As an undergraduate at Lock Haven University, I would sometimes jog along the Susquehanna River while discussing Milton or Donne or the infamous Popish Plot with my roommate. Later, when I became a graduate student, those conversations moved inside, and I along with others pursuing advance degrees would sit with our wine around stacks of books each taking a turn at reading some passage, some poem out loud. I am first to admit that those were halcyon days. Our only worries involved writing papers and keeping up with the reading. But we were happy sponges who delighted in masterful turns of phrases and rapier wit.
It was a year or two before I wrapped up that leg of my formal studies that I discovered poet Charles Bukowski. I cannot recall how. I do not remember him being assigned in class. In fact, when sharing news of his discovery, a female professor in the English department declared, “Of course you like him! You’re a man!”
The retort was not meant to be supportive.
I could not get enough of his work. I bought every collection of poetry I could find by the rough-around-the-edges poet because I found him to be incredibly authentic. He was real. There was no pretense about him. He smoked. He drank. He cussed. He womanized. He gambled. Bukowski arrived on the scene at a time in my life when my understanding of literature and writing was likely getting a bit too stuffy. Indeed, his ability to be true – to the world, to his readers, to himself – shocked me out of a dusty stupor and reminded me why we are the types of creatures that write at all. It was a curious epiphany. What does it mean to study the written work of other human beings? I had been reaching for what they had to offer. I had not considered why I was reaching for it at all.
Bukowski wrote untold numbers of poems in his lifetime. I could offer any one of them, and you, dear listeners, might get a good taste of his style and approach. It is the following poem, however, that best captures his no-frills directness:
The poem is entitled, So you want to be a writer?
if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
Typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite 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 somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or 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 of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
Love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
Sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
At the end of the day, I am glad that I was steeped in the classics. I was blessed with the opportunity to receive such an education, and I remain very, very grateful. I acknowledge that many would have loved the same access. I am also happy, though, that Bukowski came relatively late in the game – as if he were the cherry on top. When I began my studies, I was just a kid from a small town in Pennsylvania who spoke plainly. Toward the end of that leg of my formal studies, I was reintroduced to the power of plain language by a poet who likely did not give a rat’s ass about the academy. All said and done, it was a lesson in humility and a reminder – not so subtle, I hasten to say – that language and story should never have gatekeepers – that a person should never have to check with those who have titles and rank to determine if that language and those stories have worth. We all have the built-in ability to recognize the authentic. This is, after all, Bukowski’s thesis. We should not pretend to be someone we are not. We should not force the story. And this goes for our lives as much as it goes for anything else, for it should never be contrived. Contrived work and contrived lives are no good to anyone even if you are a man or, perhaps, especially so.
