The title can be misleading, as this books consists of Bukowski's letter to various editors between 1945 to 1993, but besides telling of his struggles in day to day living, it does reveal of course what he thinks about writing. Just don't expect this to be a how to book. ( )

Letters to friends, editors, publishers and agents. Early on, Bukowski concentrated on poetry and the letters are a form of poetry themselves. He explains his approach to poems: Freewheeling, not overworked. He felt a poet can't "punch clocks" " take vitamins" and "play it safe and still sing the madman's beautiful song."

Bukowski displays a low opinion of other poets at times. "They know about everything but plumbing and they ought to know about that because the load it with shit."

In the letters, Bukowski takes writing seriously - both his and others. He treasures honesty and reviles those in it for the glory. Above all, the letters express his need to write.

"Creation is our gift and we are ill with it." ( )

I opened this up in a bookshop, and it was like sticking my thumb into a power socket. A letter he wrote in 1963 to John William Corrington, I won't quote it, it's too long, but my heart was pounding and I could feel adrenaline prickling down my forearms. I carried it to the counter, still open, bought it, staggered out into the street and sat in the roughest bar I could find – a place called the Highlander, with boarded-up windows – and just sat there drinking and reading this and scrawling encouragements over the pages in biro.

I haven't read any Bukowski in years. The last time I read much of him was when I was living in South America, nearly twenty years ago, a time when I was also writing a lot, probably not coincidentally since the moods from which I write are very similar to the moods that Buk is concerned with getting down on paper. So he speaks to me. And this is…intense, beautiful. I hate books about writing in general, all those god-awful self-help manuals about constructing story arcs and developing character motivations I find positively offensive, even stuff like that Stephen King book that everyone loves are just anathema to me. Bukowski did not hold with any of that shit as these extracts from his letters make clear.

I do not believe in technique or schools or sissies…I believe in grasping at the curtains like a drunken monk…and tearing them down, down, down…

His writing is so beautifully rooted in the world he lived, and so detached from the literary scene.

I can't stand writers or editors or anybody who wants to talk Art. For 3 years I lived in a skid row hotel—before my hemorrhage—and got drunk every night with an x-con, the hotel maid, an Indian, a gal who looked like she wore a wig but didn't, and 3 or 4 drifters. Nobody knew Shostakovich from Shelley Winters and we didn't give a damn. The main thing was sending runners out for liquor when we ran dry.

His writing was plain, direct, ungrammatical when necessary, but never for deliberate effect.

I think I could come on pretty heavy. I can toss vocabulary like torn-up mutual tickets, but I think eventually the words that will be saved are the small stone-like words that are said and meant. When men really mean something they don't say it in 14 letter words. Ask any woman. They know.

He never censors himself, he's offensive and crude and true to the life he's known, and you can feel that in every word – you can feel the difference between this stuff, that is done out of honesty, and the kind of writers who are putting it on to sound tough and gritty.

Besides, it pays to be crude, buddy, it PAYS. When these women who have read my poetry knock on my door and I ask them in and pour them a drink, and we talk about Brahms or Carrington or Flash Gordon, they know all along that it is GOING TO HAPPEN, and that makes all the talk nice

because pretty soon the bastard is just going
to walk over and grab me
and get started
because he's been around
he's CRUDE

And so, since they expect it, I do it, and this gets a lot of barriers and small-talk out of the way fast. Women like bulls, children, apes. The pretty boys and the expounders upon the universe don't stand a chance. They end up jacking-off in the closet.

There's a guy down at work, he says, “I recite Shakespeare to them.”

He's still a virgin. They know he's scared. Well, we're all scared but we go ahead.

What I love, what I absolutely love about this passage is that in a sense I don't really agree with any of it, it's the kind of macho bullshit that appeals when you're a kid, at the very least it's misleading, arguably pretty sexist, and so on and so forth, but he feels it, and he writes it down, and he pushes the thought right through until – he hits something aphoristic. The last line or two there is excellent, and he earned it. You can see him earning it.

The writers he admires are the ones who, in his assessment, have lived life and not just written literature.

There have been some breakthroughs through the centuries, of course—Dos[toyevsky], Celine, early Hem[ingway], early Camus, the short stories of Turgenev, and there was Knut Hamsun—Hunger, all of it—Kafka, and the prowling pre-revolutionary Gorky…a few others…but most of it has been a terrible bag of shit.

The ones he doesn't admire are those who write for fame or academia or, basically, any reason other than compulsive necessity.

A writer is not a writer because he has written some books. A writer is not a writer because he teaches literature. A writer is only a writer if he can write now, tonight, this minute.

--------

When you write only to get famous you shit it away. I don't want to make rules but if there is one it is: the only writers who write well are those who must write in order not to go mad.

Some people are turned off Bukowski because he swears a lot, he objectifies women, he's a bit of an asshole. But he's so true, he's so honest, I would take this honest misogyny a hundred times over the laboured respect of someone telling me a fucking lie designed to make themselves look good, which is what, after reading Bukowski, you can't helping feeling most of literature is.

Besides, even if you don't like what he's writing about, if you're interested in writing there is so much to learn from him. Which makes a book like this an ideal way of consuming some Bukowski, and understanding the compulsion that underlies all his work – that underlies, he would say, any great work.

And when you can't come up with the next line, it doesn't mean you're old, it means you're dead. It's all right to be dead, it happens. I yearn for a postponement, though, as do all of us. One more sheet of paper into this machine, under this hot desk lamp, stuck within the wine, re-lighting these cigarette stubs […]. This is a life beyond all mortal and moral considerations. This is it. Fixed like this. And when my skeleton rests upon the bottom of the casket, should I have that, nothing will be able to subtract from these splendid nights, sitting here at this machine. ( )

Bukowski, in any form, is a breath of much-needed fresh air on this stale planet. I own, and have read, every single book of his and I dread the day when the writing gives out. 23 years now he has been dead and the books still keep on coming!
The prose in the book is mostly new to me and I found much of it, though not all, interesting. A few examples:

"...and I am thinking of an old French janitor at one of the last places I was employed. A part-time janitor, bent of back, wine-drinking. I found he painted. Painted through a mathematical formula, a philosophical computation of life. He wrote it down before he painted it. A gigantic plan, and painted to it. He spoke of conversations with Picasso. And I had to rather laugh. There we were, a shipping clerk and a janitor discussing theories in aesthetics while all about us men drawing 10 times our salaries were lost out on the limb reaching for rotten fruit. What does this say for the American way of life?"

"To get through this game drinking helps a great deal, although I don't recommend it to many. Most drunks I've known aren't very interesting at all. Of course, most sober people aren't either."

"Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist."

"may we all get better together."

"God, woman in here feeding kid and as I write you I lean across and say, 'ooooh, try some banana, TRY SOME BANANA!!' me, the tough baby, well, we all come down. they've been in here since the beginning of this letter and I have the radio on and am smoking some cheap cigar along with my beer so if this is garbled it isn't because a green monkey is under the table grabbing my nuts." ( )