Beerspit Night and Cursing (18 page)

Jan 3-61
[
postcard
]

Sheri
—

It is naturally the diminishing of a poet when he goes to the essay, critiques and manifestos, as Pound, T.S.E., so forth;—men who broke into being through the poetic word, and troubled for more power, the dominance of power, lost it in laying down the law. It is a natural human frailty, a boil upon Emperor, Kaiser, Poet, traffic cop, house-wife (so forth), all bubbling up out of a natural source into a source of definite form and definite hardness.

…an’ now have a spur upon my dmnd heel and can hardly walk, but does not really trouble my drinking. Thank you for
Leoun
but there are some bad lines, and I don’t know how Cocteau ever made it, or his cheap movies either: the backs of his couches leaping out on halloween masks with skid-row wires of fancy. I believe Jean read Shakespeare 3 times daily when he wasn’t admiring himself in the mirror. (I will write Sunday—some disagreements)

Charles

BUKOWSKI

dreams of eves and arbors,
Jan. something into ’61

Sheri, goddess-thing, what:

Your jumping altar keeps the midnights fine. Why I’ll bet even the coffee-beans ha ha in the lowly hair-grass.

My guess is that it’s Gib…with carburaters and Ernies bilking and boiling the landscape of his mind. Although Pan might be bothered about something too.

No, I didn’t listen to the broadcast because it meant going out to buy an F.M. radio and some lady had just bought me a new A.M., and she howled when I mentioned another radio, and so she wouldn’t feel bad, I didn’t bother. But I would like an F. M. because of better music and less gnarl, but also if
I HAD WRITTEN THE POEMS FOR RADIO
(or the manifesto or whatever part they used) I would have been interested, but since it was just the work of climbers, I mean those trying to push poetry out in the open like a streetcar transfer, it didn’t matter to me. It was a tape that had been earlier broadcast in New York, and now it’s sitting somewhere and everybody’s asleep and it still doesn’t matter. Very little matters in the broad coarse except what we do or say or think toward ourselves, the “I”—how we treat its calls and how we answer them. Ez wants to ed. the masses. He is right because he is Ez and the Ez says so. I don’t care about the masses. I am right because I am Buk, but I would be wrong if I became Ez. This is all basic and simple, but how involved we sometimes get, like an essay in the Kenyon Review, talking large fancy circles, interesting circles, but missing the meat. Enough about the radio. Except there was some editor in N. Yawk who wrote me he was reading something of mine now and then in the Bizzare Cafe and he hoped it was ok and he wd continue to do so unless I sued him or wrote him a nasty letter. I told him, go ahead, I write the poetry and if somebody wants to do something about it or with it, I am not going to hit it over the head with a stick. What I object to is standing there
MYSELF
and reading my own bilge and waiting for applause or some ass to come up out of the audience, beret and goat, shake my hand and say, “I dig you, dad, from way out.” I don’t want to rub dicks with the ill; I may be insane, but I am not ill. The blood I spit out is good blood and the beer I drink sets the hills of hell on fire.

And each day I grow some more like a small cactus sticking those thorns up out of the dryness.

I once said, If I can live to be 40, I can write something. So I didn’t write for ten years…waiting, and then I began 5 years early. I think now I must possibly ask for ten more years: I need to be 50 or 55. I am still not strong; I can feel large gashes of impossible light, intruding!

Oye, Shere, as I write this, my beer can to my left, sitting in my old yellow bathrobe, same old thing: hair in my eyes, 4 day beard, just had 3 scrambled eggs and some rye-krisp and pears, and I fried the eggs in warm butter like a Van Gogh yellow, and I put in a
PINCH
of leaf oregano…oye, those eggs tasted like the left leg of God roasted at 250 degrees for 18 hours…try it…
LEAF OREGANO
, a pinch. Get it at most any market. I bought it for another purpose that didn’t turn out so good: red beans and 2 pounds of handburger (ham, yes) (hamburger) and tomatoes and onions, celery salt, garlic, and chili peppers. Tasted not bad but I made too much, lasted too long and I gained 5 pounds and threw it away.

