Charles Bukowski - Beerspit Night and Cursing

[ This appeared in A&P #5 (January 1961) immediately following Clarence Majors review of Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail and three other books. Majors subsequent review, promised in the first paragraph, never appeared .]

Targets #4 A Signature of Charles Bukowski (arrived too late to airmail to Mr. Major so the typist must do it & she is not going to cock Mr. Bukowski up with kisses. As a matter of fact she is reviewing one poem only & the rest will be reviewed by Mr. Major next issue of the Anagogic & Paideumic Review ).

Page 19: Horse on Fire wherein Mr. Bukowski has Mr. Ezra Pound saying:

one of the greatest love poems ever written

He did NOT say that ; he said AMONG the best love poems in the language

Mr. Bukowski has Mr. Pound described:

many kinds of traitors of which the political are the least.

Mr. Pound was not guilty of any political treason. Mr. Pounds own statement:

W H A T I WD HAVE BEEN GUILTY OF IF I HAD NOT SPOKEN

(Of Misprision of Treason/ European 59)

covers his conduct.

It was a grim jest to call Mr. Pound a traitor & it is a traitorous act to release him in the care of his wife, a British lady, however correct she may be & of high class & the best dressed lady in the world (I mean the tie dots matching the hat feather & glove stripethat degree of knowing. Whispering in the artists ear: that lipsticks the WRONG colour for that dress) but Ezra is an American & he ought to be free to come to us if he wants & he cannot because it needs his wife to bring him & shes been here & that was enough for her.

Wed need reform ourselves overnight to be good enough for a lady who wore a black silk top-coat/ a river-mist grey knit fez-hat glittering with silver sequins/ a jeweld ring matching the colour of her stripd scarf & greyd toned stockings of silk matching her greyd toned silk gloves/ a scarf pin whose colour fit the colour of her eyes & underneath a dress of forest green to match her shoes that shes put black narrow ribands under th arch & tied criss-cross up her ankles, ballet fashionon the hottest day of the hottest town in the midithe swamptown heat of Washington D.C. traveling to St. Liz on a bus full of half-naked red-skinsMrs. Dorothy Shakespear Pound was a miracle of civilisation & all by herself; without writing any Cantos youve no idea how these tawrsome paradises bowre me she could have raised our general cultural level & uplifted our society from its goddamnd dry on these rocks [Canto 93/643] on toward a proper civilisation.

The look of pain in Allen Ginsbergs eyes when the typist said: he read me Dante translating as he went along & Guido the same & Ovids Metamorphosis and his own Cantos starting from XX to spare me HellAllen needs to have his Dante read to him. We all need him: Mr. Major needs him:

all of us who do not know what it means to ever have had a Guru or a means to go into ourselves quietly & find the beautiful boundless area of what we call Heavenwe find Hell every time.

What good did it do to release him from St. Liz & sign him over to our British cousins?

A recording of an artist reading his poetry is not it. That is for the mass mind & ALL they got; but any who are of the caste of artiststhe muse worshippers ought to stand in the Presence of the Throne & be Knighted. There is a power; there is a living reality & you aint going to get it from any recording of a human voicethe monkey mind is forever concerned with mass production.

The typist has uncovered evidence of enough intelligence alive & at work in the U.S. to warrant saying: there are men here who are men in their own right & they shd be in the presence of the living reality of a Dante walking the earth. They are being cheated of their right to equalitywhat good does it do to make the grocers clerk equal when our best men must resort to plastic recordings of something that is theirs by right of proximityour best red-skin poets forced down to the factory level. It is a political & ethical crime to cheat a boy of sensitivity & intelligence as Peter Orlofsky of his cultural heritage as a fellow republican & citizen of a free nation. Poor Pete, beautiful of mind & body & ignorant as a goldfishhis inborn love of arts & letters is pitiful in its poverty but persistent beauty: Sheri, today I was at Sutro Park & I saw a painted ship upon a painted ocean & wheredja get th blues? (forget-me-nots plucked in Sutro Park for Diana striding white in moon ray) How are we EVER going to reach the level of Europe & the Orient? Our one international success has been sold into slavery. O! Go down Moses & pull our Ezra up sos Pete can sing: Leafdi Diana, leove Diana, Heye Diana [Canto 91/632-33] & Michael Grieg can test his dry, double distilld wit upon the master of wit & Robt Stock can see first-hand the out-go-er sea-farer & know its likeness to the in-go-er sea-rougherremove the eyes of pain from Allen Ginsberghasnt he had ENOUGH Hell?