My Correspondence With Charles Bukowski
by Rich Wilkes
In the summer of 1991 I was trying to get in with an underground ‘zine in Los Angeles called HALF-TRUTH (“Only Half the Lies of Other Magazines!”). The ‘zine was run by a cool group of older punkers (real punks from real punk bands dating back to the late ‘70s L.A. scene.) They had published a couple silly articles of mine, nothing too impressive, but I really wanted to impress them. So one day, out of the blue, I proposed to land an interview with Charles Bukowski. Half-Truth editor Jeff Hughart, knowing I was a fearless idiot and that this was a fool’s errand, called my bluff. So I wrote a letter to Black Sparrow Press (Buk’s publisher at the time) and asked for a thru-the-mail exchange with Buk. To spice up the deal, I also asked for a mail order catalogue so I could buy more of their books (super subtle, I know). They sent me back a catalogue and then this:
The poem was really cool. Unpublished, I assumed (at least at the time.) Something they had released exclusively for the 1991 San Francisco Bay Area Book Festival. They said they would forward my request to Bukowski and that they couldn’t promise anything. I figured that would be the last I ever heard about it. Then, a few weeks later, the following letter appeared in my mailbox:
This letter was even better! He was sharing personal details on aging and the writing process, and adding more cartoons (including a bird, a sun and a wine bottle)! A couple months later I sent him the issue where we published his rejection letter. Included in that issue was a comic I wrote about what happened one night at a bar. I figured this would be the end of it, but then this arrived:
Holy shit! He read my bar comic and liked it! And what’s this…? He apologized? He felt bad enough that we didn't get the interview that he submitted a few poems to make us feel better. Two unpublished, unsolicited original poems by Charles Bukowski! Unseen since 1991, here they are:
The first poem, THE MAIL, showed how fortunate I had been to get a response from Bukowski in the first place. It was dumb luck that my letter hadn’t wound up in his trash with all the others! But this wasn’t the end of my history with Bukowski. I had no way of knowing it, but this back and forth would go on for another year and a half, culminating in over 40 pages of raw Bukowski: letters, poems, cartoons, diary entries, book chapters, self-portraits… I even got him to do CD reviews of the RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS and NOFX!
To this day, I STILL can’t believe he spent the time stuffing envelopes and licking stamps to send me this stuff (or that he considered these “submissions,” like anyone in the ‘zine world wouldn’t jump at the chance to publish anything he touched.) Right now I’m still tripping because I just realized that after calling himself a dog, he drew his classic friggin’ dog cartoon at the bottom and named him “BUK.”
And it only gets better from here...
Thanks for reading!
Copyright 2018 by Rich Wilkes
NOTE: the above material was UNPUBLISHED at the time I got it and put it in Half-Truth Magazine (1991). Since then it may have appeared elsewhere (or in different forms,) but I have no idea...