You can touch about everything as you run around. It lets you out of the straight jacket of pure Art, and you’ve got to get out once in a while. Of course, I don’t restrict myself as much in the poem as most do, but I have made this my business, this freedom with the word and idea [* * *]. (22)

He escapes from the straightjacket of pure Art, we note, not by self-indulgence but by a discipline (“my business”) of writing designed to earn the freedom with word and idea. Yet even so, the personal letter offers a welcome further relief: no worries about unity, shaping a whole, or revision, for instance. Still, it’s a form it would be dangerous to grow self-conscious about. When Tom MacNamara proposed quoting from both past and future Bukowski letters, Bukowski sensed a danger.

Letters? god damn, man, let’s be careful. all right at outset, esp. for tightheads who have been working in sonnet form, writing critical articles, so forth; it gives them (letters) the facility and excuse for wallowing in the easiness of their farts and yawns without pressure. [* * *] then the next thing you know instead of being an o.k. thing, a natural form, it simply becomes another form for the expulsion of the creative, artistic, fucked-up Ego [* * *] and soon a lot of the boys end up working as hard or harder on the letters than they do on their poems. wherever the payoff lies, what? (103)

Self-consciousness and posing are the enemy, in all their guises and whether in writing or personal behavior. It is his suspicion of such posing that makes much traditionally admired literature unpersuasive to Bukowski:

“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!” (14)

(His recurrent jeering at the coteries and mutual admiration societies of the “creative writing” crowd provides many amusing passages of invective throughout the decade.) Against such falseness there is unself-conscious “natural form,” whether of the letter or of the kind of poem Bukowski writes. Bad poetry, false poetry, is the self-important ego on display: “I am not primarily a poet, I hate god gooey damned people poets messing the smears of their lives against the sniveling world [* * *].” (47)