thoughts on Bukowski – letter to a friend

I have read through some of your blog posts and I must say, have enjoyed the read…  you said that you were involved in the “meat poets” …. ok…  the only one of them that I know anything about is Bukowski and he was independent as much as a part of any school…  I guess…  anyway, I discovered Bukowski when I first read “Post Office” which I ran across in a book store, shortly after it was published…  I loved the slice of life feel of the writing, the wry humor and the view from the bottom of the working class which is not overly represented in American Literature…  I read his other novels as they came out and as I ran across them and picked up a few volumes of his poems as well… I don’t know that the poems amounted to much as “poetry” but they had the same lively style as the prose and were vigorously accessible and full of wit and humor… like the prose…

I was working at a factory printing telephone books at the time that I first ran into Bukowski’s writing…  I was going to grad school as an English major, driving the hour plus to River Falls, Wisconsin for classes in the daytime and working full time nights printing telephone phone books… I got a lot of breaks during the job and would write my college papers as my rolls on the press wound down… and later, after I dropped out of grad school in the mid 1970s, I would spend the free time reading, writing and drawing with ballpoint pen on telephone book cover stock…  I had been an undergrad art major at the u of Minnesota and had mostly learned from that experience that the world of contemporary art had no place in it for me or the artwork that I was doing and wanted to do… so, I went to grad school at River Falls as an English major… I was writing and submitting poetry regularly, at least one or two submissions a month, and was getting rejections on all of them…  this pattern continued from 1970 to 1984 when I finally had a poem accepted for publication…

my job involved putting rolls of paper on a printing press the size of a house and I would write prose and poetry in my head while working and then write it down as my rolls ran down… I had no interest in contemporary poetry beyond Dylan Thomas and maybe a bit of Ginsberg…  I had learned about poetry from my mother who’s taste went toward Alfred Noyes and Rudyard Kipling (from her father)…  I had discovered the British romantic and Victorian poets and so was trying to be Blake, or Tennyson…  updated with contemporary images…  needless to say, the editors were not impressed…  I did not save the ms when they came back to me…  I figured that if the poems were not good enough to be accepted by an editor, they were not worth saving…  so, by the time I started publishing, my poetry was one that would often incorporate half remembered or fully remembered images from a poem that had been submitted and tossed, into a new poem…  thus, if anybody ever cared enough to read through my published work, there would be a to me interesting, repetition of words and images…

after the acceptance in 1984, I decided that I had proven to the world and to myself that I could write a poem that was good enough to be accepted by a prestigious literary journal (the “GW Review”)…  and I decided to quit writing poetry…  of course, within a few years, I was back to writing poetry again  and submitting…. so I had my second poem accepted in 1994…  after that, pretty much everything I submitted was accepted…  so, I continued until the twenty teens when I really just stopped writing a lot of poetry…  my poetry had changed and was no longer formal rhymed poetry, and I am not sure any of it has any literary merit, and even if it does, I am not sure that having literary merit has any value to the modern world at large…  is writing a good poem as useful to the world as turning over a shovel full of dirt, or doing any other mundane task???  well, I don’t know…  probably not…

so, anyway, I always have been a voracious and fast reader and when I would finish reading a book I liked, back in my printing press days, I would often send a fan letter to the author just to let them know that I had enjoyed the book enough to take the time to let them know…  so, it came to pass that I wrote a letter to Bukowski, a fan letter, about one of his books that I had enjoyed… I remember that I wrote the letter while sitting on an ink can in my little nook, under a steel stairway, behind the “reel stands” of the old Wood Hoe, web fed telephone directory letterpress…  the air would have been thick with paper dust, chemical smells and vaporized oil and oil based ink… the gigantic press would have been roaring like a freight train… I would mail a letter like that at the post office, on my way home from work at 7 a.m…

much to my amazement, a week or so later, I got a reply from Bukowski…  a personal letter from the, by this time, famous author…  I was excited about this and wrote him two more letters, both of which he responded to…  I then thought that I had imposed upon the famous author enough and so did not write to him again…

I still enjoy reading Bukowski…  I love biographies of artist for one thing, and his novels and to some degree, his poems too, read like autobiography, even though I know they are fiction…  but the stories of being a great artist, mingling with the down and out sons and daughters of the working class gutters and bars have always been fun to read…  I also enjoy Fante’, Celine and Hamsen et al and to some degree Hemingway, all of whom seem to be Bukowski’s progenitors…  Is Bukowski a great artist??  I guess that is for history to decide…  will people in our problematic future even read novels anymore???  I think they have already mostly given up on reading poetry…  Hmmmm….

so, the only response I can really make to a statement like the above, is, of necessity subjective…  I enjoyed and enjoy reading Bukowski…  that is enough to me…  so many in the poetry small press world seem to want to emulate Bukowski’s hard drinking life style…  but little poetry of interest seems to come from this crowd… although, the myth of the intoxicated genius is one that was foisted on me by my own parents… who, in spite of the horrors that alcohol had wrought in our family, firmly believed that I could not be a real artist because I did not drink or use drugs… well, that is a myth that mostly pisses me off…  I would not have liked being around Bukowski, I think, had I met him, as I have no patience for and little sympathy with people who are intoxicated… addicted and fucked up… I have no interest in telling other people how to live their lives, but when their bad decisions impinge on me, I reserve the right to walk away…  as a child, I could not walk away, but I have not been a child for many decades now…  so, I enjoy reading Bukowski but have no desire to live or write like he did…