The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

by Charles Bukowski

  I am tired and ashamed of the sham.

  And besides, and besides.

  Let us take the next to last poem in the book. It is proficient, it is almost good, you know. Really. But, but, but??? Is this what I have lain drunk in skid row alleys for years for, small children poking sticks into my back at high noon? In that “messianic sun”?

  Here it is:

  THE LATE LATE SHOW

  (Ripeness is all)

  The number of my purchases

  declines; night is for sleeping

  and the pleasures of silk; a

  flank of polished oak replaces

  green excursions.

  These latter days revolve

  like a charger’s bloody eye

  and friends steeped in shadow

  fall away, leaves of a shrinking tree

  Athwart the coolness of this age,

  within my shabbing flesh,

  there chronicles no prickly

  need; these veins are full

  of tea.

  Each dawn is a surprising wine;

  twilight thunders its obvious line

  and Venus returns, cursing, to the sea.

  Now do you understand a bit of what I mean? Dr. Corrington gives himself away, unknowingly: “within my shabbing flesh . . . no prickly need. . . .”

  And so, this is a review of John William Corrington’s 3rd book of poems.

  I now need to piss some more, drink some more, and sleep.

  Steppenwolf No. 1, Winter 1965–66

  Foreword to Steve Richmond, Hitler Painted Roses

  It is a sweet goddamned pleasure to write a foreword to these poems. Yet this foreword, like the poems, is going to bring the enemy out from under the rock. Well, at least we will be able to look at him and vomit.

  This is Steve Richmond’s 2nd collection of poems. The first was called simply “poems” and was issued in 1964. Steve has come a long way since then—whether he has changed his liquor or his women or his diet, I don’t know. Yet I suppose it’s mostly a solidifying, a gathering of intent, more cement in each line. The words are harder now and clearer now and gripping and racking more on that slippery and goofy belly of Truth.

  To those of you used to the comfortable screams of the Dickeys, James and William, to Mott and Moss and Morse and Morris and Mason, to Sarton and Scannell and Sexton and Stafford and Stanford, and Wagoner and Wilbur and Witt, to the play-patterns of Creeley drawing dull and accepted zeroes; to those of you used to the lies of your presidents, your girlfriends, your wives; to those of you used to the lies of the centuries, the lies of the Art of our centuries . . . these poems aren’t going to be much good to you—unless you have a miraculous reserve tank of recovery.

  It is not difficult for a man to figure he is pretty well fucked upon the earth. A good turn around any city street can tell you this. Yet the game goes on: frenzied and insane men run in and out of buildings, their breathing choked by neckties, their faces slaughtered and hanging in the air like turds. Even their children, by the age of three, begin to look like butchers. The women are only beautiful in body for a short while, and never with faces, always the paper-blank face. Everywhere everywhere is the stink of death—in the churches, in the museums (of course), in the Art galleries, in the libraries, in the parks, at the symphonies, at the playhouses, everything stinks of death and is death and nothing is said. WHERE IN THE HELL ARE THE POETS? WHAT THE HELL IS THIS CON GAME? You scream and there isn’t any answer. The people go insane. They kill themselves. They kill each other. But the troops of society straighten out the kinks—they build more jails, madhouses, graveyards, and the rest of the game goes on. Richmond’s poems are the feel and scream of a living man immersed in this deathshit and not wanting to go down into it. The comfortable poems of the well-known poets aren’t any good to him. The time is raw and the time is NOW. He has to write his own poems from the kitchen light. From the curbing. From the sink where he heaved. From where his dinner went. From his balls. From his belly. From the area where he’d like to cry from but doesn’t quite know how. What a fix. Millions of men born and walking around as if everything were all right. Centuries of poetry and literature with no more meaning than a man snoring. The Lost Generation . . . the Atomic Generation . . . the Fucked Generation. Richmond’s poems are about a man reaching only for what he can see, and he hardly trusts that, but it beats reaching for what they tell you to reach for—judging by the looks of them. I am sympathetic with Richmond’s poetry because here, a good 20 years older, I feel much the same way. And about here, I must enter another word, for protection from another type of death. About here, upon reading, say, Richmond’s poetry or some of mine, the World Savers LEAP in. “Ah ha!” they say, “yes, very powerful poetry! You know the world is fucked-up! Fine! You are aware! Now, look, all ya gotta do is this. . . .” To them, all we need is a better form of government. Everything else will take care of itself. The eyes will come back into people’s heads. Their backs will straighten. Their walks will not be wooden. Their voices again will have a decent tonality. The World Savers are constantly upon us with their literature and their pleas. The World Savers love to rub together like chickens on a cold day; they huddle in their houses, meet once, two, three times a week . . . they cannot meet enough, they just cannot meet enough to cold-cock their insecurity. They continually make little light bright jokes to each other and giggle and argue and agree with each other and make each other. The only trouble is that they are a sickly lot, unable to create, and I look upon them and I see that I was wrong: no, they are not sickly, they are simply dead. And the dead will not like these poems because they will feel that there isn’t any “social message.”

