Abel Debritto (Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground) pored over 2,000 pages of poet Charles Bukowski's highly opinionated letters in order to assemble On Writing. Bukowski was a prolific letter writer (doodles and all), with many notably wry missives accompanying submissions and many others regarding those submissions after they were rejected. This admirable and revealing collection begins in 1945 with a letter he wrote regarding his rejections by Story magazine and asking if Story needs readers--"I can't find a job anywhere."
He wrote as much as he drank (beer mostly). His writing philosophy was to "stay loose, work wild and easy and fail any way you want to." In a letter to Henry Miller, Bukowski wrote: "I write a lot of stuff drunk... and the next morning I am too sick to read it." The letters show that he craved acceptance and publication--along with ink and a good woman. When "women who have read my poetry knock on my door... I ask them in and pour them a drink." He disdained university poets ("their writing is 4 flat tires and no spare") and considered himself an "isolationist and an enigma."
Though in 1963, he said the poet Robert Creeley couldn't write--"I have no doubt he thinks the same of me"--by 1973, he'd changed his mind: "I no longer hate Creeley... he has put his energy and his life into [writing]." As had Bukowski, in his many, small Los Angeles apartments; the craft meant everything to him. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher