Charles Bukowski’s Ars Poetica: A Previously Unpublished Poem, with Commentary
In 1960, Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) was still largely unknown to the literary world, his name recognized only by a handful of other poets who contributed to the same small magazines he did. Always looking for new places to publish, Bukowski learned that year—probably from poet Jory Sherman—of a new mimeographed and stapled magazine published out of San Francisco called the Anagogic & Paideumic Review. Without seeing a copy, he submitted some poems in June of 1960 to its editor, Sheri Martinelli (1918–1996), a former protegee and girlfriend of Ezra Pound during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. She wrote back to Bukowski saying she would pass his poems along to her poetry editor, Robert Stock, but admitted she didn’t find a “thump” in his work, denigrated his subject matter, and gave all sorts of gratuitous advice in an oracular tone, citing Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and even the Greek Anthology.
Thus began a seven-year correspondence enough to fill a 380-page book, Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli, 1960–1967 (Black Sparrow Press, 2001). Although Martinelli did eventually publish a few Bukowski poems in her magazine, and even wrote the first review of one of his books (all reproduced in the appendix to Beerspit Night), they began to snipe at each other like an old married couple. She encouraged him to read and revere the classics, while he insisted he had read enough of them and preferred to go his own way.
Four months into their correspondence, Bukowski had had it with Martinelli’s nagging championing of the intellectual, erudite, often obscure poetry of Pound, Eliot, and other modernists and banged out an extraordinary letter on his typewriter that both mimicked their poetics and defended his own. (He often drank at night, the effects of which show as the letter proceeds.)1
Dear Sheri, muh:
beast-time passing of scars through closed windows, and a senseless sun, peine forte et dure,2 the cuckold of unreason, a Samson hesitates in the fine web of quiver and titan spires, and no Samson at all—say the buprestid beetle or ordinary man can only grin esperanto hurricanes closer to coma. and if beetles grin, men wear hairshirts to cover their wisdom. looky, baby, what I mean here: splendid then: the caprification and the didactic load, but what are you going to do for passion when there’s only India and only India can amend the spare revenge, the sparrow-lovers, si vis me flore dolendum est primum ipse tibi,3 the oxen are as golden as the sun through golden eyes, but now the tablets sit in morphia, and hear hear!, doctrines and deductions curd into a leaf and die, not because we fail ourselves, but other certain empires we shut away with a mouldy and indelicate, stucco, pontifical nay.
Sure, old friend, I’ve read Pound and Eliot and Cummings and I can toss the words fancy, see here: the spathic lameness of reverie in metempirical phrases is the catch-crotch of the high bulgarians, and I am the last to blot or censure the mystery and high-dove go of the language, it is simply that coming out of the slaughterhouses and whorehouses wilted and impugned with foretaste,—the placenta must go, and the intortion and the divine bullshit, and also… the eunuchs, the civets, the cloisters of footmen, the lavender founts, oblique sirens, everything dastardly sirroco and weeping
must go
must go
must go
and the wergild price is not enough, nor the fancy getaway run of rabbits or rats or genuii—
look here:
let’s trim the fat,
and die.
… the drunker one gets the more mountains appear in the hill of the head, and barking like cats and snarling like gods, and all the puppies in the boot with tap-root smiles and the lion chewing off my left leg and belching blue sparks, ya gotta have a forest and colza and perch and reverie, and letters from Spain and a bag of wet walnuts; and really love, or thinking about love, or getting ready for love—or hate, which is the same thing in a smaller way. the welt of living is so hackneyed, let me luxuriate and mull over the junk of death, puffing through my simple lungs, my spiral brain twisted and decayed as a rotten tooth; the jocund blood rattles in its simple sack, spying on Time, ah ha, but what can be said? It has all been said. we are a sub-species, a sub-species of saving and doing, well-read, inbred, half-wit, constipated roar, rabbit-roar… o, beg in the roads wet with perfume and palsy, oh shit! these soft-hearted sounds—would that I could dream alive the granite gods! would that this rip of red across my eyes mean the voices and sounds and figures, that the full haze of the iguana/—oh christ, how do you say it say it say it drunk and not-drunk, ignorant in the high-seas of death, a gutter-guy scratching for a comb in catalysis of peaches and tigers and beer, can you tell me that frogs are less a manoeuvre than our leap beyond the lycée of breathing?
