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 ready for the reject, I am a dark alley loser from way back, and I write badly enough when I try and when I don’t try, and so all right. Although I drank more than a six pack getting it done. It was 6 writing it in long hand and then 6 or 8 typing it, dropping and adding, translating…all right.

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.