  What they forget is that a man must be alive in order to be saved. And that the way to stay alive is not to memorize Karl Marx and play a guitar and march in Peace Marches and Freedom Marches. The way to stay alive is inch by inch; horrible, pewking, praying, cussing, fingernail-breaking, blood-red inch by inch. There aren’t any formulas. There aren’t any pot-luck lunches. There aren’t any poetry workshops. There aren’t any tea-meetings, cookie-meetings, cocktail meetings. There is none of this weak pansy cocksucking bullshit.

  There is just one man thrown upon the earth, belly-naked, and seeing with his eye. Yes, I said “eye.” Most of us are born poets. It is only when our elders get to us and begin to teach us what they teach us that the poet dies. Richmond has not been “gotten to” yet. Maybe they will get to him. But, as yet, these poems are memorable bellows and wailings and cussings. These poems are the living work of a living man. These poems are Art. Be glad you are here to read them.

  Richmond has been to college. He is not a rag-picker. But if he were a rag-picker and Richmond, he would still write, essentially, the same way. And don’t argue with me. I am tired of you rule-believers and book-noses. You, locked into your compartments of this-is-good, this-is-evil; right-wing, left-wing, center-of-the-road; pro-war, anti-war; pro-God, anti-God, and on and on . . . Ah, you icecream dandies! Ah, you 18th-century versifiers dressed in 20th-century clothing!

  The cusswords that the church-pewkers and rhymers will object to, the cusswords are both a frustration and a joy and a non-trust of the language and the life by a man who senses the stockpiles and deadmen everywhere. A man who can feel his balls and know that they are there, that man is alive. Our poets and statesmen, our loves have left us very little that we can trust. We begin at beginnings so that we may not end. Each of these poems is, in a sense, a demon turned loose, looking for light. Each night is one more night and each day is unbelievable. Dramatic? Sure, like a knife going in. That’s our culture, don’t kid yourself. You can forget your courses in Appreciation of English Literature. That’s just dried skin glued to a corpse. But if you don’t understand something of what I have said up to now, there’s no use reading these poems. Just throw the book away or give it to the first person who passes.

  Do you realize that there will even be people who will object to the title? More loss
. Again divisions. Good and bad. Good wars, bad wars; good men, bad men; good nations, bad nations. (A bad nation is one that loses a war.) There are monsters and heroes. Men are different and their difference terrifies us. It may please you if I tell you that I didn’t care any more for Hitler than I did for Gandhi. You will say, that guy is really nuts, and then you will feel better. Fine. I want you to feel better. But, you will insist on asking (still in your cubicle of division), how could Hitler have painted roses? Then let me ask you: have you ever painted roses?

  But enough, enough. I have certainly written enough here. I feel that these poems can now take care of themselves, or perhaps would have been better off without me. I will get some agreement here, I am sure. It is a Tuesday in March, mid-March in Los Angeles. The year is 1966. And my radio gives me Mozart. One of the few who forgot how to lie. The pay was poor if you want to count it as money or the way he went. Anyhow, Richmond’s poems here, now . . . a young man bringing it to you through the fire of the bombarded graveyard. Here they are.

  Begin.

  Steve Richmond, Hitler Painted Roses

  Santa Monica, CA: Earth Books and Gallery, 1966.

