So You Want to Be a Writer?

"so you want to be a writer?” was published in sifting through the madness for the Word, the line, the way (Ecco, 2003). One of the many posthumous volumes of Charles Bukowski’s work, this collection focuses on poems Bukowski wrote near the end of his life. Throughout his career, Bukowski deliberately distanced himself from literary movements and communities. Nonetheless, the belief that writing is a rare gift links Bukowski to a plethora of poets who championed the special abilities of the true writer and condemned the subpar traits of false writers.

The 17th century English poet John Milton thought there was a short supply of good poets and an overabundance of bad writers. In his introduction to the 1674 version of Paradise Lost, Milton slams "famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom.” The religious allusions in Bukowski's poem were explicit with Milton. In Paradise Lost, Milton can translate the word of god for humans due to his peerless poetic gifts. Decades later, English poet Alexander Pope portrayed writers as witless and foolish in his poem The Dunciad (1728). In the following century, the French poet Charles Baudelaire portrayed the true poet as a battered product of a whimsical God in his poem "Benediction” (The Flowers of Evil, 1857).

Bukowski often finds himself connected to the Beat poets. A group of American writers who gained prominence in the mid-20th century, the Beats (or Beatniks) thought writing should come from a personal place. Notable Beats like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac rejected literary and societal conventions and composed works that regularly focused on their experiences with drugs, sex, alcohol, and the underbelly of America. Bukowski spoke ill of the Beats. He disliked their social and political activism. At the same time, Bukowski’s poem—and overall output—have much in common with the Beatnik aesthetic. Both embrace an instinctual approach to poetry. The long, breakneck lines in Ginsberg’s poem "Howl” (1956) and the bulging paragraphs in many of Kerouac’s autobiographical novels reflect Bukowski’s notion that writing should "come bursting out” (Line 1).