It all started with a single, furious letter.
People misinterpret this. They think it means laziness. But read the letter to John Martin. “Don’t try” doesn’t mean sit on the couch. It means stop forcing the fake version. Stop writing for the tea party crowd. Just live. Feel the air and the light and the time and the space. And if you do that honestly, the art will find you. charles bukowski letter to john martin
Martin was a young, idealistic publisher who had just started a tiny press called Black Sparrow . He had read a few of Bukowski’s stories and was obsessed. Martin didn’t just want to publish Bukowski’s next poem; he wanted to rescue Bukowski from the postal service entirely. He offered him a deal that no publisher had ever dared to offer: $100 a month for life . In exchange, Bukowski would quit the Post Office and write full-time. It all started with a single, furious letter
If you know Charles Bukowski, you know the myth: the dirty old man of American letters, the drunken poet laureate of Skid Row, a man who claimed he wrote only to survive. But behind that myth is a business partnership so strange, so volatile, and so successful that it changed the course of 20th-century literature. But read the letter to John Martin
Without John Martin, Bukowski might have died an unknown alcoholic civil servant. Without Bukowski, John Martin would have run just another small poetry press.
That’s a fair trade. What’s your favorite Bukowski letter or poem? Let me know in the comments.