o_190rdjfm016nc2151bib7h517kha.pdf

Jeffers is my God
Sitting here
Typing
At a friend’s house
I find a black book by the typer:
Jeffers’: Be Angry at the Sun.
I think of Jeffers often,
Of his rocks and his hawks and his
Isolation.
Jeffers was a real loner.
Yes, he had to write.
I try to think of loners who don’t break out
At all
In any fashion,
And I think, no, that’s not strong,
Somehow, that’s dead.
Jeffers was alive and a loner and
He made his statements.
His rocks and his hawks and his isolation
Counted.
He wrote on lonely blood
A man trapped in a corner
But what a corner
Fighting down to the last mark.
“I’ve built my rock,” he sent the message to
The lovely girl who came to his door,
“you go build yours,”
This was the same girl who had screwed Ezra,
And she wrote me that Jeffers sent her away like that,
BE ANGRY AT THE SUN,
Jeffers was a rock who was not dead,
His book sits to my left now as I type,
I think of all of his people crashing down
Hanging themselves, shooting themselves,
Taking poisons...
Locked away against an unbearable humanity,
Jeffers was like his people:
He demanded perfection and beauty
And it was not there
In human form, he found it in non-human
Forms, I’ve run out of non-human forms,
I’m angry at Jeffers. No,
I’m not, and if the girl comes to my door
I’ll send her away too, after all,
Who wants to follow old
Ez?
Talk about hitting the nail on the head! One
of the many splendours of Charles Bukowski is his
ability to tell it like it is, and this marvellous poem
really does the job beautifully. Name-checking Jeffers
volume, Be Angry At the Sun (Random House, 1941),
Bukowski does what he does best, almost effortlessly,
writing poetry that could be taken as a homage to his
revered ‘god’. He faces Jeffers’ apocalypse head-on,
one loner to another. Yet Bukowski recognises the
loners that ‘don’t break out at all, in any fashion’, the
same kind of people he’d known for years in the bluecollar
world of rough jobs and tough breaks. And he’s
scared and angry at that world, and just glad to be out
of it, because he knew all along that that world meant
death, suicide or madness.
And these were themes that Bukowski knew
well and which he saw and responded to in the older
poets work. He seems to pinpoint Jeffers’ main
imagery, the rocks and the hawks, and indeed the
sheer isolation of living in such austerity, that Buk
could recognise himself there very easily while living a
very different life. For at the time he wrote the above
poem Buk was becoming famous and gaining a cult
following on the reading circuit, he would never
forget where he was from, nor the factory floors he’d
had to shuffle across through seemingly endless, backbreaking
years. And it is really from these years of
working the 9 – 5 jobs that Bukowski developed as a
poet; the poet as outsider. And it is from the mindnumbing,
day-in, day-out; grind of the working
world; of the relief through alcohol and sex and
writing, that Buk came across that kindred something
in Robinson Jeffers.
Then Sheri Martinelli crops up again in the
poem; ‘the same girl who had screwed Ezra’. As she
explains in a letter to Bukowski from December 28 th ,
1960, “Jeffers is in the bowels of life & so on but I’ll
go to him again”. There is a certain ambiguity here,
yet its plain Jeffers wasn’t too impressed with Sheri,
for whatever reason. Probably because she popped up
with Pound in tow, and the two American originals
appraised each other through gritted eyeballs.
From the previously quoted poem from 1992,
Bukowski’s Jeffers, he informs us about his hero:
“he would never be a popular
Creator: people need to be
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