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.