The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

by Charles Bukowski

  (Corybants were priests of Cybele who celebrated like hell about the mysterious things they were not quite sure of.)

  I.L. says he will try to throw some light on the creative process more by description than explanation; not ”why” but “how” the poems came about. This is what I tried to do when writing about my park bench in El Paso. It is much safer than dancing with the thick-tongued, well-read, well-bred, and dull critics as to mechanics and ultimate concern of verse. So Layton will go into how it happened like a bowel movement say or like lightning which struck a tree. All right. One day he took his wife to the beach at Caughnawaga and stayed all morning and part of the afternoon. This seems to me to be a fine thing to do. How many poets take their wives anywhere? How many poets even want wives? Anyhow, he finally took her home and went out for a walk alone. He went down St. Catherine Street (I take it he was re-gathering thinned out wits that had been pummeled at the beach) and turned into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. He had no sooner sat down than the whole thing came: turds and wings and shaft-eyed screaming, and luckily he had a pencil and “Nothing existed for me at the time except the words I saw forming on the napkin: an irregular black stain whose magical growth gave me a sensation of almost unbearable ecstasy and release.” Of course, the waitress probably thought he was crazy, but who ever heard of an immortal waitress? One of his poems, “The Bull Calf” (See A Red Carpet for the Sun, Toronto: McClelland & Steward Ltd., 1959), was written in less than ten minutes while he was enjoying some afternoon sunlight. “Whatever else Poetry is Freedom” was put into his mind, he says, while walking along the road that led away from his summer cottage in St. Marguerite. Another time he was awakened from a deep sleep by the line: “Lie down in my ghostly mental bed,” which is a pretty good line, you’ll have to admit. But he sat there waiting more than an hour but nothing else arrived. You’ll also have to admit that this is real dedication to poetry, especially on a cold night. “El Gusano” was written in a field in Denia, Spain. Not everybody gets to Spain: some industrialists, some actors, some bullfighters, but few poets. “Women of Rome” (see The Swinging Flesh, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961), was written in Rome. Layton has “respect for good workmanship and painful revision.” I do not. “Think of Swinburne’s last inglorious years,” he asks, “or recall Rilke’s decade of painful sterility.” I’d rather not; I’d rather drink a beer. Yeats, I’m told, ran dry for two years, “No ferment, no poetry: that’s the long and short of it!” Well, poetry is a dangerous game, no doubt. I lay drunk in the alleys until I was 35 and then I began writing poetry. Now I come inside to get drunk. Layton is properly worried: reputation is dangerous and praiseology is deadening—they and the fawning ladies with big asses and the professors and the free whisky ripped Dylan Thomas apart like a cheap toy. A man can go to bed being a carpenter and awaken still a carpenter, but a man can go to bed being a poet and awaken and be nothing at all. We turn to the first poem:

  I stand on a hill;

  my mind reels in terraces

  and I’m sucked into a whirlpool

  of earth.

  As evening wind rattles the almond trees.

  In the hushed arena of the sky

  the bloodied bull sinks down

  with infinite majesty:

  the stanchless blood fills the sea.

  Triumphant matador, night

  flings his black cape across the sky.

  I’m afraid that this poem could have been written by any high-school girl with a bad case of acne who had missed the Senior Dance and was sorry for herself and creating a seemingly beautiful escapism. Am I being too hard? Yet I feel that this is the type of poetry (poem) that drives the few and almost real people away.

  “In Canada we have no tradition of brawling, irreverent poets, no Villons and Rimbauds. Only a bunch of squares. We need wild-eyed poets . . .” says our rooster.

  Then, Irving, stop writing square poetry!!!

  In “El Caudillo” we are told that Franco hardly exists in Spain although the people know he is very much there. It is a good poem, not a bad line, and close to the best Layton genius. But being in Spain is strange to Layton; he expects much dust and hollering, perhaps butterflies dreaming of Lorca. But things are much the same anywhere. Life takes hold; motorbikes go by; young ladies on bus benches are often good and careless enough to show us much wondrous and fascinating leg; there is toothache and rain and comic strips. Our leaders, our masters, are there somewhere . . . up in a tree branch, behind a steeple, a paper face on the editorial page, a foggy thought over a martini until the taxes get too high or they are assassinated or until we see them riding through our town peering at us with human eyes from under a mass-manufactured hat. God save us from everything! Let us eat an orange.

