Screams From the Balcony by Charles Bukowski
[* * *] On Layton, he’s up in Canada, I don’t know where. You can probably contact him through Alan Bevan (editor) c/o evidence, Box 245, Station [illegible], Toronto 5, Ontario, Canada. Bevan sent me his latest book The Laughing Rooster to review, which I have done, and am waiting on word whether it’s going to run or not. I tore a little meat but also went on in waving wands of glory over some of the poems. Layton’s been around a while and maybe the way the teeth of the machine work, too long. he’s getting to be a craftsman. I mean in his own way. not theirs. but it’s still bad. he’s finding it’s too easy to lay it down and make it sound good. the words flow off the ribbon good, but not just quite right. this comes from working the bull, from knowing the steps, knowing the crowd, when and how to hook the sword perfectly and bring in the ears and the tail too and bring down that BIG one out of the stands for later over the springs zeep zeeep zeep ZEEP, another sword. But Layton—even with knowing too much what he is doing, is still far ahead of the rest.—how many people will come through for you with work, I do not know. the poets I have met are generally notorious snobs, they are not very good people. what I mean is, some of these Awrtists…might think mimeo below their dignity. really, most of them eventually buy the shadows, they buy the stink…the New Yorker or The Atlantic can wave them on in with a dollar bill and get them to stick their heads right up that dirty crotch. I don’t understand it, there is very little that I do understand. If Life magazine walked in with their cameras they’d smile and smirk and pose and talk like highschool boys with their first drink working toward the first dizzy worthless bitch dressed in taffeta. I mean, you may write these boys, and they may write well but I am not responsible for the rust and bologna that crawls into the soul and makes a snob or a prick or a jackass or a fink out of a man who can, or who once could, lay down a good line.
—the old woman says to give her love to your 3 year old. I give my love to your lucky dog who can’t speak English. give your wife a kiss from me too. arrg, we are getting sloppy. some good classical stuff on now. I go the classical & the new experimental & the 12 tone, which of course, is now old. we all get old so fast. I like jazz too when I like it.—I’ve got to get ready to go in to the pit. my back aches already. I can see now the sheer empty bash of faces, the screaming guggling words; the dumpling of a foreman in his white shirt and eyes of spit…the blood is everywhere.
hold to something.
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
December 8, 1964
Harlequin was a grunion, a brick goblet, a drowning moll, and there was something about a dwarf, a dwarf at the door and I had 75 cents in my pocket and it was early morning in Texas and she stayed in bed and the d. took me out and showed me showed me the old man’s lands and lakes and belongings and I was not impressed and I did not say anything only rather yawned but the dwarf thot I was a sharpy he thot I married her for money which wasn’t exactly so and I do not want to tell you exactly what it was because it was more personal on her part than mine and more sacrificial on my part than hers & dollars be damned, and it didn’t last, of course, she had the millions coming and wrote bad poetry and I had 75 cents and wrote poetry, and there I was and she had the magazine and then she wasn’t too interested and left submissions in the closet or under the sofa or mixed in with the kotex and I took to answering these things and became more or less a part of the magazine until she met a Persian with a stickpin and a lisp and that led to divorce and then I heard she was in Alaska and she married a Japanese fisherman or school teacher named Kami and Kami had wonderful manners, a gentleman, and Harlequin more or less c e a s e d, I could give my god I cd give you more but it’s so dry; I think shots of light are best, nice stores tories stories have slivers and yawns.
[* * *] I really don’t know if there is enough plentitude of talent to deserve even one magazine. and when I say talent I mean JUICE TO MAKE THE EARS JUMP and the hands look like hands, know they are hands and the window screens to look like mother’s panties, I mean SOMETHING. I just don’t think it’s there—maybe a line or 2, and then limp again, making the same old picture. maybe it’s the human race, maybe we’re just full of shit and no light, maybe we’re still full of shit after we shit it out.
There are many things that bother me. I know that I have never passed a man on the street that I liked—most of them giving off a kind of ether of disgust and stumbling and clay-eating, snot-eating grievance. I don’t like the human race at all. this is my confessional, father, pass the wine. [* * *]
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
December 9, 1964
no murals, noting nothing, the overtime has got me, I am dead, dog-fucked tired and the old woman drops tin cans in the bathtub and walks around complaining that life is hard, the baby is cranky she says and she has a cold and maybe the baby has a cold too. my old woman has had a cold ever since I messed-up with her. well, look. yeah, a cold head too. what I mean. I got Ole and the few moments I have left before going into the mill again, maybe I could say something, although I feel my sight is a little twisted today. what’s wrong with the foreword, introduction? I agree, we gotta put balls on poetry. this lisping home freak has layed pale in dead libraries long enough, let’s bomb on out. [* * *]
let me say off and on and over as time keeps running that it was a lively number a good number and I can say this easy without lying which I have not learned to do yet and so you wanted to know and so now I’ve told you, & we look FORWARD to more Ole, poetry with balls!!
