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

Ginsberg and introduced by W.C. Williams, my typewriter teeth are already itching for the bite. What?
    Williams works around in the short foreword and I do not quite pick it up. It is a kind of a jogging through of his poetic formula of what good poetics should be and Ginsberg is his boy, “this young Jewish boy, already not so young any more.” There is some talk of Dante, of G. Chaucer. Williams says that the poet must speak to the crowd in their own language yet he must disguise his lines so that they will not offend. “With this, if it be possible, the hidden sweetness of the poem may alone survive and one day rouse a sleeping world.” Of course, since 1952, since this foreword was written, we have realized that no “hidden sweetness” is necessary. If Williams meant presentation (style) or humor or inventive distractions to jack-off boredom, then I will go along with him. It is possible that this is what he did mean.
    The poems themselves are simple, clear, very good poems—not yet diseased with the Whitmanesque prophet rantings of the later Ginsberg.
    I feel as if I am at a dead
    end and so I am finished.
    All spiritual facts I realize
    are true but I never escape
    the feeling of being closed in
    and the sordidness of self,
    the futility of all that I
    have seen and done and said.
    Maybe if I continued things
    would please me more but now
    I have no hope and I am tired.
    There are some borrowed and overused phrases here: “feeling of being closed in,” “sordidness of self,” but the last 3 lines are honest enough to perhaps save the whole poem.
    â€œ. . . What a terrible future. I am twenty-three,” he says further on. And he was right. He had no way of knowing how he would use himself or how America would use him or make him use himself. But here he speaks of something else. Of madness. Of the feeling that his head is severed from his body. He realized it while lying sleepless on a couch.
    In “Psalm I” there is some hint of the biblical line, the Whitmanesque roar-plead and act. The lines still trickle between originality and the pose. In the end, in the last line, originality loses and the pose finishes off the poem: “This gossip is an eccentric document to be lost in a library and rediscovered when the Dove descends.”
    While writing this, I can’t help thinking how easy it is to be a reviewer, as if one (myself) held the candle of truth and was tossing light to the slobs. What horseshit, eh friends? Well, I’ll do what I can, or can’t. My head hurts tonight and I am out of beer and smokes and am too lazy to make coffee. Allen, you’re probably going to catch hell.
    Yes, “C é zanne’s Ports” is a bad poem.
    In the foreground we see time and life
    swept in a race
    I am afraid that the sweetness is not too well-hidden. It gets sweet enough for toothache later on. It doesn’t help me understand C é zanne nor “Heaven and Eternity” either. Ginsberg is a better writer than this. And C é zanne was a better painter. They should have met over a bottle of wine instead of in this fashion.
    When I sit before a paper
    writing my mind turns
    in a kind of feminine
    madness of chatter;
    These are what I like to call perfect lines, for lack of anything else to say. I mean perfect lines to me as to content and presentation. Ginsberg lays it in your lap and there it is, as real as a kitten. Or a lion. You know what I mean.
    â€œFyodor” is a good poem not so much as a force but because I guess we all felt that way about Dostoyevsky, so it’s charming to hear it, good to hear it, but still being somewhat snappish we wish it were better written. But let us remember that Ginsberg was young here. I wonder how Allen looked when he was young? Have you ever wondered that? All we have now is this bearded half-monk, kind of lighted with bedroom infractions and stinking of nightmares of India and Cuba and