  “Stone-splitters in Alicante”: the worms are underground in Alicante, the ringing blows on rock startle them as Spain sleeps so beautifully in the evening sun. We are all Romantics!—a hell of a fix!

  “The Cactus” is modern enough. A little Auden, a little Eliot, a little Jeffers, a little Layton. . . .

  From this odious ramshackle affair

  of pulp-ponderous roots and shoots

  will the airman finally appear,

  his face torn under a comic crown

  of spiky, fat-fingered polyps;

  his bleeding feet, ah, shod

  in the sandalshaped leaves of the cactus?

  But where . . . where will he go?

  I don’t know. I’m told Christ #1 got rather roughed-up. “Fornalutx” is Layton taut and good, the “spiegeleisen”:

  Light? O no! More like dark perhaps.

  But that too is not quite accurate:

  I mean about the dark. The sun smoked.

  That’s the nearest I can come to it.

  And no air stirred, and we almost choked.

  He’s the same in “Encounter”:

  Is it because

  I really wish to kill him,

  to pierce him with a nail

  and mess up this trim armorial?

  Is that the reason why?

  Is that it?

  Go away, lizard, go away.

  There are tears in my eyes.

  It is dangerous for you to stay.

  All right, each of us kills the thing he loves, eh Oscar? Some think of doing it with a nail. This is not bad poetry, and the lizards are often more beautiful than the blondes. And although rhyme frightens me, many things do, and many things are not against the rules. “At the Pier in Denia”:

  Such hair, such necks

  for stroking;

  such bosoms, which seen,

  starving men might turn from melons;

  eyes, ojos, that when raised

  from the books they’re reading

  are clouded with love.

  They sigh, reading True Romance

  —Spanish version—

  but ignore the suntanned caballeros

  that squat behind them:

  three stunned bulls.

  You can’t write much better than this. It is the genius, finally, come out to play, without tricks.

  Now he’s coming on. The better poems are reserved for book center and further on. My God, yes!!!!: “Portrait of a Genius”:

  My friend Leonardo

  gives himself real scars

  with imaginary razors

  that he tests on the pubic hairs

  of his old nurse.

  When the storewindows of the supermarkets

  are unwilling to listen

  he shows me his scars

  and we use them to play Noughts and Crosses,

  taking turns winning.

  Nevertheless he’s always one game ahead of me.

  “Vigil,” one of the early poems dug out of old newspapers, shows that most of us have a chance to finally write very well (or some of us, anyhow) if we once wrote badly, depending upon the traffic of the living and the luck.

  But you just can’t get too critical of Layton when he starts laying
it down, the preface and all that be damned! He gets you sliding up and down the emotional ladder like a drunk searching for his lost cigarettes. You are just going to have to buy or borrow The Laughing Rooster in order to read “I saw a Faun.” I’m not even going to quote it in part as I did a few of the others. It’s a damned good poem. Get the money out! We poets have lived too long in narrow and smoke-dimmed rooms nursing that last drink.

  For those who like the wild-eyed poet, here’s something for you: “The Maddened Lover”:

  With no words

  terrible enough

  to carry my loathing

  I grab

  the doting, bejeweled wife

  of the eloquent banker

  and screw her in the bathroom

  Layton knows his women, knows them well. “Coal.” So true, yes. Then “Release”:

  I shall rejoice when you are cold, dead clay;

  Nor shall my hate be cheated by the dust

  That fills your eyeless bones or cools your lust

  With passionate embrace of quick decay.

  And “Lust”:

  Desire

  without reverence

  is lust

  I know that

  by the way

  my phallus stands up

  at sight of you.

  There are more poems on women, on sex, on love . . . swift, carved, exact, delightful . . . Layton is best here. He knows plenty and writes it down very well in play, in dread, in wonder and it remains as Art, capital A. Aviva is his love and he has much heart and that is why you can listen to him. I’d listen to him without Aviva but those who head college English courses might feel safer this way.

