Bukowski: Creation is Our Gift - Poetic Outlaws

I can not tell you how much the careful boys rip me naked with their planned and worked-over creations. Creation is our gift and we are ill with it. It has sloshed about my bones and awakened me to stare at 5 a.m. walls. — Bukowski We all know Charles Bukowski’s writings from his numerous poems, short stories, and a handful of novels. But some of his most fervid and lively prose was in the letters he sent off to magazine editors who refused to accept his poems. They are gut-busting, at times absurd, and other times philosophically clever. Bukowski was one writer who never held back on the various issues concerning society, art, and the creative act. His most passionate writings were about writing. ”Great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. If you read this after I am dead it means I made it.” Below is a letter he fired off in 1961 to an editor wh

I can not tell you how much the careful boys rip me naked with their planned and worked-over creations. Creation is our gift and we are ill with it. It has sloshed about my bones and awakened me to stare at 5 a.m. walls. — Bukowski We all know Charles Bukowski’s writings from his numerous poems, short stories, and a handful of novels. But some of his most fervid and lively prose was in the letters he sent off to magazine editors who refused to accept his poems. They are gut-busting, at times absurd, and other times philosophically clever. Bukowski was one writer who never held back on the vari