Got a notice from my x-wife in Alaska. She is marrying an eskimo. Not won dam do i giv a wit. po’ po’ eskimo. Mi old girl friend died 5:45 p.m. Jan. 22, 1962. It did not go well for me for quite some time and even now it is not so good, but, I am not looking for a mother.
Cuscaden writes (Midwest Poetry Chapbooks) that my 3rd. collection of poems Run with the Hunted will be out in about 2 weeks. I had more of a hand in the selection here and I think these poems are both my latter and better. But maybe not. Maybe this kroutpole head iz crumbling. o, mortal wound of nothing, o beast crying in cave, Bukowski done, Bukowski nothing, ayeeie, ayeeie!!! next page babe—
Mead is bringing out a couple of my pomes in Satis and there is an article on me by Cuscaden. I do not know what the article says but I think Cuscaden is a little too overboard on me, which is all right as long as I don’t go believing it, and I know all the things that are wrong with me, the things that are weak, wrong, sad. I wonder how strong a man can get? And then I wonder if a piece of steel is any longer human. The perfect sighting is the perfect art: being human and being not-human, somewhere in between there is art. So fuck it. I would rather ride a dinosour to hell.
Another too personal poem:
Remains
things are good as I am not dead yet
and the rats move in the beercans,
the papersacks shuffle like small dogs,
and her photographs are stuck onto a painting
by a dead German and she too is dead
and it took me 14 years to know her
and if they give me another 14
I will know her yet…
her photos stuck over glass
neither move nor speak,
but I even have her voice on tape
and she speaks some evenings,
her again,
so real she laughs,
says the thousand things,
the one thing I always ignored;
this will never leave me:
that I had love
and love died;
a photo and a piece of tape
is not much, I have learned late,
but give me 14 days or 14 years,—
I will kill any man
who would touch or take
whatever’s left.
Yes again. It is very bad. The jazz bit. It kills or distorts the whole flow of the magazine. It is like a lead in the back. A bullet.
I have much to do now. And when I mean much I mean nothing. Doing nothing. Letting the ceiling have its say. God oh jesus I am glad we eat and shit, I am glad there is music. I am glad there is rye bread; I am glad there are old dogs in the streets. I am glad there is rain and bridges and wine. And sleep.
Look, baby, don’t blow yr brains out.
Or the other either.
Love,
Buk
L.A. Friday
Dear Sheri:
Please disregard last letter. I wrote while intoxicated. I see by yrs that I might have inferred that I wanted to see you. This is child-stuff. You and I would not strike it. I mean, I am not good with people. It is so.
Enclose Satis in case Mead did not send. In review of my work Cuscaden does not get everything right, and in one case, So Much for the Knifers etc., he gets it exactly backwards. But it’s all right. He’s of good intent and knows that I swing the hammer around because I’ve got to.
I don’t know if I wrote in my drunk letter what the next problem will be (except the going on, that is), and the next problem will be to keep from getting the fathead, to keep from believing the bildge about me and so forth. I have seen people like Corso and Ginsburg and Kerourac go the way of self-love, of self-importance. I think I am harder than that but I must be wary. One magazine has accepted 14 poems, another 15, another 6. This can cause trouble. The world, even the Art world, is very corrupt, rotten. They will print you if you have half a name and half a talent. They will print you if you have a big name and a little talent (or no talent at all). It is up to me not to fall into the pit.
The gods now have me up for test. They are looking down and waiting. I must not add to decay. These walls are mine.
love,
Buk
Buk
[dated by SM 7 August 1962]
Dear Sheri:
Enclosed review from apparent liberal N. York rag and if one may defend one’s self, the reviewer’s idea of poetry and mine are different: he believing a poem must be fragile, “poetic”, so forth, and I believing…nothing.
I am late for the god damned job and must run like any other legless worm.
No, you nedn’t “expose” yrself to me keep in yr clean light it is best we never see each other
we fall short
we fall short
we fall short
alllove,
BUKOWSKI
L.A.
a Monday in August
Dear Sheri:
be calmed: I do not believe in my subject matter; it is only that I exist in this fashion and I photograph my existence…It is hard as hell to live as a Saint, the nerves give way, and then it would be tough to participate in Sainthood and find out later—like an oyster taken out of its shell—that you were wrong. If you don’t put any chips on the table they can’t rake them in…
Ginsburg and Corso are bothered with self-importance. They run about in various countries holding their names up above their heads while they still shine. They have taken to the worst trap and their writing—their creation—must suffer because they have taken their gift out of the mould and are using it as a wedge into something else. When I go to the racetrack or to bed with a whore, I stand aside. I really do not enter. I am there to record the sounds of another world. I do things without being things. My x-wife found this out after 3 years of wifing: “You are nothing but a god damned puritan,” was her way of expressing it. I wouldn’t give her my soul to walk about in her bedroom slippers and she had thought I would be easy taking, “a dupe”, after reading my poems. I am soft as air in part & then there is the hard German steel. I attempt to use these fruititians properly. God and the devil grant I am not too much in error. It would be difficult to self-impose any given laws…only there is a very odd thing…I am guided someplace from the back and above. Otherwise I would long ago have been gone over the rapids.