But what I’m trying to say, she’s gone now, but while I was writing this—I live on the 3rd. floor and from my kitchen table where I write I see nothing but sunshine and 4 red flats and an apartment house and a blatch of the Hollywood hills, but as I write I see things, and there is this girl: they live in the front pink flat, all women, 3 or 4 or 5 women, no men at all, and a small dog without sense, and they are Europeons of some sort, Armenian, Rumanian, Polish, some lowly defeated race, but they are strong because they have not been Americanized, and they are angry too because there are no men, and they are all beautiful from the youngest to the oldest because nature and themselves is keeping them ready in case a man enters. Oye, there is one. 19. Big, oye, big, strong as a horse with brown hair down to her big ass. It’s Sunday. She empties the trash, back and forth, back and forth, and they speak, I believe in some Europeon lingo most of the time; and she is in purple, and outside of a man she desires nothing, and she feels little pain outside of a belly or a toothache and she seldom has either, although some day a mailman or a truckdriver or maybe even a garage mechanic will marry her and her belly will bloom and breathe with the snake turning into man, being born, and turning back, spiritually, to the snake. But now she empties trash. oye, this strong thing in purple. A
church dress. There is a four foot tall fence partially covered with vines. And she’s still emptying trash while the rest of the woman-family walks down the sidewalk toward church. So then the oldest one, Europe from way back, speaks the command, a harsh command that cannot be disobeyed, and I interpret it to mean: wtz takin u so fucking long wit da trash? We’s going to church. C
HURCH! GOD
! Idiot, idiot child!

Well, what happens? My purple horse-child drops her wastebasket, puts one hand on top of the fence and
vaults
over, her skirts whipping up to her waist, long new nylons on the miracle of legs the new world will walk on, and all the sunlight and all the plants growing, and the purple, the purple, bunched around her waist, and in front of the little pink flat a bush covered with more orange flowers than leaves.

Old Buk—who like an idiot wants to be older—lifts his beercan and drains it surly to a simple maiden who made his German blood sing.

Sherman wrote: God damn you, god damn you, why in the friggin’ hell won’t you write? He’s gotten a job as a copy boy with the
Examiner
, I suppose with all the publicity on the ticket mess he got himself into and with his ambition he’ll probably
own
the Examiner in ten years. I know Sherman is of your camp, so I will not say too much. I did one time, and I heard about all my “asshole palaces”, and again when I said something about Wang, I thought y’d never run out of paper and invective. You protect your fledglings, your nestlings quite well, Sheri, but I’m glad that most of the time we are on opposite camps. I haven’t any fledglings, only Buk, and that sloppy drunken cur in his old growling yellow robe is more than I fk can handle.

Now, your Pound and your young Jewish boy, I leave that to you. There are too many things working against each other here, and I think for the first time in a long time you must realize that your inner spirit is bumping heads in many manners and ways, and actually this is not good but sometimes the not good happens. We are challenged continually along the road and we are forever given one of two (or more) choices. That is why so
FEW
of us make it.

My guess is that you are making the wrong move. But you are to be forgiven. You are a woman and Pound is far away. I understand his silence. You have broken a tenet. A tenent, with Pound, is not to be broken. Like the Imagists: a set of rules grown out of reason. And I guess H.D. is the last of the Imagists. But H.D. is wrong in holding so close; although originally it was a force, forces grow dull. And perhaps the force of Pound has dulled (a little) within you. And another force is closer to you. And you are a woman.

I leave it to you.

Thank god my crossroads are ok if only that fat lovely simple cow will stop vaulting fences in her Sunday best as I wish for old age so I can see more clearly the word that must be put down.

Oye, I know a coupla nice ladyies who by mee shirts and radios, but***oye.

I think yr Gib, in a sense, very strong, and may well outlast and outthink us all. Tell Gib I say hello, and Walker too. I hate and love you all.

Concerto Grosso of somebody playing. It doent mata.

