Read Screams From the Balcony for Free Online

hate to be a bitch but this kid is getting to be real pain in the ass. He’s got a $150 a week job and he keeps borrowing from me, and then he’s got guts enough to claim he’s paid me back. [* * *] I’m going to have to cut off relations with Sherman. You are the editor, but if he sends in anything on me on congrat. for 1962 OUTSIDER , I wish you wouldn’t run it because congrats from this person are not congrats at all. Enough of this type of bitching which is a little bit swinish…if it were only the borrowing it would not be so bad, but there are other facets of personality here in Sherman that you wouldn’t find in a low-grade polecat. Enough. [* * *]
----
     
    [To Jon Webb]
    [ca. October 1, 1962]
     
    I am enclosing another letter of acceptance which I much prefer to the other one I sent you. Of course, I do not know exactly what you want, and even if I did, I couldn’t do it. This one might be a little too long for you, or the ending rather sudden. I don’t know.
    I am over my menopause or whatever the hell it was. It only lasted a month; maybe it was something else. I don’t mind going mad so long as it is clean. I don’t like the sloppy thing. Yet, you surely know that any of us who work with the word are open to anything, I mean any day we might test the cliff’s edge. This is the nature of remaining as alive as possible: while other men die slowly, we are more apt to blow out the fire with one quick fucking blast-see Van Gogh, see Hemingway, see Chatterton, see the whole thing back down and through. Or if we don’t kill ourselves, the State kills us: see Aristotle, see Lorca. And Villon, they ran him out of Paris just because he did a little thievery between poems. We are in for hard times, Jon, any way you look at it. Even those of us who are not giants. But it is harder for the giants. Their bones are the same as ours but they have strained and made the leap. Then there’s a lot of pap and shit: people who write drivelly little poems while maintaining a time-clock, children, new-car, new-home decency. They’ll make with the poem as long as nothing else is lost. It won’t work. Man can’t divide his impulses and expect to have power down every corridor. Now, the original Beats, as much as they were knocked, had the Idea. But they were flanked and overwhelmed by fakes, guys with nicely clipped beards, lonely-hearts looking for free ass, limelighters, rhyming poets, homosexuals, bums, sightseers—the same thing that killed the Village. Art can’t operate in Crowds. Art does not belong at parties, nor does it belong at Inauguration Speeches. It belongs sitting across from Khrushchev but only if it drinks a beer with the man and talks anything but politics…. and there are so many good beginnings. A strong young talent makes it. Then can’t stand light. This is nothing but the plain old-fashioned fathead and shows that the Artist was not ready in the first place. The days speak; the years tell; the centuries throw out the garbage.
    God oh mighty, another lecture. Is this a sign of old age? Let me tell you that by saying these things to myself, and to you, I protect myself from rot. I’ve seen so much rot. And I may be rotting myself and may not know it. It’s just like when someone else is sleeping with your wife: you are the last to find out, or you never find out. Such is the soul. We are tested when we lace our shoes, or in the manner in which we scratch our back. [* * *]
----
 
    The following is from the letter accepting the “Outsider of the Year” Award that Bukowski sent for publication .
     
     
    [To Jon Webb]
    [ca. October 1, 1962]
     
    [* * *] I have always been pretty much outside it all, and I don’t mean just the art I try to send down through my typewriter, although there it appears I stand outside the gate also. It appears from many rejections that I do not write poetry at all. Or as a dear friend told me the other day: “You do not understand the true meaning of poetry. You