Absence of the Hero by Charles Bukowski, Edited with an introduction by David Calonne

than I ever have in English classes, Art classes, or other writers knocking upon my door.
    Just because men work with the art form, this does not necessarily justify them or purify their gut. For the same reason, priests and dwarfs or legless men and whores are not to be elevated needlessly.
    When I call Norse a “pro” I only mean that he is
    the right man in the right place
    doing it more than properly
    and that’s done so little that it’s enough to make a man cry.
    We all exalt the cauliflower-ear belter. Norse. American bum:
    dante lived here
    & got kicked out
    now he’s worshipped
    like a saint
    Harold Norse: poet:
    kick him in the nuts
    until he leaps wildly
    among the dancing couples
    until he falls
    unconscious
    out of the dream.
    Christ, have you ever been in a hospital as much as I have? as much as Norse has? Laugh with us, the bedpan mewk, the Trojan horse.
    nurses/stealing my pens/&roses/snakebrained/nurses/with wrong
    medicine/they laugh/slamming doors/while fragile old/ladies gasp
    for breath/tubes stuck in their throats
    Perhaps it is a mistake to give you parts of these poems for if this bit is accepted, you might get these poems in total anyhow; I am simply trying to pinpoint for you how well, how simply, how like his honor old Hotshot Jersey Joe gets it across, like Braddock got it across, coming off the relief rolls, to one fat and cocky Max Baer one night many nights ago. You know. My god:
    ah go on
    bury your head
    in the bug-infested blanket
    let the fleas
    bounce in yr crotch
    there are no
    fuhrers of
    enlightenment
    baby
    and he’s right, we take it on the way in or out, sleeping under volcanoes or on park benches, it’s sweet stale shit, this poeming, and it isn’t that poeming is asking for sense or a chance or righteousness or $$$; it isn’t really that at all.
    None of us knows what it is. It’s like awakening in the morning with a boil on your back and it won’t go away. To ask a Patchenesque donation upon the qualities of our Art would be chickenshit—there are too many other good men with bad backs or good Art. And some with worse backs, some with Better Art.
    But there sure as hell aren’t any fuhrers of enlightenment, baby. And sometimes it makes for long evenings, sharp razors, accidents while cleaning shotguns.
    Good writing, without fucking relent, is nothing but g.d. trying to bust through a wall of steel, and we are just not going to make it. But when I see the fade-outs, the flake-outs, the sell-outs, the chicken-livered punks of our age sucking it up, it’s good to see the old hard head—the pro, Jersey Joe, still bumming the European sideroads, missing the ski meets, the Olympic games, the rich sag-tit balloon-head broads, and still hammering hammering.
    the word.
    I am listening to something by Wagner tonight over the radio, which is all right, and my 20-month-old daughter is asleep in the other room—the woman left her here while she went to some kind of Trotskyite meeting. And my crazy drawings are all over the walls and I am not even drunk yet. So I guess I can safely say,
    old Pro Norse
    I think that with 5 or 6 less of you
    I might not have made it this
    long.
    man o man, that’s enough.
    â€”Charles Bukowski
    Los Angeles, 1966

Reviews of Allen Ginsberg/Louis Zukofsky
    Empty Mirror . Early poems by Allen Ginsberg/Totem Corinth Books/17 W. 8th St./New York/N.Y./10011/$1.25
    It is not easy being Allen Ginsberg. Nor is it easy to review him. For in spite of his romantically-avowed homosexualism, we still subconsciously look up and expect top performance. The favorite parlor games of little magazine freaks (and big magazine freaks) is to knock Allen Ginsberg, and Mailer and Albee and Capote and and and—I know. I do it myself. Imagine, for instance, that these early poems had been written by somebody called Harry Wedge . I’d immediately have myself a new culture hero. But since they were written by