Charles Bukowski and me

The first lines in a Charles Bukowski poem that stayed with me were "people run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water", from the poem "86'd", read on a park bench in Richmond, Melbourne in the first half of the 1970's. Some years passed, until a tram conductor friend gave me his copy of "Burning In Water, Drowning In Flame". I was struck by the poem "Something For The Touts". I liked the scope of the poem and how it incorporated ordinary people, such as nurses coming off a shift. The influence of that poem is there in a poem I had published in AMBIT magazine, a poem called "Like Talculm Powder In the Rain" and also in a poem, entitled "War And Journey", published in my first poetry collection, "In the Human Night."
I remember one Saturday in the mid-1980's whilst living in a shared house in Fulham, London, reading three of John Fante's novels back to back in 14 hours, having read Charles Bukowski's championing of Fante's works and clear, clean writing style.
Saturdays in London, I would catch the tube to Camden, go to Compedium Books to see if there was a new Charles Bukowski.
One London winter, I flew to Los Angeles, travelled down to Calexico and crossed the border into Mexico, wound up in a hotel room in Merida, Yucatan. In the hotel room I wrote the poem, "One for Charles Bukowski", which later appeared in my first poetry collection, "In the Human Night". I typed up the poem in that hotel room on a manual typewriter I had lugged all around Mexico, and mailed the poem to Charles Bukowski c/o Black Sparrow Press. Several months later back in London,
I received a letter typed by Charles B, the first line of the letter read "That was some poem you wrote, I'm honoured..."
In my next letter to Charles Bukowski, I enclosed a black and white photo of myself leaning against a London factory wall and said that a lot of my late adolescence had been spent playing pool(!)
I wrote my third and last letter to Charles Bukowski on the eve of myself undergoing a major heart operation at the age of 39. I wrote that letter from the cardiac ward of the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, and despite having read numerous Bukowski poems outlining his need to be alone, in the letter I asked whether in 1994 I could come visit and interview him.
His tactful gracious (and generous-minded) reply to me is there published in "Reach For The Sun" -Selected Letters 1978-1994 Volume 3 (Black Sparrow Press 1999).
Here my poem "One For Charles Bukowski" -

One for Charles Bukowski

I've carried your books like bibles
from Bali to Britain to north of Brazil,
past the Hollywood props, the neutered corral
of schoolroom nodding poetry and fiction,
to find again the hermit strength
of your unbartered words
under the reading lamp's halo.

And the bovine public
ever swilling at their trough
will best remember you
for your "dirty" stories,
but for me it will always be
the poems.

Rimbaud said, "So then,
the poet is truly a thief of fire."
Truly then
you are the best thief of all!

I like your poem about
when you were starving in atlanta
and writing your poems in the margins
of old newspapers.
I like your poem
"Have you ever kissed a panther?"
I've fallen in love with some too.
I like your poems
about working in factories and other
shit-kicker jobs.
I've chewed and bled some
against the wire of that life.

I like your poems about
your whores and your heroes:
the fist and earth of them,
their venom and their yearning,
throwing out a last horseshoe
from their hearts.

And I like the way
you've never really liked
giving poetry readings,
how you only did it 'cos
you needed the money.
It's alright, we've all
been whore to something
sometime.

I like the way
you've ridden your horse:
through Andernach,
through a childhood of thorns,
through the whipped streets
of Los Angeles,
through the little magazines,
through the acres and alley-ways,
droughted of peace,
droughted of love.

It's a story of bravery
and I've always admired bravery.
Still do.

And don't worry about
non-acceptance; American literature
only bestows its laurels
to treaders of water,
inwardly they shudder
at your anvil songs.
On the Continent
they understand you better,
their eyes have long been propped open
by the singular barbs
of Cendrars and Genet.

You've taught me
that where a person's truth begins
is in the dawn realm
of solitude,
harbour of our deepest anchors;
and that
the way to love something or somebody
is by not committing surgery upon them,
to recognize and respect
their trials and graces
in their own arena,
be they
lion, horse, spider, cat
or human.
You've taught me
to be lean in the poem,
to say the thing
directly,
the way the hammer
says things
to the nail.