  Essay on Nothing for Your Mother-Nothingness

  Literary magazines are like a can of tuna fish, cheap, if you can ever get through it you forget all about it. Most of them are brought out by distraught young boys or old lesbians and what do these know about the Arts? Exactly. Nothing. They are pushing their own tin-can agony upon us in fancy dress—that is: bad poetry. The short story. Forget it. The last man who remembered what a short story was was Edward O’Brien who died too many years ago. And artwork? They think artwork is something that looks like artwork just as they think poetry is something that looks like poetry. The fish is dead. Poetry doesn’t look like poetry, poetry is, just like a whore is or a drunktank or a cancer is. The “littles” are a mess begging for an audience. The audience is a mess begging for a soul. In between these two messes you have four or five men who can lay down a decent line of poetry or a decent flow of paint, and, of the four or five, one is going to commit suicide and the other one or two are going mad or thinking about suicide. Outside of that you have nothing but towers, green fields, bums, presidents, bombs, beetles, tits, textbooks, and the pulling of teeth and other various time-triflers.

  It is hardly worth a damn to go on. Just a peek of leg, a little free ass now and then. The timeclock. The butchershop. The flushing of a toilet. The car that won’t start. The ugly face on the street.

  So, another magazine? The editor asked me to write something about another magazine. What can I say? Will there be another Ezra? Will Ernie H. chase another lion through our minds? I think that we are a little harder to fool nowadays. The bombs are stacked everywhere and we are ready to die whether we want to or not.

  I just don’t know anything, I just don’t know what to say, so wherever you are, in a bar or in a jail or in a barbershop or in a library, and you pick up this magazine and begin to read it, I hope you do find something in it, even if it is only this bit that I have just written. I am not trying to be tricky; I am through with tricks—I only wish the rest of the world were the same way.

  Spectroscope, Vol. 1, No. 1, April 1966

  Who’s Big in the “Littles”

  I’d have to place them this way: 1. Ole; 2. Wormwood Review; 3. The Outsider. And, I might say, the real pros are Jon and Lou Webb (Outsider), who often put in an eighteen-hour day on their magazine or Loujon Press books, selecting the material and printing it on their own press, without any income except returns through the mail in book sales or subscriptions. This, at an age when most people are thinking of retiring to some sort of jaded safety. All three mentioned magazines print a living and electric literature.

  The “Mimeo Revolution” is sometimes more revolting than revolutionary—printing hasty faded careless and misspelled poems and stories. Yet I do suppose that the very lack of pressure and expense does create a freedom from which arises some good hotbed literature. Some of the more interesting of these rags are: The Marrahwannah Quarterly, Wild Dog, Kauri, Blitz, Simbolica.

  Snob publications that print an icy and glass-spun, unreal type of work are Evergreen Review, Poetry (Chicago), Trace, The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, Contact, The Antioch Review.

  Of course, if you want to join the sewing circle there is always The American Poet, Bardic Echoes, Jean’s Journal of Poems, Merlin’s Magic, The Promethean Lamp, South and West, World Poetry Day Magazine. Many others.

  El Corno Emplumado continues from its Mexican base with Meg and Sergio Mondragón pumping out the magazine and books (and babies) with a free and beautiful intensity. Evidence staggers on, somehow, bringing us good work from Canada and also some U.S. writers. Vagabond leaps up from Munich, Germany, promising a gutty and searing work. Earth is being printed in a small bookshop in Santa Monica run by a mad poet (Steve Richmond) who carries only “little” magazines and books of poetry upon his shelves. The Steppenwolf shakes its fist from Omaha. Spero, Flint, Michigan, lives on pennies and still comes out in letterpress. Notes from Underground has vanished again along with slippery John Bryan, but he can’t quit the game and he’ll be back with another of his wild and flaming issues of hot truth.

  The “little” mag world goes on and on, stronger now than ever, more living now than any time since its birth. There are more magazines and more writers, more writers and better writers—that some of them will go the way of Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the novel, this sort of death, is true. But to assume that the “littles” are only the proving ground for young writers is untrue. Many of us are no longer so young and we continue to submit and get published in the best of the “littles” because they are the only remaining platforms of truth and good art in a very frightened and sick Age. Many of us would not consider wasting a stamp on The New Yorker, not because we write too badly but because we write too well.

