But welcome, anyhow, to this Daring Old Man on the Flying Trapeze.
To this wonderful and original show.
[signed] Bukowski
December 12, 1988
Macdonald Carey, Beyond That Further Hill
Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1989
Further Musings
1.
the sound of one life scraping
against another.
2.
life’s sensible repetitions are
galling.
3.
once I phoned somebody to
bail me out of jail and his
answer was, “I can’t, I’m
entertaining somebody from
Spain.”
I’d just as soon he had told me
to go fuck myself.
4.
once while reading D.H. Lawrence
on a train I decided that I’d like to
drink wine with him.
then I decided it would be better to
drink wine alone because
we would not like each other and,
besides, he was dead.
5.
the worst people are not those that
you’ve already met.
6.
hell is where you are now, even
when you are laughing.
7.
I told her that I had a great
time that day by cleaning out my
desk and finding all sorts of odd
and forgotten things.
this immediately made her angry:
“That’s what you old guys do!
That’s what old farts do!”
A week later she tried to run me
over with her car.
things had not been going well
for some time.
8.
as a boy I often pretended that
I had important things to do with
my time.
now, nearing 73, I find myself
still doing the same
thing.
9.
I often can’t tell if people are at
peace or just being
dull.
10.
“Who?” asked the owl, “is going
to die next?”
never guessing.
11.
why are novelists so boring?
is it because so many of them
write about their own
lives?
12.
I’m not certain of what I am
doing, are you?
think of how impossible it would
be
if we did.
13.
a wise man knows when to step
backwards.
14.
the bell only tolls for itself.
listen.
15.
that curious thought I had about
3 a.m. last night
would have fit nicely
here.
Half-Truth, Nov./Dec. 1993
INTERVIEWS
Stonecloud Interview
Interview by Phil Taylor
STONECLOUD: You don’t give too many poetry readings, do you?
BUKOWSKI: No, but you know, of all the readings I gave, the one I gave at USC was really the deadest. Something about the audience or the campus, I don’t know. A lady wrote me and asked if I would read. I was working in the post office, and I was very anti-reading at the time because I had a job, a little money in my pocket, and I was saving my soul. I wrote her a two- or three-page letter and said, “Happily I’ll go to my grave without ever giving a poetry reading.” Now I’ve given about twenty or twenty-five.
STONECLOUD: How many of them did you enjoy giving, or how many came off well?
BUKOWSKI: Out of all of them, maybe four or five good ones. It’s really a drag though, hard work like being in a ditch. I’m not an actor; I do it for the money, strictly a poetry whore. For the time, giving all these readings at colleges around California, I’m living off the poetry fat of the land.
STONECLOUD: Are you publishing any more issues of Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns?
BUKOWSKI: As Linda likes to say, “woman the humping guns.” Women’s lib, you know. No, I’ve turned it over: got so much bad material. We really didn’t publish anything good except our own.
. . .
STONECLOUD: Are you glad that you’ve had as much or as little money as you’ve had?
BUKOWSKI: I’ll go back to the corny concept of the “starving writer” days. Especially when you’re young. You don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you don’t know if you’re going to be able to get the rent up, and the landlady’s footsteps are going by. When it isn’t terrifying, it’s kind of interesting. The good old early days, it’s kind of romantic. When you’re young you have these ideals, you’re going to be a writer, it’s kind of romantic. It carries you through. It felt good; I didn’t mind starving. As long as you’re young you say “Shit, I can do it; I can always straighten out and become a damned fool or an industrialist or something. I’ve got these years to really burn in glory.” But when you get older, you’re starving in a room at the age of fifty-two, you’re trying to be a writer. . . .
STONECLOUD: It doesn’t seem so romantic anymore.
BUKOWSKI: Hell, no.
STONECLOUD: Do you have any regrets? Would you change anything in your past?
