . ] I believe that too much poetry is being written as “poetry” instead of concept. By this I mean we try too hard to make these things sound like poems. It was Nietzsche who said when asked about the poets: “The Poets? The Poets lie too much!” The poem-form, by tradition, allows us to say much in little space, but most of us have been saying more than we feel, or when we lack the ability to see or carve, we substitute poetic diction, of which the word STAR is nabob and chief executor.
[To Jon Webb]
December 11, 1960
[ . . . ] You long ago told me that you were rejecting “names” right and left. It appears then that you are selecting what you like, which is only what any editor can do. I was once an editor of Harlequin and have an idea of what comes along in the way of poetry—how much poorly written amateur unoriginal pretensive poetry one can get in the mails. If printing “names” means printing good poetry . . . it is up to the non-names to write poetry good enough to get in. To merely reject “names” and print 2nd. hand poetry of unknowns . . . is that what they want? . . . a form of new inferiority? Should we throw away Beethoven and Van Gogh for the musical ditties or dabblings of the lady across the street because nobody knows her name? While I was with Harlequin we were only able to publish ONE formerly unpublished poet, a 19 year-old boy out of Brooklyn, if I remember. And this . . . only by cutting away whole sections of the 3 or 4 poems he sent in. And after that, he never again sent in anything even partially worthwhile. And we got our letters too, bitter letters of complaint from known and unknown too. I would stay up half the night writing 2 or 3 page rejections of why I felt the poems wouldn’t do—this instead of writing “sorry, no.,” or the out of the printed rejection. But the sleep lost was in vain; the poems I did not write, I should have written; the drunks, the plays, the racetracks I missed, I should not have missed; the operas, the symphonies . . . because all I got back for TRYING, trying to be decent and warm and open . . . were snarling bitter letters, full of cursing and vanity and war. I would not have minded a solid analysis of my wrongs—but the sniveling, snarling missives—no, hell no. It’s very odd, I thought, how people can be so very “shitty” (to use one of their terms) and write poetry too. But now, after meeting a few of them, I know that it is entirely possible. And I do not mean the clean fight, the rebel, the courage; I mean thin-minded glory-grabbers, money-mad, spiritually dwarfed.
In “Horse on Fire,” published in Targets 4 in 1960, Bukowski puts Pound’s Cantos down.
[To W. L. Garner and Lloyd Alpaugh]
Late December 1960
[ . . . ] Old Ez[ra Pound] will probably spit out his teeth when he reads “Horse on Fire,” but even the great can sometimes live in error and it is up to us smaller ones to correct their table manners. And Sheri Martinelli will wail, but why did they blubber over their precious canto and then tell me about it? I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.
1961
[To Jon Webb]
Late January 1961
[ . . . ] 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. I can read some poems and just sense how they were shaved and riveted and polished together. You get a lot of poetry like that now out of Poetry Chicago. When you flip the pages, nothing but butterflies, near bloodless butterflies. I am actually shocked when I go through this magazine because nothing is happening. And I guess that’s what they think a poem is. Say, something not happening. A neat lined something, so subtle you can’t even feel it. This makes the whole thing intelligent art. Balls! The only thing intelligent about a good art is if it shakes you alive, otherwise it’s hokum, and how come it’s hokum and in Poetry Chi? You tell me.
In 1956 when I first began writing poetry at the doddering age of 35 after spitting my stomach out through my mouth and ass, and I have sense enough not to drink any more whiskey although a lady claimed I was staggering around her place last Friday night drinking port wine—in 1956 I sent Experiment a handful of poems that (which) they accepted, and now 5 years later they tell me they are going to publish one of them, which is delayed reaction if I ever saw any. They tell me it will be out in June 1961 and I guess when I read it, it will be like an epitaph. And then she suggested I send her ten dollars and join the Experiment Group. Naturally, I declined. Christ, an extra ten today on Togetherness in the middle races would have had me whistling dixie through my anus.
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. And sure, they set him up like a dead dummy in the snow and let him blubber through his dying sight and insight at the inauguration. Very fine, indeed. And any more things like that and I’m going to try and look up a Communist party card or an old black arm band or some queer to flub me off any way he likes. I hope I never get so old that I can no longer remember, but, of course, Frost has always played the favorite, and if he ever did like a 60 to one longshot, he kept his mouth shut. [ . . . ]
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.
[To Jon Webb]
March 25, 1961
[ . . . ] what bothers me is when I read about the old Paris groups, or somebody who knew somebody in the old days. They did it then too, the names of old and now. I think Hemingway’s writing a book about it now. But in spite of it all, I can’t buy it. I can’t stand writers or editors or anybody who wants to talk Art. For 3 years I lived in a skid row hotel—before my hemorrhage—and got drunk every night with an x-con, the hotel maid, an Indian, a gal who looked like she wore a wig but didn’t, and 3 or 4 drifters. Nobody knew Shostakovich from Shelley Winters and we didn’t give a damn. The main thing was sending runners out for liquor when we ran dry. We’d start low on the line with our worst runner and if he failed—you