Oh, these magazine editors think they’re all, y know. I wrote a poem called
The Life of Borodin
. And there was a line where I mentioned one of his works:
On the Steppes of Central Asia
. How did the editors change it to read?
In
the Steppes of Central Asia
. And I don’t even
try
. Who
are
these
EDUCATED
bastards? And worse yet, I won some kind of Memorial Prize for the poem which was supposed to come as a gift of flowers but came instead as a check for ten dollars. The flowers would have meant more to me, but I figure the editors were crossing the donor, trying to help me, thinking I thought as they did: money was worth more than flowers. So I took the ten and put it on a horse which ran out, but anyhow, I still have borodin and he’s ON the steps. Although, I do suppose it comes down to a matter of translation finally and I don’t care to argue. Let me say only?: it was a bad horse.

You should have gone to Italy with Ezra. But wasn’t there some
“ever-present English woman”
near-by? Where did I read this? I don’ know? I suppose she had money, and Ezra is man enough to love and fox enough to revalue but not discard money, hay?

Let’s not worry so much about Miles. Sometimes I have the feeling that he has a gun against your brain? I think, perhaps, that of all the men living upon earth, Payne sees holes in you better than the rest of us. Miles is weaker than you, Sheri, but something in his training aides him against you. He tells me that I am rotten, slaps me across the face with his giant
BEE
and Moszt etc., but he knows afterwards that he cannot hurt me with what is part of me and I laugh at him, and he learns essentially and finally, that I too am educated and have read all the books and heard all the music,
ONLY I DO NOT TALK ABOUT IT LIKE WEARING A GOLDEN MEDAL LIKE MILES DOES
. And I still manage to write a different type of poetry not based upon the manners and ideals of the past (although Sheri says I am “late mid-Victorian”)

Which almost made me mad, finally. And I decided not to write her again. I am a prude, yes, in many ways. I was once
married to a millionaire’s daughter.
And I gave up millions rather than put my head between her legs.

“As far as a poet goes, I don’t want to insult you, but you’d make a good race-car driver.”

“You look like a successful but a cheap gambler.”

“Why don’t you open your eyes? It was a year before you opened your eyes and looked at me, and when you did it looked as if you were in agony.”

Of course I do everything backwards. How else could I write poems.

One thing I will not do is to take crow from a woman. When there is a woman in the room, I am the man. And when there is another man in the room, I am the man. And as I have told you, I am very quiet and very calm and I only seek peace,
but a set of facts and mathematics and a stomach and a cock, sometimes tears me from my peaceful bearings. This, as death, comes to all men, and it’s the way you handle it that matters. It’s the way u handle it.

I SAID, I COMMAND THEE: READ
ROAN STALLION
.

Jeffers is
not
in the “bowels of life”, it is only those who want us to hate him hoo seee sew. Jeffers presents the dahlia against the brick wall and although he is upon the side of the dahlia he knows that the brick wall will finally win, and the part of him I don’ like is his secret admiration of the brick wall; but in his poetry, it is the working of these 2 parts alwayes
ALWAYS
, and that is the secret and the strength of Jeffers’ poetry, and you cannot compare him with Pound because they are 2 different damned trains running down 2 different tracks about the same time, going, perhaps, in different directions. But these men are strong, both of them, and their dirrectikns don’ mata. Their energy does. Shit! Art can be
ANYTHING
! It can gd be a religious ass like v.g. drowning in the shotgun corngufffield of color, or a homosexual like D. H. Lawrence building up the womanhood of sex while wanting to sleep with the sloppiest pig of a man available.

To me, Art is forgiveness without God and with the little availability of light offered.

To you, something else. Education of the masses.

But, god, Sheri, you must damn you bring the masses up to us! And have them step upon our toes and crowd us out of some line or tother for a hot dog or a boxseat upon a holiday…the masses just mean
THAT
: the masses. What are
YOU
going to have us do? Exchange first sheets of hidden Shuberts instead of trading stamps? I know it was Schopenhauer who said (in my words), well, hell yes, we’re suffering, but if we ever
stopped
suffering, wd know we were
them
.

Jeffers is a genius in the preservation of the soul to the natural attrition of fame. Frost and Sandburg and Hem and Faulk have little or no resistance to applause.

Sherman, if he ever made it, wd be a complete and horrible mess. Sure, Sherman can grow salty; it is a natural and human reasoning. There is a man down where I work every night