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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 26
Cajoled Not notified of ancient Curses Still true for our Untuned Actuality”. And Bukowski is bang on the money again; that Jeffers is not a poet who spoon-fed his readers is quite correct. The more thought the reader puts into reading, the deeper the rewards. Robinson Jeffers aesthetic universe could be variously described as anything from Gothic to Beat; Gothic because of the obvious blood-red imagery, and Beat due to the fact that Jeffers was an archetypal individualist, at odds with society, and wrote with a certain cosmic exhaustion. He could almost qualify as a hip existentialist, and the overall mood of his verse is down-beat, hermetic yet prophetic. So Bukowski certainly was in tune with Jeffers modern madness in the early 1960s. Turning once more to Bukowski’s “he wrote in lonely blood”, “I think of all his people crashing down Hanging themselves, shooting themselves, Taking poisons... Locked away against an unbearable humanity” Bukowski here describes what could be seen as an almost unbearable nightmare world, harsh and austere in the extreme. Jeffers quest was for some kind of eternal Truth which was often painful, and as he tells us in his poem Cassandra from the volume The Double Axe (Random House, 1948): “Truly men hate the truth, they’d Liefer Meet a tiger on the road. Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying...” And the truth is that human beings cannot accept much truth and usually keep their senses dulled with a provincialism bordering on the inane. Like Robinson Jeffers, Charles Bukowski dared to face the truth head-on, and this brings with it a level of awareness that is almost psychic in its intensity. On a day to day basis, human beings rarely, if ever, contemplate their lives with such stark insight. And that is why we need the poets to remind us of the abyss beneath us, because they are the unofficial legislators of the world. In a thousand years’ time, when capitalism has finally crumbled, and the petty politicians have dried up for good, poetry will still exist in all it’s glory. When Jeffers died on January 20 th , 1962, there was a minimum of fuss; there wasn’t even a funeral or a memorial service. He was cremated, his ashes now with Una’s, buried beneath a yew tree. But Jeffers left more than ashes: his granite-like verse will endure for many, many years to come –as will Bukowski’s. To show us, beneath an already vanishing world, what really went on in those small, haunted places? Bukowski will forever live with stars bursting through his soul, while Jeffers cold appraisal will leave the phonies standing. Bibliography: And all without a safety-net. Jeffers is my God Robinson Jeffers –Poet of California by James Karman (1987) Chronicle Books Robinson Jeffers –A Portrait by Louis Adamic (1929) Kessinger Legacy Reprints Against Oblivion by Ian Hamilton (2002) Penguin Books. Charles Bukowski by Barry Miles (2005) Virgin Books Charles Bukowski – Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes (1998) Rebel Inc. Hank – the Life of Charles Bukowski by Neeli Cherkovski (1991) Random House The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (2001) edited by Tim Hunt, Stanford University Press Beer Spit Night and Cursing –the correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960 – 1967 (2001) edited by Steven Moore, Black Sparrow Press Septuagenarian Stew –stories & poems by Charles Bukowski (1990) Black Sparrow Press Mockingbird Wish Me Luck by Charles Bukowski (1972) Black Sparrow Press 27
Page 1 and 2: Number 73 Summer 2014 £4.50 Lew We
Page 3 and 4: Number 73 Summer 2014 Editor ditor.
Page 5 and 6: fall 1972 I moved from California t
Page 7 and 8: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends Du
Page 9 and 10: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends ra
Page 11 and 12: BILL BURROUGHS IN AMSTERDAM by Eddi
Page 13 and 14: Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam ‘Patt
Page 15 and 16: A Half-American Writer During the p
Page 17 and 18: A Half-American Writer Another impo
Page 19 and 20: CONVERSATIONS with KEN KESEY edited
Page 21 and 22: company alongside Charles Olson, Ro
Page 23 and 24: abstract expressionist painters wer
Page 25: Jeffers is my God interest in it. H
Page 29 and 30: Ginsberg on Kerouac Buddhism, too,
Page 31 and 32: Ginsberg on Kerouac after being in
Page 33 and 34: Ginsberg on Kerouac Inter ntervie v
Page 35 and 36: ----------- It’s Monday morning.
Page 37 and 38: they discover a dead seal and say,
Page 39 and 40: We pick up all our garbage and spli
Page 41 and 42: eaders. Since I was driving taxi, I
Page 43 and 44: Write a Madder Letter if You Can by
Page 45 and 46: Write a Madder Letter if You Can ho
Page 47 and 48: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction by Ed
Page 49 and 50: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction Despi
Page 51 and 52: THE BEAT SCENE REVIEW SECTION Dexte
Page 53 and 54: Damn Fine Letters work but he reall
Page 55 and 56: Jack Kerouac The Haunted Life and O
Page 57 and 58: The Haunted Life talk on porches, l
Page 59 and 60: Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn The Coll
Page 61 and 62: Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn happens
Page 63: Diane di Prima having her long hair

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