Absence of the Hero by Charles Bukowski, Edited with an introduction by David Calonne Read Free Book Online Page A

s-midi d’un Faune , slug them with Beethoven’s 5th, and then send them home happy with some Water Music by good old Handel.
    And now that I’ve buried Poetry Chi , let’s move on. Another particular bone in the poetic throat is the work of Robert Creeley. I have been told by professors of English (those with “Dr.” appended to their names) that Robert Creeley is the miraculous confessor of all of our talents. Me, I have tried Creeley again and again. And it was always much like falling asleep at the beach the time I tried to read Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus . Try this for your insomnia.
    But back to R.C. Usually as I return the books to the good professors with some such acidulous remark as: “It appears very thin. Nothing here.” Or: “What the hell are they trying to sell me?” I would always get the tender kindly smile through the beard, the hand-on-shoulder bit: “Oh, come now, he’s not that bad!” Which all infers that they understand, they understand something which such a crude one as I does not. (The niceties, you know, the pure unadulterated phrasing, etc., etc.) But the bearded Dr.’s in Creeley-shadows are good souls after all: they will forgive everything but their own convictions.
    And then too—I might be a bitter old man because I somehow get the feeling that they are afraid of Creeley. Why this should be, I do not know; but perhaps it is because I am closer to washing dishes than I am to teaching in any University.
    Creeley is just one of the horrors and outcroppings of the poetry -political powerhouses: “The School.” But The Age of the Bomb has taught us more than the mushroom; it has taught us not to swallow pap. “School” is out. The days of schools are over. Thank God, or whoever is up there. It is kind of intensifying in a banal sort of way to think back to the good old days when the “Imagists” drew up their manifesto with blood-stained fingers. But most schools are invented by the critics, or by photographers from Life magazine. Or by stodgy old men teaching English in Midwestern Universities while being driven mad by the knees and thighs of 19-year-old girls who do not pull their skirts down because they’d like to “make” a B in English; and, of course, the talk about Allen Tate, Dr. Williams, Wallace Stevens, Y. Winters, and John the Crow bores them.
    The state of American poetry? U.S. poetry? Well, I’ve named you 2 Canadians and a Frenchman as good workmen. . . . But maybe somewhere on the farm there’s a boy working over a calf who might later do it for us with a hot typewriter. Right now, U.S.-wise, there’s about as much guts showing as at a tea for the Retired Ladies of the Auxiliary to Chase Phantoms out of the Closets of Dog Catchers. Whatever that means. Ah, right now a beer and a dose of salts. Chicago, where’s your Sandburg? The brave teeth and big hand of Mencken? Sandburg, where’s your banjo? Christ, christ, we need some music!

If I Could Only Be Asleep
    We are in bed. I am reading the racing charts and she is reading Russian Icons from the 12th to the 15th Century . She turns a page.
    â€”See the Saint?
    No.
    â€”See him?
    Yes.
    â€”If I could only be asleep.
    What?
    â€”Everything would be all right.
    Why?
    â€”I see pretty pictures. Don’t you see pretty pictures when you dream?
    No.
    â€”The Ascensions . . . look, who went into Heaven?
    Christ, I don’t know.
    â€”What does the door mission of the Virgin mean?
    I don’t know.
    â€”Ooh . . . isn’t she pretty ? You don’t like her?
    No.
    â€”You don’t like her because she can see into your soul.
    That’s enough. Sometimes I think religion is a giant Sadism.
    â€”See that?
    Yes, it’s a guy with a hole in his chest and another guy in the hole.
    â€” That’s the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ is represented by a