of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,” to his final poems, stories, and essays, he returns obsessively to the primal question: “Old Writer puts on sweater, sits down, leers into computer screen and writes about life. How holy can we get?”
INTRODUCTION NOTES
1. Charles Bukowski, The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1998).
2. On Bukowski and Trace, see David Stephen Calonne, Charles Bukowski (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 42.
3. On Zahn, see Brian Kim Stefans, “Los Angeles Poetry from the McCarthy to the Punk Eras” in A History of California Literature, ed. Blake Allmendinger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 264-65; James Boyer May, “On Trace” in The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History, eds. Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie (Yonkers, NY: The Pushcart Press, 1978), 376-387. Also see Bill Mohr, “Scenes and Movements in Southern California Poetry” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158; and Bill Mohr, Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948–1992 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 37-9.
4. On Bukowski’s manifestoes, see Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, ed. David Stephen Calonne (San Francisco: City Lights, 2008), “Introduction,” xii-xiii.
5. Ole Anthology, 6, ed. Doug Blazek, 1967.
6. Rexroth had reviewed Bukowski’s It Catches My Heart in Its Hands in the New York Times Book Review, calling him a “substantial writer.” He told James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions in a letter of July 25, 1967: “Why don’t you publish [Charles] Bukowski? He is by far the best to come up in recent years, though he’s near as old as you. I think he is great and would love to do an introduction.” See Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. Lee Bartlett (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 242. On the episode involving Ruth Wantling, see Howard Sounes, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010), 137-39.
7. On the Webbs, see Jeff Weddle, Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of The Outsider and Loujon Press (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).
8. See Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, ed. David Stephen Calonne (San Francisco: City Lights, 2008), 49-53.
9. Ibid., “Jaggernaut,” 156-61.
10. William Saroyan, “Preface” to Opera, Opera in Razzle-Dazzle (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), 118.
11. Previously, Bukowski had reviewed A.E. Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway (New York: Random House, 1966). See “An Old Drunk Who Ran Out of Luck,” Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook,” 54-56.
12. Hemingway was significant in the work of several poets. See Ron McFarland, “Hemingway and the Poets,” The Hemingway Review, Vol. 20, no. 2, Spring 2001.
13. On Richmond, see Gagaku Reader: The Life and Poetry of Steve Richmond (Smithville, TX: Busted Dharma Books, 2016).
14. The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle: The Selected Poetry & Art of d.a. levy, ed. Mike Golden (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999). Also see Len Fulton, “Anima Rising: Little Magazines in the Sixties” in Print, Image and Sound: Essays on Media, ed. John Gordon Burke (Chicago: American Library Association, 1972), 128-29, 134; Gary Snyder, “The Dharma Eye of d.a. levy” in The Old Ways (San Francisco: City Lights, 1977). For Bukowski’s other (untitled) essay on levy, see Absence of the Hero, ed. David Stephen Calonne (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010), 115-16.
15. Knut Hamsun, Hunger, trans. Sverre Lyngstad (New York: Penguin, 1998), 3, 5.
MANIFESTO
Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way
I was going to begin this with a little rundown on the female but since the smoke on the local battlefront has cleared a bit I will relent, but there are 50,000 men in this nation who must sleep on their bellies for fear of losing their parts to women with wild-glazed eyes and knives. Brothers and sisters, I am 52 and there is a trail of females behind me, enough for five men’s lives. Some of the ladies have claimed that I have betrayed them for drink; well, I’d like to see any man stick his pecker into a fifth of whiskey. Of course, you can get your tongue in there but the bottle doesn’t respond. Well, haha among the trumpets, let’s get back to the word.
The word. I’m on my way to the track, opening day at Hollywood Park, but I’ll tell you about the word. To get the word down proper, that takes courage, seeing the form, living the life, and getting it into the line. Hemingway takes his critical blows now from people who can’t write. There are hundreds of thousands of people who think they can write. They are the critics, the bellyachers and the mockers. To point to a good writer and call him a hunk of shit helps satisfy their loss as creators, and the better a man gets the more he is envied and, in turn, hated. You ought to hear them razz and demean Pincay and Shoemaker, two of the greatest jocks ever to steer a horse. There’s a little man outside our local tracks who sells newspapers and he says, “Get your paper, get your info on Shoemaker the Faker.” Here he is calling a man who has ridden more winners than any other jock alive (and he’s still riding and riding well) and here’s this newspaper guy selling papers for a dime and calling the Shoe a fraud. The Shoe is a millionaire, not that that’s important, but he did get it with his talent and he could buy this guy’s newspapers, all of them, for the rest of this guy’s life and into a half-dozen eternities. Hemingway, too, gets the sneers from the newspaper boys and girls of writing. They didn’t like his exit. I thought his exit was quite fine. He created his own mercy killing. And he created some writing. Some of it depended too much on style but it was a style he broke through with; a style that ruined thousands of writers who attempted to use any portion of it. Once a style is evolved it is thought of as a simple thing, but style not only evolves through a method, it evolves through feeling, it is like laying a brush to canvas in a certain way and if you’re not living along the path of power and flow, style vanishes. Hemingway’s style did tend to vanish toward the end, progressively, but that’s because he let down his guard and let people do things to him. But he gave us more than plenty. There is a minor poet I know who came over the other night. He is a learned man, and clever, he lets the ladies support him so you know he’s good at something. He is a very powerful figure of a man growing soft around the edges, looks quite literary and carries these black notebooks around with him and he reads to you from them. This boy told me the other night, “Bukowski, I can write like you but you can’t write like me.” I didn’t answer him because he needs his self-glory, but really, he only thinks he can write like me. Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way. Oh, by the way, if you want to get one angle on a minor writer, it is one who throws a party or gets one thrown for him when his book comes out.
Hemingway studied the bullfights for form and meaning and courage and failure and the way. I go to boxing matches and attend horse races for the same reason. There is a feeling at the wrists and the shoulders and the temples. There is a manner of watching and recording that grows into the line and the form and the act and the fact and the flower, and the dog walking and the dirty panties under the bed, and the sound of the typewriter as you’re sitting there, that’s the big sound, the biggest sound in the world, when you’re getting it down in your way, the right way, and no beautiful woman counts