  I began writing this review while the sun was up, have smoked half a dozen cigarettes, repaired my typewriter, which stopped spacing, drunk a pot of coffee but no beer or wine yet, and it is dark now, there is gloomy classical music on the radio and I have gone through The Laughing Rooster slowly while telling you about parts of it, and this re-reading was better than the first reading, and Layton gradually takes one in, and there is no reluctance—when he is good he is as good as anybody else and when he is great he is as great as anybody and when he occasionally gets bad, I forgive him. We must go out and get some dinner. Apples are not enough. The book goes into the bookcase alongside Poems for all the Annettes, by that other fine Canadian writer, Al Purdy. It has been a real afternoon for me, at least one glowing number painted in the rather foggy days of my life.

  The world is full of fish; there are few real writers around. Irving Layton is one of these writers. That I found trouble with the preface is minor. That I found trouble here and there is minor. That I found Irving Layton is important. Mr. Layton? Ah ah ahh!

  I think I’ll go out and mail this somewhere.

  Evidence No. 9, 1965

  Introduction to Jory Sherman, My Face in Wax

  One must be careful with introductions. Very careful. There is a tendency to oversell your product. And as I sit here listening to the music of Samuel Barber and drinking my ever-present beer and writing this thing, I think of a book I received in the mail in February 1962, signed and with a few words from the author. Two weeks earlier a fine woman I had known for 14 years had died, and this was my first return to writing or things of writing. It was a sign that I might make it after all. I opened the book of poems and noticed an introduction by a famous modern poet, and this must have been quite a thing for this almost unknown poet, to have this contemporary half-immortal poet and editor of a university magazine introduce him. That they both taught at universities, I suppose, gave them some relationship. Well, I read the introduction. Among the phrases was this one: “He uses American as it strikes him—as it probably is—with a rich baroque guttural, learned or New York-ese, bombastic or tender, with the full gamut of the comedy of our unbelievable, impossible heritage.” Now after reading this, I expected some sort of steel god from the gutters saying it red the way it is red and smoke where the fire is, mixed in with barren mad speech of our brothers and along with this any soul or Art the author had retained. What did I get? Carefully conceived, pale and ineffectual poetry? Hell, yes. You guess it. And then I threw the book across the room. That was the comedy, full gamut, and the guttural, the three or four words, were mine.

  Now this is no introduction to Jory Sherman. Yet. There’s time for that. There’s time for everything. The bomb. Another bottle of beer. Wait a minute.

  Down to ten bottles. Perhaps an afternoon. But, going back, now when I think of this famous poet, who has really written twenty or three poems that will be hanging around streetcorners long after I am gone, I only think of him as the guy who messed up an introduction. Through friendship, through kindness, out of the best and worst motivations, he stumbled. It is all right to say good morning to the mailman, but whenever a man sits down to a typewriter, poem or not, his soul is on the line. And the toteboard blinks. And I don’t like to lose.

  Sherman and I are friends but not in the University fashion. We have crossed overhand rights on dark nights when the only way to know blood is to see it. This may not be too holy but it clears the air.

  I first came across Jory Sherman in the Winter 1959 Epos, which is not too long ago, as time goes. There were three poems, of which two are included in this book. “Reflections in a Bitter Eye” and “Perhaps Fear in a Rainynight.” These poems struck me as damned odd and damned original (although the first title rings of Carson McCullers’s title), and there is something of the poetic in them, and usually I do not go for the poetic (I use a hammer myself) but something caught here:

  grief, we must gnaw grief as grey

  grease grief

  is absolute . . . :

  My innocent vein rippling foamblue

  opened eager to the stab . . .