BUKOWSKI: No, especially the way I live. It’s been pretty damn good, a wide-open gamble. I gave up writing for ten years and I did that ten hard years of living; drinking, hospitals, jails, women, bad jobs, madness. Even now, I think of a night that happened, write a poem, a short story. I can draw into that even now. I don’t see how guys still in their twenties can hardly write.
STONECLOUD: You mean because they haven’t experienced anything?
BUKOWSKI: You can’t reach in and get it. When I was twenty I was writing like mad too. I think you write the way you feel when you’re young, more than your experiences. I think it’s better to be old, though, and reach back.
STONECLOUD: When you talk about style, in terms of clarity, or freedom from excess baggage, or naturalness, what are you thinking of?
BUKOWSKI: I’m really an “essentialist.” Maybe reading so much poetry that seems to me devious and secretive, people who have little secrets with their friends, you know. A game, a code that no one else quite understands. I try to break it down and make it just as simple as possible, just say what I’m thinking. That doesn’t sound like much, but I think it’s important. Like I’m talking to you now, I say, “My elbow itches,” something like that. Of course if you write down “My elbow itches,” not many people are going to take to that. You know what I’m trying to say.
STONECLOUD: Just let it come natural.
BUKOWSKI: Yeah, naturalness.
STONECLOUD: Certain poets demand of you knowledge of all sorts of myths, legends, historical facts, etc. But whatever poetry you’re writing, it seems you always expect your audience to have a certain amount of knowledge, about life and certain feelings of the times you’re writing in.
BUKOWSKI: Well, I don’t know. In the old poetry they refer to mythology, the gods. . . .
STONECLOUD: I’m thinking of twentieth-century poets like Yeats and Eliot and Pound. Where do you stand there?
BUKOWSKI: Well, you especially have to know your Chinese. All this stuff, reference to mythology and so on, is dropping out. It’s been so standard, you’re supposed to know the gods, etc., etc.
STONECLOUD: It seems like baroque embellishment for its own sake, have you ever used a god in one of your poems?
BUKOWSKI: Not knowingly. I’ve said my poetry could be understood by an East Kansas City whore or even a college professor.
STONECLOUD: Don’t those people, whores and such, bring to your poetry a knowledge of life that is in its own way just as complex and deep, though not as well versed in the ar
ts?
BUKOWSKI: Yeah, I just don’t do that kind of academic thing. I don’t have any excuses.
STONECLOUD: Have you ever tried like Charles Olson to construct theories about the way you write poetry? Line breaks, form, rhythm, etc.?
BUKOWSKI: I stay away from these Olson essays and all that. I think I’ve broken through more or less to the common language. But we don’t want to make it too common. I think the mistake that some of the black writers are making is—oh Christ-y, this’ll probably be construed as anti-black, but it isn’t—the mistake is that the language is too common, like “Hey baby, big train. . . .”
STONECLOUD: You mean because their language belongs to everybody, and therefore to no one poet?
BUKOWSKI: It’s kind of like flaunting the street language, instead of using it. I think they gotta calm down a little before they get to it. They’ve missed the mark there so far. What you end up with is a lot of clichés and platitudes posing as wisdom. If you use the common language, you’ve still got to stay away from the cliché and the platitude. I think that’s where they make their mistake.
STONECLOUD: Which of the poets writing today or, say, after World War II, do you like?
BUKOWSKI: That’s a tough one. I don’t read anymore, I don’t even read newspapers. I’ve gotten so locked up in myself. You can call it ego, or whatever, Jeffers is dead. I can’t think of anybody, frankly, who has really stirred me. This is a very bad time for me to look around and say that this man’s good, or that one’s bad. I really can’t say.
STONECLOUD: Is that simply because you don’t follow what’s being written?
BUKOWSKI: I don’t think it’s that. I drop on a few lines but I’m so turned off by what I read I just say I can’t waste any more time on them. It’s an instinctive turn-off. I used to like Karl Shapiro, something called “V Letter,” which he wrote in World War II, very clear, simple. Then he became editor of Poetry and Prairie Schooner. Like others, he was good just in the beginning.
