Charles Bukowski's Advice to Writing Students at EMU

For some reason I can't find the poem "Poetry Readings" by Bukowski in any of the books I have.  Here it is anyway, check it out.  After you read that, you can read this poem.  I love his view on poets and poetry readings, because I find them timeless and all but too relevant to me right now in this place.  If I ever had to do a poetry reading, I promise myself now I will read Poetry Readings first.

For now, I'll put another poem I found from him, that every student I have dealt with at this school should read.  It applies to all of them; in fact it probably applies to most of the staff at this college as well.  Another poem that directly applies to my life right now.

I'm not all knowing, but...
by Charles Bukowski

one of the problems is
that when most people
sit down to write a poem
the think,
"now I am going to write a 
poem"
and then they go on to write a poem
that
sounds like a poem or what they think
a poem should sound like.

this is one of their
problems.
of course, there are other 
problems:
those writers of poems 
that sound like poems
think that they then must
go around
reading them
to other people.

this, they say, is done
for status and recognition
(they are careful
not to mention
vanity
or the need for 
instantaneous
approbation
from some
sparse, addled
crowd).

the best poems
it seems to me
are written out of
an ultimate
need.
and once the poem is
written,
the only need
after that
is to write
another.

and the silence
of the printed page
is the
best response
to a finished
work.

in decades past
I once warned
some poet-friends
of mine
about the masturbatory
nature of poetry readings
done just
for the applause of
a handful of 
idiots.

"isolate yourself and
do your work and if you
must mix, then do it
with those who
have no interest at all
in what you consider
so
important."

such anger,
such a self-righteous
response
did I receive then
from my poet-friends 
that it seemed to me
that I had exactly 
proved my 
point.


after that,
we all drifted 
apart.


and that solved just
one of my
problems
and I suppose
just one of
theirs.

Dylan Thomas

I can't find the Bukowski poem I'm looking for, so I'll start with Dylan Thomas.  In my time at EMU, I have found very few lessons to be learned from the courses I have taken.  One pursuit that seemed worthwhile was introduced to me last semester, by Professor Rob Halpern, in a class I failed by my own design.  It was an inspection into what modernity really is defined as, and how it can be effectively pursued in art.  We examined the paradox of literary modernity (all too briefly, so I cannot claim to know much about it) Baudellaire and de Man wrestled with, and I wrote an essay examining the possibility of Dylan Thomas being the one poet I know of that was effectively modern with his poetry, through his impeccable use of the english language.

I have no idea if I was on the right track, as my essay was so far off the prompt the essay was intended, it was not reviewed.

Though I only followed the instructions of the class - that is, I continued my examinations from my first essay into my second essay.

What looked to be a promising class turned into another class where the students were given the false belief that they were far more clever than they really were, and I guess it was assumed that with such a weighted subject, more than 20 people could understand in a month what it took far smarter writers a lifetime to try to understand.

In either case.

Here is the poem that struck me with its use of language:


A Grief Ago
by Dylan Thomas

A grief ago,
She who was who I hold, the fats and flower,
Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn,
Hell wind and sea,
A stem cementing, wrestled up the tower,
Rose maid and male,
Or, malted venus, through the paddler's bowl
Sailed up the sun;

Who is my grief,
A chrysalis unwrinkling on the iron,
Wrenched by my fingerman, the leaden bud
Shot through the leaf,
Was who was folded on the rod the aaron
Rose cast to plague, 
The horn and ball of water on the frog
Housed in the side.

And she who lies,
Like exodus a chapter from the garden,
Brand of the lily's anger on her ring,
Tugged through the days
Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,
On field and sand
The twelve triangles of the cherub wind
Engraving going.

Who then is she,
She holding me?  The people's sea drives on her,
drives out the father from the caesared camp;
The dens of shape
Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,
That she I have,
The country-handed grave boxed into love,
Rise before dark.

The night is near,
A nitric shape that leaps her, time and acid;
I tell her this:  before the suncock cast
Her bone to fire,
Let her inhale her dead, through seed and solid
Draw in their seas,
So cross her hand with their grave gipsy eyes,
And close her fist.