Most poets—if I may call them that—are lost in the slush and hazard of their own work. They do not know the secret and even if you told them the secret they could not use it. When Ezra said “do not worry ab’t yr contemporaries” he said plenty.
Part of the secret is in having somebody in back and above. Part of the secret is in laying down the word. The word must be put on the page so that it is drilled down there, screwed-down, fucked-down, so that it will not brush away. The language must be a basic language that does not change. Your Kerwhoreac had an idea of this when he began but he found it too easy and he now beats on it like a drum, and as a consequence, he writes very badly. Basic language does not mean easiness. The thought must seep down through, and the words without the mind are so much formula and most writers end up formula because they get tired and they write what they want them to write. When you get tired, stop writing. I stopped for ten years. I filled up enough in ten years to write for 200, maybe 2,000. Everything is so simple, and yet they cannot see. Pound saw and Jeffers saw, and the rest of the pages were wasted. T.S. Eliot got pretty and took to the bit and they cut his mouth out. The gods give us this thing and the gods get angry, pretty damned angry when they are wronged.
Somebody at Wagner College wants me to send a holograph(?) of one of my poems and a photo for somebody at Brown University, but this is a hell of a lot of work and I might pass. I don’t like to be photographed and I am—in the world’s eye—a very ugly man.
To publish a magazine like Satis would cost between 200 and 250$ for 300 copies, which means you would have to sell them all to break even. Which you don’t do.
Do not become too incensed about Mead and Ruthe
rford: their English brand of humour, ya know.
…on the job, I am cracking. I failed an examination last week and the man with the cigar roared back and laughed. My mind simply would not work at the thing, would not pick it up. But these are practicalities and just so much trash.
Good to get yr long letter and know you are trying to guide me through the rapids, and I cannot disagree with anything you say.
Tired today and sick. Drunk last night. I was on radio last night (taped), a reading of some of my poems but by the time it came on (11 p.m.) I was too far gone to listen.
May the gods be kind as possible…
love,
Buk
[handwritten postcard from the Del Mar Turf Club, postmarked 21 August 1962]
Dear Sheri
Telephone still in head. All good.
Drove down here (100 mi+), will prob stay 3, 4 days. Hope they run with alacrity.
Wish I were one of your flies.
L. Buk
L.A. Sept. what? 5, 1962 or 1662 or 1442
Dear Sheri:
Death has me inside a napkin and is ready to wipe its bloody snout face of a head and mouth, gut reaming down into all the shit I have been stepping, making us one. hurrah.
flies walk my head,
talking about buttons.
misery, ancient misery
and coffeecup handles
the sky flattens and drips
FIRE
e.e. cummings died.
hemingway died.
Faulkner died.
Jeffers died.
J.Christ died. I am dying, I am dying, I am dying, I am dying, I am dying
to some of us
sometimes
come this thing—
that no matter what is done
it is of no matter
things fall away finally
and though one senses pain
and walks as before
and makes efforts at
feeding
living loving
fucking
paying rent
looking for wurk
having nightmares
but see this, essentially it has ENDED, & tho
the grass grows and the dead are buried
we see only thru motion picture eyes
the scene, as they say,
the burning soldiers marching into a golden city:
sigh.
and o most splendid love or drums and sounds
sheri darling image on my wrist
speaking through frost and glass,
how are you today?
I am not very good at love letters
I am not very good at love
I am as old as the moss on a tourniquet,
whatever that is.
Ezra still breathes and if suddenly not,
he leaves us the W(o) R K
jade-mad butterflies cuarved
carved curved
into the sides of rivers
I SEIZE THE INSIDE OF MYSELF AND THE WALLS BARK LIKE DOGS.
what are our visions worth? 29$? ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha!
there are now
very FEW giants left…
do you think Ginsburg can step in? iz he strong enough?
or just the clapping of tambrowines?
shit, who cares?
THE VOLITION IS EVERYWHERE, THE VOLITION AND THE VIOLATION.
I make love to an onion. I speak to it like a lady. It is pleased and smiles. Rome was yesterday. I wonder.
it will be good to sleep under steep hills.
love,
Buk
[note with a drawing captioned “Death-grip of everywhere—” on other side] 9-11-62
D.Sheerii:
The gods only allow us so many mistakes
and then
they burn us down.
(please remember.)