STONECLOUD: What’s your feeling about experimental forms like concrete poetry?
BUKOWSKI: Concrete poetry? It’s just a cute trick.
STONECLOUD: It does seem that there’s no way concrete poetry can contain any real feeling.
BUKOWSKI: There’s not enough meat in it. I tried something more profound. Write a line of poetry that comes to mind; say the first word has five letters, the second three, the third seven, etc. Under that line, you have to follow with one that makes sense with the top line but yet has the same number of words, with each word containing the exact number of letters as its corresponding word in the previous line. Kind of a stylized vision. It’ll be like a set of columns finally. It’s a good exercise to make it make sense.
STONECLOUD: Have you ever tried sestinas or. . . . ?
BUKOWSKI: I don’t even know what those mean. I don’t tie myself up with all of that, rondeaus or any of those things. I took a poetry class one time. I looked around and said, “Shit, look at this.” I decided not to learn what they were learning.
STONECLOUD: You’ve read a lot of stuff from the past, but as a whole you’re not thoroughly schooled in the history or the craft of poetry?
BUKOWSKI: I wouldn’t say I could hold a conversation with Olson—of course he’s dead anyway, so I couldn’t hold a conversation with him—or Creeley, for example. Breath pauses and all that. If I’d bogged myself down with all that, I wouldn’t have had time to live. I put my stress elsewhere.
STONECLOUD: There are only a few works of literature, past or present, that really move you, is that it?
BUKOWSKI: Yeah. I get more out of the Racing Form.
STONECLOUD: Have you ever gotten a kick out of Roethke, for example?
BUKOWSKI: Oh, no. I read him. Everybody talks about him. He’s too comfortable. I don’t believe him. They build him up so much, but he’s so comfortable. He was out of San Diego or somewhere, wasn’t he?
STONECLOUD: I think he used to teach at the University of Washington. Do you mean he was too comfortable in his approach to poetry?
BUKOWSKI: Yeah. I’ve never met him in person.
STONECLOUD: He died eight or nine years ago. He was a very heavy drinker. He lived pretty hard too.
BUKOWSKI: Well, you can be a heavy drinker, but that doesn’t mean you’re a creative writer. Somebody sent me this book [holds up a book by Blaise Cendrars, the French poet and journalist, whose photograph is on the cover] and I said if this man writes like his face, I might as well give up writing. I thought I’m really going to read something here, and I opened it up and . . . nothing. Well, I still have a chance. But he has got quite a mug on him. If he could write like his face; he probably could if he could get the right mirror turned on him or something. Once people sit down at that machine they tie up. They can’t be themselves.
STONECLOUD: Have you read anything of Sylvia Plath’s?
BUKOWSKI: Yeah, she did the thing, didn’t she? And she didn’t get famous until after she did it. I never read too much of her stuff.
STONECLOUD: Have you ever written a poem about suicide?
BUKOWSKI: Yeah, there’s a poem I did call “The Last Days of the Suicide Kid.” Well, actually it’s about old age. The only good woman writer I know is Carson McCullers. She wrote The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She drank herself to death, and she might have been not quite a woman. Some people say she was a dyke. She was really good, though. I said to myself “A woman wrote this?” A powerful writer. I almost cried. She died on a ship somewhere, in a wheelchair, drinking. She was on her way to Europe when she died. Men can’t ever write the way she did.
STONECLOUD: It seems that the easiest thing to do is to learn how not to write bad poetry, to become a competent technician. I gather you’re sort of down on things like teaching positions, fellowships, prizes. . . .
BUKOWSKI: I’ll take them all! I have nothing against money that allows me time to write, but I’ve never applied. I was sitting around with some professors one night. Miller Williams and two others, and one of these guys gets a scholarship every year. He goes to a little island. He’s a nice guy—a fair poet—maybe he deserves it. I’m sitting there drinking and I say “OK, goddamn you bastards, you get these things; all I want to ask is where do I get the form to fill out, at the corner drugstore, or where you buy a Racing Form? Where do you guys get these papers?” I really got in a fury, and they wouldn’t answer me, they all looked at me. Then I said “Tell me, goddammit Where do I get a paper to fill out?”