burn there greater things than poems on blondes in nylon and garter, crst, I mean the young blondes, Sheri, of beerspit night and cursing; burn there greater things than fighting for your life in a 4 rounder, the gloves bombing your guts when you only want love?… or people who think you are a bastard because you can sit in a room for 3 weeks, the sick shades down, without the desire to look upon the face of your brother? tell me, is this madness? burn there greater things than when the music claws and crawls like ants from the floor, up your arms, your chest, your ass, and sings in your head, sings words, crazy words and love, and all the walls are forests of burning music and you laugh drunk-weird and move to the typewriter and all the crazy blondes and all the crazy gloves, Shakespeare as close as the pepper shaker, Beethoven in your wallet along side the hock ticket and the name of a whore, the blood of 4-rounders coming like an aria, and out the DOOR (the typewriter can wait) into the jails, the dives, the fox-crazy traffic, the torn signs yelling names of old lovers through the malaria of breathing, and see see see BANG, already the bartender marks you with his scientist’s eye and the old whores preen in the mirror, and the night is fine by god by god by god, juke boxes and screaming and the deer marching on the windows, and you begin talking through your scarred unholy face, you lie about the last 4-rounder you won in ’53, or you remember the time you were in the same magazine with Lorca and Sartre and everybody else.4 well, shit. it’s old stuff. but so are magnolias and wars and mountains and bullfights, and everywhere the sound comes on and a woman calls your name and you laugh and it doesn’t matter, the bartender comes on like God, heaven in a bottle, the cash-register of hell, and purgatory until 2 a.m., so drink to the dead bull, the dead poem, dead love, everything dead in the face of morning, your fingers slowly closing about the lie and tossing it down your throat.
… there is nothing subtle about dying or dumping garbage, or the spider, and this fist full of nickels and the barking of dogs tonight when the beast puffs on beer and moonlight and
asks my name
asks my name
asks my name
and I hold to the wall not man enough to cry
as the city dumps its sorrow in
wine bottles with stale kisses,
and the handcuffs and crutches and slabs
fuck like mad
got yr letter: awright, the classics are a condition, ok wit me. I don wanna make a romantic outa ya, u stay sprung out and yet set tha weigh ya r… Wang I heard from another source, tell me he can no make his mind up w. he prefer man or woman.5 I dunno, I don care, but seems 3/4 of Art world homo.
Ya see wot heffect y has got ona me? Yos gut me rritin’ Martinellies jaw haw rite, a rite, a rite… da stars are thick wit sickness, bad-time sickness, vury, an I jus knock pounda coffee on floor, all over, n ahm toooooo sick to pick up wit hit and high sit shit and looky upon it, the crumbs of coffee coffeeeeeeeeffeeeee sittin lookin at me wit all its I’s, an nobody wins… I must out and mail this.
sheri muh deer,
Buk goin now
Buk [handwritten]
Having got that off his chest, he apparently realized he had the stuff of a good poem, and composed the following, probably within a day or two (after sobering up), and typed it neatly as he could for submission:6
Note, Edict and Cantata
the spathic lameness of reverie in metempirical phrases
is the catch-crotch of the high bulgarians, and I am
the last to blot or censure the high-dove go of the language
but the intortion must go and the divine b.s., and
the eunuchs, the civets, the cloisters of footmen,
the lavender founts, oblique sirens, everything
dastardly sirocco and weeping
must go
must go
must go,
the wergild price is not enough, look here:
the game is over: let’s trim the fat,
and die.
look, the red rain of gut-string will find a way,
the Nile tamps its own tobacco
and zither and blasé elegance
and the lion chews off my left leg and belches
blue sparks and my neighbor slams his window
when it rains and curses his wife out of
antiquity and damnation,
but now the tablets sit in morphia,
and hear hear!—doctrines and deductions
curd into a leaf and fall
with a mouldy and indelicate, stucco
pontificial nay, but meanwhile—say—
the camels go on, and the sounds of strings;
go back, go back, listen now:
wisdom comes in slow things
and sometimes ugly things
like the slime crawling of the snail
or the spider waving webs of blood in the sunlight,
or Dylan Thomas drunk in the New York pubs
dying actually because he knew that poetry
could never change anything,
that it took more than a poem
to hold back a bomb or a curse or ugliness;
or look, the maypole children
celebrating youth, and when you celebrate youth
you celebrate death,
the death of the Statue of Liberty
the death of Caruso
the death of great Notre Dame football teams,
the death of kisses by firelight and logs,
now the candle goes down to rancid rain,
beast-time passing of scars through closed windows
PEINE FORTE ET DURE,
but the camels go on,
the snails,
the parched packages,
you and I,
holding to new modern sounds,
finding a way,
as we must go on
and be
not false and flat
like star-spoken words
but in with the rockets,
pulling at their god damned levers,
finding the elegance of ZOOM***;
there will be other Thomases
drunk in space
wondering why a poem
won’t do,
wondering why you have to have
a forest and colza and perch and reverie
and letters from Spain, the spare revenge,
the sparrow-lovers, our frenzied frog-leap
beyond the lycée of breathing…
we are a sub-species, a sub-species of saying and doing,
well-read, in-bred, half-wit constipated
rabbit-roar… o, beg in the roads
wet with perfume and palsy,
oh shit! these soft-hearted sounds—
would that I could drum alive the granite gods!
