Screams From the Balcony Read Free Page A

reasonable. Let’s get this thing out of the way. Let Mason screw his lambs for a while. I am beginning to talk to myself in the mirror.
    ps—I see where Witt crossed you up on “Lowdermilk,” having appeared with it in Decade 1953. How they want their fame! over and over again! instead of writing something new. Frankly, E.V., I’m getting pretty sick of the literary world but I don’t know where else to go. Yeah. I know. I can go to hell. I dropped a hundred and fifty on the ponies Saturday. Riding back on the train drunk, all the women looking at somebody else. Bukowski old and grey and shrunk. all the rivers dry. all the pockets empty. best anyhow, damn it, they haven’t dropped the bomb yet.
 
    The broadside referred to in the next letter was the first separate Bukowski publication, a poem called “His Wife the Painter,” published by E. V. Griffith and included as an insert in the magazine Coffin, no. 1 (1960) .
     
     
    [To E. V. Griffith]
    August 6, 1960
     
    Thank you for the quick response on inquiry. Hope I have not piqued you.
    Yes, this little mag game discouraging and that is why I try to keep quiet and not scratch at editors, just write the poem. When I bitch occasionally it’s just the nerves reaching the throat, mine really, and I’m eating at myself rather than anybody else.
    Thank you for broadsides: they are beautiful type jobs. I have at least a half dozen friends, places in mind that I’d like to see these. Tonight I am mailing out the ones you send. They are wonderfully presented, can’t quite get over that. Do you have a few more sets? [* * *]
    No, I don’t have any particular mags in mind for review copies. I don’t have any particular feuds going nor, on the other hand, any strong supporters who would swing for me. [* * *]
    Nice to hear from you Griff and I promise not to cry anymore.
    A little outa the way, but I rec. a note from Ann Reynolds of the Sixties this morn. little photo a duff and bly. I roasted Duffy and he ducked out and joined the French Foreign Legion. Who says I’m not a tough baby? [* * *]
    P.S.—If this works out ok, perhaps sometime in the future—the far future—we can work out another half-and-half deal. I think right now we have both suffered too much with it…. [* * *]
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    The next letter records the first contact with Outsider magazine and its editors and publishers, Jon and Louise Webb, a connection which was to prove so beneficial to Bukowski. It also, like the preceding letter, notes his incompatibility with the kind of poetry being furthered by Robert Bly’s magazine The Sixties ( formerly The Fifties). Bukowski had eleven poems in Outsider No. 1 (Fall 1961), under the collective title “A Charles Bukowski Album .”
     
     
    [To Jory Sherman]
    August 17, 1960
     
    [* * *] Martinelli called me down something…called me a “prick,” said I built “asshole palaces,” called me “bug-job,” I can’t remember all. [* * *] I can’t be bothered with gash trying to realign my outlook. And Pound may have been “lonely” and “fell in love with a great s SSPLLLANG ggg” “like a rain in a dry dusty summer,” but I am not Pound and I am not lonely. The last thing I wanna see is more gash and more people.
    No, regarding Griff, broadsides not of book, but insert style thing to be slipped into pages of Coffin and Hearse loosely, later to be assembled into collection of some sort. I am broadside #1, Hearse . Tibbs freelance pen ink sketcher who fulfills frus[trations] by playing little mag pages with scratchy pen. Rather ordinary talent, I think, but not too much compo[sition]. Think I could do better but I am supposed to be a poet.
    No, I’m not in Sixties . One reject they sent me, trying to place me in Evergreen Review class, had hangover and straightened them. Hence this bit of corres., photo etc., which I am not going to answer, my point already have b. made, and I don’t care too much to leave the poem and jaw unless it is crit. article.