and I will put this in an envelope and tool through traffic, weaving around the old ladies and grinding toward the death, my foot to the floor, all insurance companies have already dropped me and the police leap out from behind the palm trees of night on their scooters to hunt down the nub of snarling over the wheel, go go go!, down Sunset, to Alpine street, then a left and out of car and leap into fire of death and fire of dead faces and why I still will be able to walk around and move my fingers I’ll never know. [* * *]
* * *
• 1965 •
[To Jim Roman]
January 11, 1965
Who the hell is U. Grant Roman via “ML” and signed Jim Roman?
You Rebs oughta forget that war awhile. There’ve been other wars, and I was born in Andernach, Germany, August 16th, 1920. Yet when I bummed through the South, and particularly in Houston, they kept calling me a “Yankee” in the bars and threatened to beat the shit out of me. I always got so drunk, tho, they never got around to it because it wouldn’t have been much of a victory. [* * *]
I was re-reading your “Outsider” catalogue the other night, and some odd & pliable & weird & strange assortments in there. I keep thinking of the one woman in there (forget name) who said she’d burn all her works and damn near did. I might say it’s refreshing compared to the almost standard preciousness of some of our better talents. If I’d saved all my notebooks I wouldn’t be able to move around in this kitchen—or read them either. Yet you can’t tell the possible value of some of that stuff, say even later. (their stuff, I mean.)
Imagine having something, say, some scrawls by Whitman or T. S. Eliot or old Ez? Even these jaded fingers might tremble?
Keep the despair bottled. We’ll all out under a handful of cropped and drying blooms—
PHILIP HENRY SHERIDAN BUKOWSKI
* * *
The essay Blazek accepted was “A Rambling Essay on Poetics and the Bleeding Life Written While Drinking a Six-Pack (Tall)”; it was printed in Ole no. 2, March 1965.
[To Douglas Blazek]
[January 13, 1965]
this is still Los Angeles, yes, and it’s Jan. 13th. and the rent is due again, and I shove the green into his hands and he drives off in his three cars. Listening to Meyerbeer, an opera, somebody has gone mad and now runs off and sings with her other-self. the bile backs up into a shoal which gets so large ya can never swallow it. I have spoken. Silence in the back rows!
Glad the essay got past you, although I am always r
No, Purdy didn’t tell me he’d send anything. g.d. shame. but we’ve got to let him live. He’s going to the North Pole or something on some crazy kind of grant. He scrapes through the hard way (or the easy way) doing things like this. Maybe he’s wiser than we are, we who are walking into those buildings where they scrape the meat and replace the eyes with apple pits and bird droppings.
No, I’m not any good at babies’ names, and it’s a torturous thing I don’t enjoy at all, and always figure it’s best to forget the thing and leave it up to the woman since it seems to mean more to them. Except if they come up with something outlandish I can’t craw down.
I have nothing, right now, for mimeo press book series although I may try and give you a submission later and glad for invite. Going to New Orleans in March to help Webb wind up Crucifix but all I’ll prob. do is end up getting him drunk, which isn’t very nice, but it’s kind of relaxing while it’s going on and you’re not paying the price until later, ah. If I should submit something it would not be poetry, I think, but rather a wild literary blast rolling zombie easy and graceless headless type of thing, easy on me and perhaps confusing to the reader. I have a title in mind I have been trying to get rid of, Confessions of a Coward and Man Hater, and I could encompass a lot under this, like say the time the black in a Dallas hotel came into the room with a poker and wanted to blow me and I opened my blade and sat there and when he got close I lifted it and showed it to him saying, “Oh, be careful, you might CUT yourself!” and he ran from the room with these pig squeals. This kind of stuff is drab to anybody but me, but look you get away with it by erecting a facade: you tell them while all this was going on you had D. H. Lawrence’s collected works in your suitcase. I bullshit too much. But I’d like to try it eventually. I have a lot of loose language inside of me.
O.K. to put address with essay. I can handle writers and callers by breaking their hearts and their arms. I do quick work. cheap.