… that the full haze of iguana,
oh christ, how do you say it
say it say it
drunk and not-drunk
ignorant in the high-seas of death,
a gutter-guy scratching for a comb
in a catalysis
of peaches and tigers and beer…
sure, old friend, I’ve read Eliot and Pound and Cummings,
but have they read me?
I’m as drunk as Dylan, if not as dead
or not as alive
or not as good,
I am drunk as Dylan
I am trimming the fat beerspit night,
Shakespeare’s shroud, the sardonyx of our brotherhood,
the bloody hand, the toad…
music rolled up on a spool like an ear of corn
chewed and gobbled by the blind light of the living.
This 556-word poem distills the 1225-word letter to its essence. Reading the two in tandem allows us to watch the poet at work: deciding which phrases to retain, which to reject—he left a lot of good material on the cutting-room floor—finding the best place for the material, converting rampaging prose to metrical verse, and making small but superior word changes, as when he improves the letter’s terrific line “would that I could dream alive the granite gods!” to “drum alive.” Bukowski’s later poems look like, and often probably were, first drafts with minimal revision. But it should be obvious he really worked at this one.
The targets remain the same: the obscure, arcane, difficult vocabulary used by some modernists (Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes)—“words never heard of by the kilted Cethegi,” as Horace says in the poem Bukowski quotes—their bizarre, often nonsensical imagery (Cummings, Stevens, Dylan Thomas), their high-cultural settings (Yeats, H.D.), and their avoidance of low-cultural subjects, such as “the death of great Notre Dame football teams, / the death of kisses by firelight and logs.”
Bukowski moved the nearly incomprehensible word salad that begins the letter—parodying abstruse modernist diction—to later in the poem, and replaced it with a more comprehensible exordium that roughly translates, “Obscurantist diction is a favorite move7 by modernist poets, and while I’m reluctant to censure vivid language, such contorted diction must go, along with its exotic references. Let’s trim the fat from modernist poetry and use plainer language on more commonplace subjects.” He goes on to say the obscurantist poetry of the “high bulgarians” (read vulgarians: rich, cultured people who act in a vulgar way) will continue to be written and appreciated by some, but that today’s poets have to realize “that poetry / could never change anything,” and that they need to “go on / and be / not false and flat / like the star-spoken words” (Note the shortening of the long lines favored by some modernists, Williams and Cummings excepted.) The penultimate stanza expresses his frustration at being what he considers a sub-species—“well-read, in-bred, half-wit constipated”—and wishes “I could drum alive the granite gods.” He admits he’s just a “gutter-guy scratching for a comb,” but in the final stanza he justifies his new approach to poetry—“trimming the fat” is repeated—and adds swagger to his boast in the letter: “sure, old friend, I’ve read Eliot and Pound and Cummings, / but have they read me?” He admits he may not be as good as the late Dylan Thomas (died 1953), but ends the poem with lines that the Welsh poet might have penned.
“Note, Edict and Cantata” is only one of many “ars poetica” poems Bukowski wrote—“so you want to be a writer?,” “a suborder of naked buds,” “the difference between a bad poet and a good one is luck,” to name a few—but it is the longest and most ambitious, and was written at a crucial time when he was still unknown and developing his style. He may have resented Sheri Martinelli’s denigrating critiques—she accused him of building “ass-hole palaces” in his poems, of wallowing in the mud rather than turning his mind to higher matters—but she forced him to defend his aesthetics. His “old friend” may not have made him a better poet, but she made him a more confident and determined one.