STONECLOUD: Well, you’ve got to have a Ph.D. or at least a master’s degree.
BUKOWSKI: Oh shit, no wonder they wouldn’t say! They were trying not to hurt my feelings.
STONECLOUD: Write to the Ford Foundation. Tell ’em you drive a Ford loyally, you’ve owned one for years.
BUKOWSKI: I know a guy up in Canada, he was just awarded $40,000. He filled out a paper. I don’t know if he has a Ph.D., but he does teach.
STONECLOUD: There are prizes, though, like the Atlantic Monthly has.
BUKOWSKI: The odds against that are so high. It’s usually somebody’s sister’s brother who wins it. Those name magazines like Playboy, Esquire, etc., there’s a lot of politics in getting published in them. If you know someone, a cousin, or a brother-in-law, it helps.
. . .
STONECLOUD: I read your novel Post Office, and the aspect that interested me most is how you got by from day to day. You had to put up with a lot of shit.
BUKOWSKI: Listen, I had to quit or go crazy. They really have some creatures there. I think the supervisors are picked not for their mentality but for their brutality. They go by the book, just like in the Army, though I’ve never been in the Army. “These are the rules.” I wrote Post Office in twenty drunken nights. When I was young I said I’ll have to be fifty years old to write a novel, and now I’m fifty and I’ve written it, right after quitting the post office. I’d come here each night, have a pint of whiskey, some beer, three or four cigars, and turn on some symphony music. I’d say I
’m going to type at least ten pages as a quota, and if I run over, fine. So I drank and I typed, my music going on, and never remembered going to bed, and I’d get up in the morning. First thing I’d do is go in there and take two Alka-Seltzer, and I’d come out to see how many pages I’d done. I’d find maybe seventeen, eighteen pages spread out on the couch and say, “My God, that was a good night.” I finished in twenty days. It’s not immortal, but it’s OK.
STONECLOUD: It seems to me that the individual sections stand better by themselves than as parts of a whole.
BUKOWSKI: I know. This is deliberate. I’m so bored with novels that I made each chapter like machine gun bullets, fast and short. I’ve tried so many great novels, like War and Peace, and you’ve got to climb through so many mountains of shit to get to where it’s going. I thought I’d make each chapter a short story by itself, each relating to the central theme. So I wasn’t bored writing it. My theory is that if you get bored writing it, the reader’s going to get bored reading it. As I re-read it one time, I saw it could be a hell of a lot better.
STONECLOUD: It’s got a real strong character. The central autobiographical character is the strongest point. It makes the book stand by itself.
BUKOWSKI: At least I hope it keeps a lot of people out of the post office.
STONECLOUD: What are some jobs you’d particularly like to forget?
BUKOWSKI: I’ve had about a hundred jobs. The novel I’m working on now is called Factotum, which means a “man of many trades.” I’m coming upon all my hundred jobs, one by one, and when I think of them I ask myself, “Did I really do that? Was it that bad?” Dog biscuit factory, slaughterhouse, railroad track gang, stock boy at Sears Roebuck, gas station attendant. I don’t even think I’ve lived that long. I used to gather bottles of blood for the Red Cross; janitor, shipping clerk, it’s all so drab. I burned up the years, and now I’m crying in your beer.
STONECLOUD: That’s your beer.
BUKOWSKI: Then I’m crying in my beer. I wish I could just leap up and say something astounding. I really can’t.
STONECLOUD: What would strike you as startling or astounding?
BUKOWSKI: Oh, something like, say, if Artaud were here, he’d leap up and say something like “I hate people with feet on their feet.” Something really wonderful. What was that he said one time, “I hate well people, they’re disgusting,” something like that. When he wasn’t quite mad he’d come up with—but he’s right, by God. There’s something about healthy people. It’s obscene to be healthy, it’s unreal.