So,
as the world sits on days
as thin and sharp
as the edges of razor blades,
as the world kneels, to docilely accept
the whip of new Pentagons,
know that
your books will pass as revolvers pass
through the hands of desperate men;
the splash of your poems will ripple
to the edges of the world
and there will be
a seed, a plan and a way
for new
thieves of fife.

Old dog, blowfly saint,
you can rest in the sun now
if you want.

You haven given us more
than we deserve.
                                                           - from "In The Human Night"

Murder your darlings

There was a Beat Generation attitude to writing which was "first thoughts, best thoughts". In my thirtieth year of writing I more than ever liken poetry to sculpture - you chip away anything extra, anything lumpy until you are left with the finished form.
Since late 2009 I've been working towards realizing my fifth volume of poetry, entitled "Personal Weather". I say to myself that I don't want any passengers in the collection, any poems that let the team down. In the last three months I've printed out all the poems intended for the manuscript and then given them a hard look. This scrutiny has resulted in a dozen poems being deleted. I'm now faced with "replacing" those deleted poems. I've shift my self-imposed deadline back now several months. I'm pleased that I got rid of those dozen poems. After a break of not looking at them, then re-looking at them, I could see they were either skeletal, didn't have enough going for them, that I was to a degree repeating subject matter and character types.
I promote being ruthless with your own work. What I find holds people back is that they don't write often enough, don't face the blank page often enough. They say they are waiting for inspiration or only write when inspired - this results, at best, in five poems written in a year.
Raise the bar for yourself. Face the blank page each week. Make it a life priority. Trust that there's material in your heart, mind and bones that you don't know is there until it comes out of your fingertips on the keyboard or out of your pen. Face the blank page, calm but focused. Negative thoughts about your writing capabilities, "I have no ideas", "What can I possibly write about?", "Everything I've written in the last month is crummy" will freeze you up/block you.
Relax. Trial some words on a page. If you don't like them, no big deal. Try out some more.
Even if you spend eight hours at that keyboard/writing desk and you're not happy with anything you've written, you've cleared away debris and cobwebs. I believe no writing time is wasted time. You've got to dig away a lot of dirt to get to the gold.
Persist. Continue. You want to be a writer. Charles Bukowski said "A writer should be writing".
Writing is not easy. Some days it comes easier than others. Stay in training by writing regularly,
keep that mind supple and give it nourishment by reading and reading, going for walks thinking about the big questions too "Why are we here? What is our/my purpose? Is there an afterlife? What is a human being?
Write about your life. Pivotal, significant moments in your life. A poem about a parent. A poem about your childhood - how it REALLY was - not a soft focus fantasy version of it. Poems about what you observe. Poems about what you think about. Tell me what it's like to be you but don't complain or rant in a poem. You have your senses, your mind, your personal history, all taking things in, sifting and reconsidering. Go for it.

Personal Weather

                                                                         Photo By Walter Bakowski

This black and white photo of myself taken at Mary Street park in Richmond, Victoria on Sunday,
18 November 2012 is the proposed book cover for my forthcoming volume of new poems, Personal Weather, which I anticipate being published in the first half of 2013. 
The photograph is meant to complement the book title. Any feedback about the photograph is appreciated.
Here is a self-portrait poem from Personal Weather —

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Self-portrait, Melbourne, 19 September, 2012

I am many selves, some are intimidated by authority figures.
Disapproval, its possibility, makes them stay in the dark beneath my ribs.
Emergent selves must believe no predators are near, ready to break their spines.
Not too social some of my selves. In being alone they get their best thinking done.
Tentative, they observe rather than participate, prefer libraries to dance floors.
Insistent invitations make them grumpy. You can tell by their body language that
They’d rather be elsewhere, not politely asking, “And how do you earn a living?”
Yet they can be kind to the shy. “That was me once,” they’ll say to each other.

   

Portrait of Edith Murtone, fiction writer

Scarlet nail polish and lipstick.
Plastic surgery on her once-prominent nose.
Edith summers in Cornwall,
winters in Athens.

