Charles Bukowski // "The young poets send their works to me, usually 3 or 4 very short poems. Some are fairly succinct, but they all lack the texture of madness and gamble, the inventiveness of the wild and trapped. There is a comfort there which disconcerts. Then there is the work of the street poets. Being on the skids, they should have some life advantages, they should not be debilitated by pretense. But they are full of it. Most of their output is about how they are not recognized, that the game is fixed, that they are truly the great ones and they go on about that, while writing little of anything else. Each week one or two little packets arrive from either the street poets or the comfortable poets. Kindness does not work with either type. Any response to their work begets more work plus their long letters expounding against the fates as if nobody but themselves ever had to deal with them. And if you fail to respond to that, in most cases, there will be follow-up letters which rail against your inhumanity: you too are against them, and, fuck you, buddy, you’ve lost it, you never had it, fuck you! I am not an editor. I never mailed my work to anybody but an editor. I never read my work to wives or girlfriends. These poets believe it’s all politics, an in-game, that some word from you will enable them to become renowned and famous. And that’s what they want. All that. And only that. The packets of poems keep arriving. If I were an editor I’d have to reject all of them. But I’m not. I write poems too. And when some of them come back and I reread them I usually feel that they should have come back. What you do is dig out and in, beat that keyboard so it yells and sings and laughs so well that the fix gets unfixed, that the god damned miracle arrives struck across the paper as you get up and walk across the room, your head buzzing, your guts wanting to fly through the ceiling. It’s the best fight, the last fight, the only one."