I went down to the post office this morning with card left in my box yesterday—and yowl!—there it was, set of Hearse chapbooks by one Charles Bukowski. I opened the package right in the street, sunlight coming down, and there it was: Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, never a baby born in more pain, but finally brought through by the good Doctor Griffith—a beautiful baby, beautiful! The first collected poems of a man of 40, who began writing late.

Griff, this was an event! Right in the middle of the street between the post office and a new car agency.

But then the qualms came on and the fear and the shame. I remembered my last letter to you when I had finally cracked, scratching and blaming and cursing, and the sickness came.

I DON’T KNOW HOW IN THE HELL TO APOLOGIZE, E. V., BUT JESUS I ASK FORGIVENESS. That’s all I can say.

It’s a beautiful job, clean and pure, poem arrangement perfect. I’m mailing out copies to some people who think I am alive, but first off with this letter to you.

I hope I can live down any disgust I have caused you.

• 1961 •

[To Jory Sherman]

[1961?]

[* * *] The fact that the poets of the world are drunk is a damn good indication of its shape. Cresspoolcrews says something about the essence of poetry being in the shape of a woman’s body. It must be wonderful to be so beautifully simple and uninvolved. Sex is the final trap, the closing of the steel-kissed door. Lawrence was closer in seeking muliebrity from flesh to soul, and to perstringe [sic] the awkward-working and the ugly. Crews simply swallows sex in great drunken drafts because he doesn’t know what else to do, which, of course, is common Americana: thinking about it, simpering about it, carrying dirty pictures in the back pocket, and yet this country, for it all, is the most puritanical you can find. Women here have put the price too high and the boys go behind the barn with the cow. Which makes it tough on boys, cows, and women.

I have just read the immortal poems of the ages and come away dull. I don’t know who’s at fault; maybe it’s the weather, but I sense a lot of pretense and poesy footwork: I am writing a poem, they seem to say, look at me! Poetry must be forgotten; we must get down to raw paint, splatter. I think a man should be forced to write in a roomful of skulls, bits of raw meat hanging, nibbled by fat slothy rats, the sockets musicless staring into the wet ether-sogged, love-sogged, hate-sogged brain, and forevermore the rockets and flares and chains of history winging like bats, bat-flap and smoke and skulls ringing in the beer. Yes. [* * *]