L.,
Buk
[a two-sided postcard—one handwritten, the other typed—dated by SM 11 September 1961, a slip for 1962 since it was probably written the same day as the previous note and refers to Jane Cooney Baker, who had died in January 1962.]
The comb for you darl.
Wear it in your hair, you will be more beautiful in this fog. She was a strong woman. She would have said yes. All the love I have left, dear. —Buk
my hands behind my back in a land of hell as the mice run
along the walls
and
inside the brain—
shreds.
—B.
drunk, going down among
the rocks, not so drunk,
going among the bones
among the bones
the bones the bones.
Love, Buk
6. Oct. 62 S.M. POBX 44 Pacifica Calif
Buk: By now you are aware of the fact that I REFUSE to be witnessed by YOU.
“dog howl” etc—you beech. My private life is MY private life & that is why I wont meet you outside of literature. You are a gottamed radio—just because you wear your arsehole on yr sleeve you want us all to go about with our arses out. NO thank you. I PREFER my privacy! If I was caught off guard enough to tell you that I was stilling my mind’s howl with the oom etc you ought not to have spoken of it—otherwise I wd run off from you. My art is there—I am not there—a gentleman wd see the art—only the old fraud freud wd see the nuts & bolts.
Got a book sent me by you: Wormwood Review 7 // thanks lots—it is always good to see what those on the bottom are up to in order to prevent my conceit from making the same mistakes.
As usual you are the top of the bottom. But my godtttt. Must you? Must you Bukowski? Be fighting & breaking glass & staining the snow with blood??
Well your virtue is your honesty
The Anglo-saxon looks into the mouth to know the faults.
The Gaelic looks into the eye to know the virtue.
The Negroes look at price tags to learn the value.
The Jews look into the pocketbook to know the worth.
That’s how come big trouble. I see the eye & totally resent having my arse poked about by you Krout Headtss—Oye changed studios because once my address gets out I no longer have any privacy—thus the old phone is out as too many persons knew it—
are you all right??????
Sheri
[undated note typed at bottom of SM’s previous letter and mailed back to her]
Dear Sheri:
Art is a private matter, life is not. I, too, desire my solitude. Now that I have a half-fame there are more door-knockers. I don’t want to see them. I never have. But before, when I Wormwood Review 7: includes CB’s poem “Thank God for Alleys,” rpt. in RM (206). wouldn’t open the door, I was known as a “nut”, now I am called a “snob”. So goes it with the name-callers and door-knockers.
I am neither “snob” or “nut”. I am burning with whatever burns me, and that is the story.
love,
Buk
L.A. Mid dec. 1962
Deah Sheri
I am in some sort of sick & tired drag
where the feet don’t want to go
and the mind don’t want to go
and the body just lays there, and when this sort of thing happens
it is best to ride with it, and I mean
especially if the mind don’t wanna go
you don’t get out and push it
like some THING on axels
hoping it starts so you can enter
the big race and I don’t mean the WHITE race,
I mean the old vanity race, name in lights
and the broads with mother-light in their eyes
pushing in to screw you.
I mean, you let it go.
I slip sometimes. I find myself running down the road like any other jackass. This is easy to do because nobody tells you anything else, and to stop running with other jackasses
you got to slow
and look around
see
w
here they’re going,
and it’s pretty easy to see
if you give yourself a chance,
that they aren’t going anywhere.
Webb, now he is giving me a kind of spread in Outsider 3, searchlights…the gods gonna be waiting to see if I crumble under to the bait. It is a good honor Webb is feeding me and I understand him this way; I do not knock if a man cares to say something well of me for I have gone long without any sayings of any sort, but I am watching the gods and the gods are watching me
and the shades flap in front of me now
and my small radio, my red radio plays
and I sit next to a bottle of MILLER High Life
and I am hungry and soon I will eat something;
I like to keep things simple
because that way you don’t get your flapper
tangled in a lot of tinfoil and horseturds.
Anyhow, enclosed 3 submissions to yr A & P
(and if you never spell out the name
you ought to just call it A & P
because this would mean just as much
to me as the other which is not in the
dictionary—which does not mean it does not
exist.) Anyhow, got yr card, and here
3 poems and if you do not use them need them
please return in envelope enclosed.
I eat now.
Love,
Buk
L.A. Tuesday 18th. December 1962
Dear Sheri:
Thanks for good letter.
I made the drunk tank Monday morning—must see Judge on Wednesday and he may throw book at me—120 days—it is hard to tell.
I am getting very sick of trouble. Ankle all swollen, may be broken. Also, possible loss of job.
Pray for me, pray the gods to take away some of my trouble.
The world presses against my mind and spirit. A horror. I can hardly go on.
This is a sad letter. Perhaps, if I come through everything, I will write you something a little better.
Love,
Buk
Beerspit Night and Cursing Page 28