[* * *] Thanks again for Beat’d. Anonymous poem not good because guy thinks he can compromise life. There is no compromise: if you are going to write tv rifleman crap, tv rifleman crap will show in your poems, and if he thinks he’s an old timer at 34, he’d better towel behind the ears and elsewhere too, because Bukowski, who nobody’s heard of will be 40 on August 16th., and Pound who everybody’s heard of will be almost twice that old and has never compromised with anybody, nations or gods or gawkers and has signed his name to everything he has written, not for fame but for establishment of point and stance. Let the baker compromise, the cop and the mailman, some of us must hold the hallowed ground…[* * *]

“S & amp; S” is Scimitar and Song, whose March 1960 issue prints a Bukowski poem, with a typographical error.

[To Jory Sherman]

[ca. April, 1960]

[* * *] Do you double space your poems? I know that one is supposed to double space stories, articles, etc. for clarity and easy reading but thot poem due to its construction (usually much space), read easy enough singled. And I think a double-spaced poem loses its backbone, it flops in the air. I don’t know: the world is always sniping sniping so hard at the petty rules petty mistakes, I don’t get it, what doesn’t it mean? bitch, bitch, bitch. meanwhile the point going by: is the poem good or bad in your opinion? Rules are for old maids crossing the street.

Saw your poem in S & S. [* * *] She messed up my poem-eve instead of eye, but it was a rotter anyway. She’s a very old woman and prints the same type of poesy. Wrote me a letter about how the birds were chirping outside her window, all was peace, men like me who liked to drink and gamble, oh talented but lost. I saw a bird when I was driving home from the track the other day. It was in the mouth of a cat crouched down in the asphalt street, the clouds overhead, the sunset, love and God overhead, and it saw my car and rose, cat-rose insane, stiff back like mad love depravity, and it walked toward the curbing, and I saw the bird, a large grey, flip broken winged, wings large and out, dipped, feathers spread, still alive, cat-fanged; nobody saying anything, signals changing, my motor running, and the wings the wings in my mind and the teeth, grey bird, a large grey. Scimitar and Song, yes indeed. Shit. [* * *]

The poem “Death Wants More Death” was published in Harlequin in 1957. Sherman must have proposed reading it aloud to an audience.

[To Jory Sherman]

[Spring 1960]