This 556-word poem distills the 1225-word letter to its essence. Reading the two in tandem allows us to watch the poet at work: deciding which phrases to retain, which to reject—he left a lot of good material on the cutting-room floor—finding the best place for the material, converting rampaging prose to metrical verse, and making small but superior word changes, as when he improves the letter’s terrific line “would that I could dream alive the granite gods!” to “drum alive.” Bukowski’s later poems look like, and often probably were, first drafts with minimal revision. But it should be obvious he really worked at this one.
The targets remain the same: the obscure, arcane, difficult vocabulary used by some modernists (Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes)—“words never heard of by the kilted Cethegi,” as Horace says in the poem Bukowski quotes—their bizarre, often nonsensical imagery (Cummings, Stevens, Dylan Thomas), their high-cultural settings (Yeats, H.D.), and their avoidance of low-cultural subjects, such as “the death of great Notre Dame football teams, / the death of kisses by firelight and logs.”
Bukowski moved the nearly incomprehensible word salad that begins the letter—parodying abstruse modernist diction—to later in the poem, and replaced it with a more comprehensible exordium that roughly translates, “Obscurantist diction is a favorite move7 by modernist poets, and while I’m reluctant to censure vivid language, such contorted diction must go, along with its exotic references. Let’s trim the fat from modernist poetry and use plainer language on more commonplace subjects.” He goes on to say the obscurantist poetry of the “high bulgarians” (read vulgarians: rich, cultured people who act in a vulgar way) will continue to be written and appreciated by some, but that today’s poets have to realize “that poetry / could never change anything,” and that they need to “go on / and be / not false and flat / like the star-spoken words” (Note the shortening of the long lines favored by some modernists, Williams and Cummings excepted.) The penultimate stanza expresses his frustration at being what he considers a sub-species—“well-read, in-bred, half-wit constipated”—and wishes “I could drum alive the granite gods.” He admits he’s just a “gutter-guy scratching for a comb,” but in the final stanza he justifies his new approach to poetry—“trimming the fat” is repeated—and adds swagger to his boast in the letter: “sure, old friend, I’ve read Eliot and Pound and Cummings, / but have they read me?” He admits he may not be as good as the late Dylan Thomas (died 1953), but ends the poem with lines that the Welsh poet might have penned.
“Note, Edict and Cantata” is only one of many “ars poetica” poems Bukowski wrote—“so you want to be a writer?,” “a suborder of naked buds,” “the difference between a bad poet and a good one is luck,” to name a few—but it is the longest and most ambitious, and was written at a crucial time when he was still unknown and developing his style. He may have resented Sheri Martinelli’s denigrating critiques—she accused him of building “ass-hole palaces” in his poems, of wallowing in the mud rather than turning his mind to higher matters—but she forced him to defend his aesthetics. His “old friend” may not have made him a better poet, but she made him a more confident and determined one.
Notes
1Dated “Oct. 19 or 20 or wot, 1960,” in Beerspit Night and Cursing, pp. 95–98.
2French: “severe and cruel punishment,” a form of torture.
3 “If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself”—Horace, Ars Poetica (trans. H. R. Fairclough).
4Bukowski’s short story “20 Tanks from Kasseldown” was published in the third issue of Portfolio: An International Review (1946), which also contained contributions from these two writers.
5David R. Wang (1931–1977) a poet and translator whom Martinelli met at St. Elizabeths; he once proposed marriage to her, and later occasionally contributed to her magazine.
6I downloaded this image from the internet on 24 February 2020, but I can’t remember the source. Bukowski scholar Abel Debritto assured me it was never published. I have corrected below a few misspellings that would have been corrected by a publisher had this been accepted (enuichs, lavander, tabacco). The image indicates the two-page letter had been folded twice to fit a standard envelope, so it was obviously mailed to some prospective editor—probably not Martinelli, else it should have been with her other Bukowski letters. (It’s possible, of course, that Bukowski wrote the poem first, then the expanded letter, but that feels counterintuitive.)
7The word “catch-crotch” used in both letter and poem is a wrestling technique.
Steven Moore is the author of the two-volume survey The Novel: An Alternative History, and has written widely on William Gaddis and other modern authors. His new collection of essays, Last Time Around, has just been published by Zerogram Press.
“Note, Edict and Cantata” is copyright © 2026 by the Estate of Charles Bukowski.