  We continue to hope through the machinegun fire.

  We continue to hope along well-worn typewriter ribbons.

  We continue to hope while starving.

  We continue to hope in the libraries.

  We continue to hope in the factories.

  That our small words, printed in issues of 150/200, will be read and saved and heeded.

  Did you ever see a man with a bookcaseful of old Atlantic Monthlies? Of course, not; they would laugh him out of town. The “littles” are big enough to live. Believe it, baby.

  Literary Times, Vol. 4, No. 5, Winter 1966

  The Deliberate Mashing of the Sun (d.a. levy)

  It is not just levy, it is all of us, it is not just poets or spiders or fleas or corncobs, it is all of us, it is the deliberate mashing of the sun. sometimes you don’t have to wait upon History to find good from evil. sometimes acts are so vile, so contraband, so clearly snakes eating eyes out of skulls, that any unbiased study is something akin to studying a turd to see if it will ever grow into a flower. the roust of levy is such a stale turkeydeath badbreath smeartit deal that i imagine even the police treat it as a playact, a movement, a practice workout, a pinch to pinch something they figure can’t bite back. what did levy say? what were the words that bothered them?: shit? fuck? cunt? DIRTY WORDS? OBSCENE? I am more afraid that they have been used and overused and could only bore the most ivorytower old maid. DOES LEVY USE THESE WORDS IN ATTEMPT TO SOMEHOW MAKE 89 cents a day? my ass! does levy uses these words as a dirty little boy? ah, he does? does he paste them on the side of his new Cadillac? does he put them on a big sign in front of his $60,000 home in suburbia? my ass! does he scratch them into doorbells of the people who set him out a plate of food, does he work them in with a pin while looking over his shoulder? your ass. DOES HE PUT THESE WORDS INTO HIS BEST-SELLING NOVEL? does he run around hissing them out of the side of his mouth at little girls aged 4,5,6,7? who in the hell is crazy in CLEVELAND? in the UNIVERSE? what bothers them then? you guessed it: POETRY. one of the last untrammeled fortresses where a good man can work out, ho
ly and free and burning. WHAT BOTHERS THEM IS THAT WHEN A REAL ARTIST USES THE WORD “SHIT” IN POETRY THEY CAN SMELL IT, and they don’t want to smell it: the shit of their lives or the shit of their shit. poets are not very careful—they are only interested in the dirtiest of words: TRUTH. corncob, sure. corny, sure. hardly pays a damn thing, BUT THE REAL WORKERS IN POETRY WOULD PAY TO BE ABLE TO WRITE POETRY. i mean in dollars if they had them. NOW THEY ARE BEING MADE TO PAY IN ANOTHER WAY. all these bookstore raids, the pinching of poets that has come very close together these past few months, it is like a friend said to me in a very weary and sad voice, wondrous voice too in that he felt that nothing at all had been gained: “It’s just HOWL all over again.” “yeah,” i said. meanwhile, the true users of FILTH FOR PROFIT know all the boundaries. what CAN BE SHOWN IN A PHOTO, what can or can’t be suggested. what words you never use. what words you use to get around words. the BIG BUSINESS OF FILTH KNOWS ITS BUSINESS. the psychopathic homicide maniacs this business causes to bust loose in the back alleys and streets of cities are vast and numerically hideous. almost everybody likes a good piece of ass but what these uncontrollable smut nudey mags cause in borderline cases would be obvious to a psychiatrist or just even an average thinking human being. but to pinch a starving poet for 34 or 50 pure poems, and even the PURE BAD ONES SAY AS ART THEY ARE STILL ART, WHY SAY EVEN HERE IT IS LIKE TRYING TO PINCH THE SUN FOR GIVING YOU A SUNBURN, IT IS LIKE TRYING TO PINCH THE SEA FOR DROWNING A MAN, IT IS LIKE TO PINCH BEETHOVENS 9th BECAUSE A BRAIN DAMAGE CASE CANNOT UNDERSTAND IT.