Her latest novel is selling well.
The cook and the gardener
will each receive a Christmas bonus,
compensation for enduring 
Edith’s moods and temper
when she finds living
harder than writing.

Characters like Clarissa and Harold
appear to her
as she drives, 
as she walks along the river.

Clarissa,
eldest of two daughters,
an amateur botanist and watercolourist, 
infatuated with her piano tutor.

Harold, 
a neighbour’s only son,
asthmatic, excused from sport.
Interested in astronomy
and the treasure underneath Clarissa’s skirt.

Desire,
the primary emotion that moves plot and pen,
stirs the serpents in the garden.

Images crafted into words,
words crafted into images.
Truth and fiction,
lying down in the same bed,
entwined, 
no longer strangers
to each other.

The white heat of writing—
thoughts, visions
becoming words,
lifting the writer and the reader
beyond the page,
to where the self is seen,
an ant
struggling with crumbs,
one day to be crushed 
beneath a wind-blown twig.

On a good day, five thousand words.
On a bad day, the snapping in half of pencils—
the study mirror reflecting
Edith asleep on the sofa,
one shoe missing, 
an empty brandy bottle
in her lap.

Edith waking
with hangover—
legs of straw on which
to inch and tilt
towards the horizon
of the kitchen sink,
a much-needed glass of water.

Edith 
straightening cushions on the sofa,
lighting the day’s first cigarette,
asking the walls
what post-war England could be 
if Nigel’s plane hadn’t been 
shot down over Berlin.

The roulette wheels spins,
the white ball
comes to rest on zero.

Not every player 
will risk as much again.

Edith alone
with her characters.
Maybe in the next book,
Harold, through his telescope
will view the flare and fall of a comet,
an arc of light that once scarred the heavens,
now reduced to a photo, data in a journal.
Clarissa will disturb his ordered world
by becoming pregnant.  

The characters’ world changed by 
a birth,
a wavering allegiance,
an affair revealed.

All that threatens and excites,
asks us to consider again 
human nature
as it slithers away
from definition,
Edith will examine
in her next book.

Already she knows its title,
writes it out neatly
on a fresh sheet of paper.

Tomorrow will be a good writing day.

Pruning and sifting your poetry

When you've written poems for a few years, it's worth doing a count of certain words you've used. If get to the happy state of having a Selected Poems published you wouldn't want to see that you've used the word "banana" in nine of your poems. I've realised in my twenty-years of writing poetry I've now used the words "sparrow" and "sofa" enough. I'm going to consciously refrain from using those two words in poems. I've had my quota. If you keep using a word you're arguably resting on your laurels, kicking back in the same old comfort zone. Refresh your poetry with fresh for you words.

Silence

I've heard and read too many poems that include the word "silence". I find in reality that if you stop and listen at any moment you'll hear something - the wind, a lorry rumbling past, the sound of a car shifting gears, a neighbourhood dog barking, a birdcall. I can't recall the last time it was truly silent - that is, I could hear no sounds whatsoever. I encourage poets to question each time they're about to use the word "silence". I encourage poets to ask themselves why they are going to use the word "silence" in their poem, to ask themselves "Is my use of that word accurate, true? Does its use ADD to the poem, improve the poem?"

Syvia Plath writing in her journal, 23 Fitzroy Road, London, February 1963 - genesis of the poem and video link

Writing my Sylvia Plath homage poem involved reading several biographies of Sylvia, a biography of her poet husband, Ted Hughes, and a biography of the woman he left Sylvia for - Assia Wevill.
I also re-read Sylvia's poems, especially the ones written in the last weeks of her life.
A key fact that helped me in writing the poem was learning that the winter that Sylvia killed herself was the coldest London in 100 years.
Melbourne poet, David Lumsden, also encouraged me to write a Sylvia Plath poem that didn't mention gas - unlit gas fumes from the kitchen oven being the cause of Sylvia's death.
Over the course of two years I revised the poem a dozen times. Reading all the biographies concerning Sylvia, Ted and their circle, was invaluable to me in realizing the poem. I get lots of poems from reading - reading continues to seed poems for me. Click here to hear and see me read the Sylvia poem.