Favorite Quotes
|
"A good style comes
primarily from a lack of pretentiousness. A man does not get old because
he nears death; a man gets old because he can no longer see the false
from the good." "What matters
most is how well you walk through the fire." "The Genius
Of The Crowd" and the best at murder are
those who preach against it those who preach god, need
god beware the peachers but there is a genius in
their hatred like a shining diamond their finest art "An intellectual
is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way. An artist is a
man who says a difficult thing in a simple way." "A young poet
should realize that if he writes something and it bores him, it's going
to bore many other people also. There is nothing wrong with poetry that
is entertaining and easy to understand. Genius could be the ability
to say a profound thing in a simple way. He should stay the hell out
of writing classes and find out what's happening around the corner.
And bad luck for the young poet who has a rich father, an early marriage,
an early success or the ability to do anything well." "When I give
a poetry reading I feel as if guilty of indecent exposure." "Stand Up Poetry
emphasizes a characteristic which sometimes causes the poetry to be
dismissed: its sense of humor... a quality that is ...anathema in some
poetic circles... In addition the term implies honesty, courage, straight
forwardness as in 'stand up for what you believe'... Stand Up Poetry
is honest, unpretentious, strong. Because it uses the vernacular, Stand
Up Poetry is sometimes lumped with "street" poetry of an antiliterary
bent. This is a big mistake. A good Stand Up poem requires as much literary
art as any other good poem." "Our poets can
whip your poets' asses... Outlaw poets relate to the poetic tradition,
and to their contemporaries in the Academy, with the bristling wariness
of a street hustler getting frisked by a cop. They've seen how excessive
veneration of the poetic mainstream has turned (sic) the practice of
the art today into an ongoing memorial service held by those who want
poetry to stay in the closet. Yet, Outlaw Poets do delve in tradition,
with the goal of turning straw into fire. It's simple: light a match.
They want to learn what has made poetry inaccessible to so many until
now - learning what not to do. Though, for the most part, they display
a savage antipathy to the poetry establishment and its values, there
is a lot of well-hidden craft in their work. Many are avid readers who
have thought a lot about what constitutes a poem, but just try and engage
them in literary chit-chat and their eyes go cold. They have butchered
the sacred cow of literature and eaten its parts. They want their poetry
to inspire the kind of fever normally reserved for the Super Bowl and
hot sex. They know that the way to the heart of a public amused by COPS
and listening to Notorious B.I.G. is not through Spencer's "Fairie
Queen"... These poets have given form to incoherence, made a song
of ugliness, and shown that unbearable pain is something we can survive.
In their best work, the poetry achieves a gentleness and compassion
despite that pain... a new cultureal front is riding the upsurge of
populist verse... a passionately lyrical energy that's spreading fast
around the globe. In every town and city, people from every walk of
life, young and old alike, are standing up at open mikes to bare their
hearts in protest against their dehumanization. A need for authenticity
has gripped everyone. There is now more poetry sold and performed than
at any other time in history." (Editor's Note: Although the permission of Charles Bukowski to include his poetry in the Outlaw anthology was not achieved, if any description best describes the Great One, it is the above. I hope my own poetry reflects the new poetry that Kaufman describes so brilliantly.) "Poetry is a
private affair. A kind of masturbation. An endless self-portrait." "Poetry is a
contact sport! The poem is not written until you read it." "I can't keep
my eyes off the poet's wife's legs, ---- they're so much more beautiful
than anything he might be saying, though I'm no longer in a position
really to judge, having stopped listening some time ago." "We disdain/competition
and its ally war/and are fighting for our lives/and the spinning/of
poetry's cocoon of action/in your daliness. We refuse/to meld the contradictions
but/will always walk the razor/for your love. 'The best poet always
loses'." "...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know. I don't know where it came from, from
winter or a river I don't know how or when..." "Our culture
shapes us to compete, to gobble each other up for money and prestige...
Poetry has taken a similar plunge with the advent of the Slam. The Slam
pits poets against one another in gladiator-like scenarios where they
compete for chump change and prestige, judged by a select group of audience
members... Too often in this arena poetry is not what matters, but performance
-- how well one can recite a line or two, no matter how backward or
banal... Here poetry is cheap, is cheapened... Serious poets who also
happen to perform well on stage are constantly being called spoken-word
artists and are not taken seriously as writers. Here... poets are constantly
in a dilemma. They are, as Amiri Baraka put it, 'the n*ggers of literature'" "Poems arrive.
