The poem below is the best advice I know about being a writer. If this mystery intrigues you, read it – it looks long but won’t take long. Bukowski doesn’t write fancy. He writes like he’s talking to you in a smoker’s chafed voice after more than a few drinks. And he doesn’t give a damn what you think of him, he’s telling you straight. I’d rather when it comes to Bukowski be a fly on the wall than a listener in his presence. He doesn’t like me, a dandled Ivy Leaguer and not a graduate of his alma mater, the school of hard knocks. He probably sneers at me for using that adjective “dandled.” Real guys don’t say “dandled,” not if they know what’s good for them.
A tough guy, yeh, but not faux-tough – toughened like old leather by the weather of defeat. No ingratiating here, grating rather, a jut-jawed defiance of life, like a spent old boxer taunting, “Hit me again, I can take it.”
No style. Style is for sissies. A blurt. But (he can’t help himself) a musical blurt. There hovers about this poem – I cringe typing this, with Bukowski reading over my shoulder – an incantatory haze, like “Good Lord, deliver us,” from my boyhood litany. Count the don’ts – I tally fourteen – all reiterating the same fervent, almost desperate advice: don’t write a poem unless you absolutely absolutely positively no-questions-asked absolutely have to; not until the pressure to extrude overwhelms your defenses like vomit. And then, if you must surrender, write the poem your way not the way you’re supposed to because when it comes to making poems, “supposed to” is bullshit. And don’t expect any reward from your poem-making more than the relief of expulsion.
Many folks like the idea of poetry. Being a “poet”, truly exposing your innards, strikes them as a spiritually healthful activity. Guilty as charged. I wanted to be a poet before I had any idea what a poet was because poets, I believed, were honest, whereas my childhood milieu wasn’t, all propriety, no passion. Having decided you want to be a poet, you check in with professors and predecessors what poetry is and even if they don’t know they tell you, so that’s what you try to make. To hell with that, Bukowski growls. Necessity, not compliance, is the mother of verse that’s worth a damn. A maker’s necessity may be strophic, regularly rhyming, rhythmically consistent – all familiar poetic patterns arose originally from human compulsion – but it need not be. It may be an unruly spew, as Bukowski’s poems appear to be, only they’re not, not the best of them, they’re melodically tight and true to the urgency they describe.
A priori no one needs a poem any more than humanity needs another baby. We’ve got enough poems and babies. Make poems – or babies – only because you must. For Bukowski making a poem feels a breach birth, he must tug and drag the words out of himself. It hurts to read him.
Younger, I shied from such disorderly poetry because my professors did. Nothing here to teach, no high-flown allusions or wily ironies, no suggestion, characteristic of moderns, that a work of art was a sly commentary on itself. Old now and running out of time, I crave an art that slugs with its sincerity. The makers I revert to couldn’t help making what they made the way they made it; their forms, however fancy, didn’t deform. While acutely conscious of their selves, they weren’t self-conscious. They’re giving me their all, best they can, even if that means sobbing into my arms.
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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedso you want to be a writer?
Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)
if it doesn't come bursting out of youin spite of everything,don't do it.unless it comes unasked out of yourheart and your mind and your mouthand your gut,don't do it.if you have to sit for hoursstaring at your computer screenor hunched over yourtypewritersearching for words,don't do it.if you're doing it for money orfame,don't do it.if you're doing it because you wantwomen in your bed,don't do it.if you have to sit there andrewrite it again and again,don't do it.if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,don't do it.if you're trying to write like somebodyelse,forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out ofyou,then wait patiently.if it never does roar out of you,do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wifeor your girlfriend or your boyfriendor your parents or to anybody at all,you're not ready.
don't be like so many writers,don't be like so many thousands ofpeople who call themselves writers,don't be dull and boring andpretentious, don't be consumed with self-love.the libraries of the world haveyawned themselves tosleepover your kind.don't add to that.don't do it.unless it comes out ofyour soul like a rocket,unless being still woulddrive you to madness orsuicide or murder,don't do it.unless the sun inside you isburning your gut,don't do it.
when it is truly time,and if you have been chosen,it will do it byitself and it will keep on doing ituntil you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.