By the way, nobody has sent me $500 to do a novel yet, which is really one hell of a relief. I might find out I can’t write a novel. This way is easier. [* * *]
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
January 25, 1965
the alka seltzer’s sparkling and down it goes. depressed fit of cut cat running by without a tail where it had a tail before, or my head is strung like beads around a savage day. All that crap. Anyhow, I have been drinking too much, and on top of that—another kind of mess, and the time has gone by and I haven’t done anything, I am ashamed, I am lazy, I am stupid, I am King Kong bending over for a button, I am a torn picture postcard of East Bermuda.
yes, if you get to feeling you want to use any excerpts from any of the letters, lay to it. And don’t worry about defamation of character. I have nothing to hide and anything I say in a letter goes anywhere anytime, and if they don’t like the taste of it, let them suck empty beer bottles. or their bloody thumb’s footprint.
I will submit something for your mimeo series of indecent literature (wild-hair mad talk; not poetry) and if you want to use my name on a circular, go ahead. My only hope is that you will like what I do well enough to print it. My tigers sometimes stumble like mice in wine cellars. But I will probably not be able to write you anything until I get back from New Orleans in late March, early April, after helping Webb wind up Crucifix. There’s a matter of a few more poems, signing pages, drinking beer and pounding nails, walking the streets at night and moving in and out of the taverns looking for the man without a head, asking the question, waiting for the white bull that smiles. I will do you something for you. A welsh fandango that will clean the fingernails of your soul. o o oh. [* * *]
don’t worry about the “bandwagon”; if I’m riding a bandwagon then I guess this blood on my gut is only ketchup and the stones over the heads are only the aria of a multi-color dream that can be snapped off like a carnation. I get all the bayonets when I walk out of the door; I move through them like fields of wild flowers, saying hello to half-buddies, punching time clocks, snarling at supervisors. The young girls look the other way: I spit through a hole where a tooth has rotted out, let the belt out a notch and move on through, and I come back in dazed, punched-out, fooled again, tricked again, wasted again, and the old woman glares at me as I peel the celluloid from the pint of rye and move between the sheets far from the glory of the lucky soldiers and the green-eyed crapshooter. If I am riding a bandwagon, let me get off. The zone of sharpshooters still surround me and they pick me off little by little while humming patriotic hymns and eating bumblebees.
if the world digs me it is only to bury me.
I resent anybody being published because he has a name and only because he has a name, and this is being done much, and I don’t understand it, and it’s more fag and fart and drag and death, and Poetry Chicago is good at it; almost everybody’s good at it—publishing name crap when meanwhile some young artist is on fire all flame flame flame FLAME and they let him burn away to knife or razor across the string of wrist or throat while Mr. X-somebody dulls the screams with flat verse on flat-printed expensive paper. [* * *]
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
Early February 1965
Any drawings or fanciness are not going to be worth a Negro’s shitola here to you, but what drew me to your mimeo outfit (Ole) was that I thot you were a hard-muscled brain of a drunk laboring lost son-of-a-bitch without a chance like I am.
I can’t do you a foreword because if I did you a foreword (on these grounds) there would also be other people I should do a foreword for also.
Look, you are not that great and neither am I—and I don’t know where next month’s rent or tomorrow’s poem is coming from.
I’ve been drunk for several days (am drunk now) trying to figure how to answer you.
Sorry on the heart-attack thing. But most of us who write don’t live too long because we eat ourselves up one way or the other. [* * *]
There are 3 poems here, in this order:
(1)—(great and beautiful)—“Up a Different Creek”
(2) A sweet last line damning us—“Plastic Dimestore Life” and
(3) “Testimony Concerning…”
But wait before you inter me with the bones of hard-head disbelievers—
(a) I still believe that more untalented fake poets are being published than ever before.
(b)—I believe that most poetry stinks like the rot of a garbage can, a game of professors & fakers. And
(c)—that writing a foreword to your poetry would do more to destroy you than any heart attack, than any gift of a new cadillac that wd allow you to drive through the latest town of culture and give a wave.
Certainly, I’m drunk and certainly I’m mad, but, also, most certainly, my word won’t make your poetry good or your wife and children love you, and, hell, you know this, you’ve known it a long time. And I don’t have to get drunk to tell you and you shouldn’t force me to get drunk to tell you—no matter what you think of your poetry or any poetry or anybody else’s poetry.
I hate to speak like a knowing prick from a pulpit, yet you’ve put me up in the pulpit, and shit! I’ve fallen down drunk from there, and I can’t help you, I can’t help myself. [* * *]
* * *
The adverse review by A. Frederick Franklyn that upset Cuscaden, publisher of Run With the Hunted, appeared in Grande Ronde Review, Fall 1964.
[To Douglas Blazek]
[February 10, 1965]
[* * *] look, just went out to get mail and here’s two letters from Cuscaden, the last airmail and about an attack on me (review of Run with the Hunted by a. frederic franklyn (his lower case) and Cus quite upset about it, says freddy boy gets “almost hysterical; every low blow known to man (dig