Charles Bukowski // "I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. If I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. But literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate… I don’t like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it. Poetry does seem to be getting better, more human…but writing’s one thing, life’s another, we seem to have improved the writing a bit but life (ours and theirs) doesn’t seem to be improving very much. Maybe if we write well enough and live a little better life will improve a bit just out of shame. Maybe the artists haven’t been powerful enough, maybe the politicians, the generals, the judges, the priests…the businessmen have been too strong? I don’t like that thought but when I look at our pale and precious artists, past and present, it does seem possible… What I’m saying is that art hasn’t improved life like it should, maybe because it has been too private?… You write me now that the man in the cell next to yours didn’t like my punctuation the placement of my commas…and also the way I digress in order to say something precisely. Ah, he doesn’t realize the intent which is to loosen up, humanize, relax and still make as real as possible the word on the page... An artist can wander and still maintain essential form. Dostoevsky did it. He usually told 3 or 4 stories on the side while telling the one in the center... Bach taught us how to lay one melody down on top of another and another melody on top of that... Don’t let the form-and-rule boys like that guy in the cell next to you put one over on you. Just hand him a copy of Time or Newsweek and he’ll be happy… You’re doing 19 and 1/2 years I’ve been writing about 40. We all go on with our things. We all go on with our lives. We all write badly at times or live badly at times. We all have bad days and nights. I ought to send the guy in the cell next to yours The Collected Works of Robert Browning for Christmas, that’d give him the form he’s looking for…have I placed the commas here properly, Abbott?"