Read Online Absence of the Hero by Charles Bukowski, Edited with an introduction by David Calonne - Free Book Online

consideration of every day living to always another phase of existence. Poetry, as other object matter, is after all for interested people.”
    I have to read these sentences several times to make sure that Zukofsky is not pulling my leg, my ears, or any part of me. The writing is not clear; it is stodgy but I get the message. Poetry is for us, the special ones—and it’s of life (almost) and yet divorced, finally, and fixed and pleasurable. To sight, sound, intellection. Well, intellection is the catch-word, the out.
    Yet once I thought poetry was to keep me alive, to keep everybody alive; other people’s poems, my own, paintings, stories, novels, I had thought that these things were to help me get on through so that, when I went into the cabinet to get a razorblade, I shaved carefully with it instead of going for the throat with the big slash. A Test of Poetry was first published in 1948 and reissued in 1964. We are living in strange and violent and unusual times. I am afraid that life has caught up and extinguished such as Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Louis Zukofsky. We will no longer accept dry and safe bread. Poetry is going into the streets, into the whorehouses, into the sky, into the picnic basket, into the whiskey bottle. The fraud is over—certain people will not be allowed to live while others die. At least not from this typewriter, and the action is heavy too at the universities, the alleys, the beer-halls. This type of primer is not going to fool anyone any longer. There are some well-chosen poems but we will not let them be put into their little cages of mechanistic and prissy explanations. Some of the explanations, let me say, are thoughtful and even make sense in the limited way of a charming circle. But I can’t imagine handing this book to a man doomed to go to the chair in a month.
    The true test of poetry is that it fits every man everywhere.
    There are some poems like this in this book but Zukofsky talks about everything else. There goes another idol. There go another 165 well-printed pages that might have crawled with love and blood and laughter, that might have gone good with beer and salami sandwiches, that might have made the next morning better instead of that trained slippery nostalgia of horror slipping through the curtains to fall upon me like a mother-axe and make me close my eyes again and hold the mean in my belly and wonder when the living will arrive??

Bukowski On Bukowski
    Notes of a Dirty Old Man , Essex House, paperback, 255 pgs. with an introduction by the author. $1.95. Written by Charles Bukowski, reviewed by CHARLES BUKOWSKI
    I drank with a friend the other night who said or maybe it was I who said, “It is terribly difficult not to like the smell of your own shit.” We spoke of staring down at our turds after an accomplishment and feeling, somehow, proud of our deed.
    Now, an opener like this will give the hackers, the poison-ivy boys, the university-ivy boys all that they need, so I give it to them early in order to feed them first. Let us get the suckerfish off of our sides and begin to speak decently. I’ve already had enough Creeley-University nightmares to last me 44 lives and dream-lives to go.
    All right. Kirby sent me a couple of advance copies. So you get the thing out of the mailbox and you look at it.
    I got into bed—I like beds, I think that the bed is Man’s greatest invention—most of us are born there, die there, fuck there, jack-off there, dream there. . . .
    I am somewhat of a crank and a disbeliever, so I clambered into my jack-off sheets, alone, expecting that Kirby and Essex House had taken out the best, not that I knew anything about Kirby or Essex House; I was only speaking of my experiences with the world—man, I flipped on through and they had left in everything—the rants, the literary, the unliterary, the sex, the no-sex, the whole bag of warty screams and experiences.
    It was honor.
    I like