  I remembered putting the magazine down with a great sense of shock. After all, who expects to read anything in a poem, a magazine of poems? Poems are generally slippery things, onion-skin things, that say things in a rather refined and poetic fashion and then slip away to be forgotten. I can pick up any issue of Poetry (Chicago) and the pages are oiled and smooth. The intent is not to disturb and to have as little to do with life as possible. It is no wonder the poets starve. And the editors wail that there is no culture in the land. Even Whitman said, and a poetry magazine long carried it on its cover: “To have great poets we must have great audiences too . . .” This is the worst kind of rot. Give us the great poet and the great audience will follow. The crowd comes to see the performer. Mantle. The crowd came to see Manolete. Franky Roosevelt held them in his palm. The crowd is usually wrong until greatness becomes so great that it becomes truth and myth and explosion and everything. Christ walking the earth again, tossing dice with the boys in the crapper, fire and death and the word. Manolete. Jeffers. Lorca. I shiver and the chills run up and down my arms.

  When I run my hand across a page of poetry, I do not want oil and onionskin. I do not want slick bullshit; I want my hand to come away with blood on it. And goddamn you if you are otherwise.

  Anyway, getting back to earth, getting back to Sherman, when I read these first three poems, I knew that something was happening. I do not say Manolete. I do not say Guys and Dolls. I do not say Mickey Walker, the toy bulldog. I do not say anything except that these poems have a wonderful sound of quite not being before, anywhere. This is important enough. I do not like all these poems. I do not like all of anything. But I think for the relationship and the feel of the goddamned thing, you ought to read them all. Maybe you’ll think a little of Keats and a little of Lorca, but something else had come in too. The song and dance of J.S. and I don’t mean Bach and the crowd is looking on.

  All right, wise guy, asks a voice, you know so much—what makes a good poem?

  I call many of these good poems and if you’ll sit down, punk, I’ll put you straight. Words are colors. We each have all the colors at our disposal. Most of us go fruit and mad and drunk. Have you seen a child with a box of crayons? He’ll u
se them all. Most of us never grow up. I don’t care for rules but I’d say the inexorable rule is this: words must be lived down through before you can use them. This is the secret. I have little doubt that old lady Stein told Ernie this, and also Picasso, for the color of color and the color of the word, all Art is similar. The old lady knew the secret but she was unable to live down through the word, so she passed the palm on to stronger people. All the old lady could say was a rose is a rose is a rose, because she was unable to live well. Ernie said a little more and Pablo, stronger than any of them, said plenty. People thought Hem’s clipped style was formula, but it was only the result of saying just what he had truly lived out. Later in life he began to say more than he felt. People think he did it because he did not want to be spoon-fed through a lingering illness. I know why he did it.

  I say that many of the poems in this book are good because they have been lived down through; the “Shermanese,” the occasional clumsiness are necessary. I am very suspicious of any man who waltzes on through.

  The introduction is much longer that I had intended, but in fairness to Sherman and myself I could not make it shorter, without leaving out items that made it important in the final way. The poems are the thing. But I keep thinking of the famous poet who stumbled and fell flat on his cazazza trying to do what I am doing here, and I do not like to fall on my cazazza, or as I said earlier, I do not like to lose.

  And as long as I have burned up all this paper, I might as well go on a little longer. There is a certain night I remember. I drove all the way to San Berdoo from L.A. (60 miles they lie to me, seems longer between drinks) and Jory had given me an apartment number and an address. But like all people involved with tinkering with things he did not tell me much else. I found the place and started looking for the numbers. There was nothing of such a number in the main building and nobody around and I was carrying two tall six-packs of beer and a bottle of sauterne wine and the stuff was getting heavy and I was getting thirsty. By God, I thought, maybe this kid is living in the garage. Poets have lived worse. Out back the ground was full of holes and it was dark, not dark as hell, but dark as the way down. There was a building in back and I went staggering looking for the number. The numbers were hard to see. I vented a bit of the guttural Bukowskese upon Sherman. Nothing downstairs. I went upstairs and there weren’t any numbers at all. Just a rickety balcony thing that reminded me of New Orleans and death and rats and Mickey Cohen, slugged for income tax. I had to peek through the windows. There was a passionate love scene upon a couch. People lived in Berdoo. Well, I walked down the stairs, leaving them at it. I said to hell with it. I am going back to L.A. and drink this stuff myself. I walked back through the yard. Then I heard it. “Tat a tat a tat a tat a tat tat tat.” There was a small court over to the east that I had not seen. “Tat tat tat a tat.” I walked up to the door without looking in. And banged it. “Let me in, you bastard.”