They hide in feelings and images, in weeds and delivery vans, daring
us to notice and give them form with our words. They take us to an invisible
world where light and dark, inside and outside meet." Q: "A
great deal of the discussion of poetry - the poetry in coffee houses,
the new magazines, poetry slams, events on CNN -- qualifies it as "The
Beat Generation" coming back." "All my poems
are suggested by real life and therein have a firm foundation... No
one can imitate when you write of the particular, because no others
have experienced exactly the same thing." "The question
is not what you look at, but what you see." "Everything
in this world has a hidden meaning... Men, animals, trees, stears, they
are all heiroglyphics. When you see them you do not understand them.
You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars. It is only years
later that you understand." "It's not difficult.
Anyway, it's necessary. Wait till morning, and you'll forget. And who
knows if morning will come." "Poetry, like
any art, requires practice. It's easy for us to accept the idea of practice
when we think of a painter's figure studies or the sounds coming from...practice
rooms in a conservatory. But since we consider ourselves already fluent
in language, we may imagine that talent is the only requirement for
writing poetry." "As a young
writer, I was a sole operator. My workshop was my bookshelf, and the
library's bookshelf. And I don't regret it. My passion to please might
have driven me either to give up or turn into someone I wasn't... as
long as you don't fall into the trap of losing yourself by trying to
please other people you can be a good poet." "There's something
heroic about poetry reading mavens; they endure while lesser souls around
them succumb to coma." "Recently my
wife and I have been enduring a period of great distraction... as a
result of an arson attempt upon our home and subsequent attempt at intimidation
by the suspected arsonist. My literary friends, the light bulbs popping...
either assure me that "I'll eventually get at least a short story"
out of it, or drift off into the possible appropriation of the material
to their own uses..." "Poetry is a
secret that can no longer be kept secret, a way of knowing." "It is necessary
in any originality to have the courage to be an amateur." "Poetry therapy
is the intentional use of 'literature to bring about a therapeutic interaction...
It's more than just reading... it's an investigation. The point is you
are trying to get... (the person) to respond to specific lines in the
poem so the person can help himself...' By delivering fresh insights
into his problem... Ask him who, what when, where, how, but 'don't ask
why. Why is the answer you're trying to find, not the question.'" V: "It's a very
difficult life, being a poet. Like going to bed on TV, with everybody
looking. Like keeing a diary for the world's eyes. You have to be open
for inspection, reveal all the beautiful and dirty things that happen
to you. If you hide something, it will kill your poems. Sometimes I
think it is too terrible... like being in a zoo." "The not so
good personal poem makes us feel uncomfortable the way the problems
of strangers do. We're not quite sure why they're telling us what they're
telling us. At best, the problem is interesting, but we feel more like
voyeurs than listeners who have some stake in what we're being told." "Human beings
are born into the language of movement; we speak body language before
any other, learning its signals and subleties from infancy... contemporary
American poems... give vivid language to wordless experience, represent
our delight in physicality, the joining of body and will in coordinated
response. Poetry is after all, another ancient game." "If religion
is the opiate of the people, sport today is the people's crack. Cheap,
hot, addictive, immediate, sport provides a reductive mirror on life.
Tells me the only thing that counts is being number one... Poets will
provide an alternative view of sports, won't they?... Sports are like
sonnets. Sonnets are like sports. In other words, sport is to play as
sonnets are to language. In one form or another, everybody plays." "...our restaurants,
motels and watering places represent a charged field where ordinary
events -- ordering a meal, spilling a little wine, remembering a certain
bird -- take on a significance that can only be called mythical, and
that... writers, when they enter the field they know, instinctively
that they are in such a significant place to write poems... in hopelessly
ugly and uncomfortable chairs, at small tables, in front of makeshift
stages, in the middle of boring corridors, facing merciless clerks,
hands over dead telephones or under lumpy pillows, fingers desperately
pressing noisy air conditioners, eyes staring at ugly cracks and painted
wires." "Always the
foreigner, the stranger, someone a bit fishy. Even the smiling dummies
in store windows eyed me with suspicion today." "In poetry,
you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms, with all
your capacity to love anything at all." "I'm on nobody's
team." "If you do not
express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being,
you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community
in failing to make your contribution to the whole." "I have been
published in the New Yorker.
The Great Poet's
Wife (For Linda B.) I understand why
she was his muse She smiled like Dante's
Beatrice - Dave Alvin, ibidem
I once lived with
a woman IF YOU REALLY LOVED
ME, she'd say Already, in the name
of love, But the Bukowski
books I never burned my
Bukowski books I guess "A Poem For Charles Bukowski" by Dave Alvin, as found in Alvin's "Any Rough Times Are Now Behind You" |