Are There Any Grammarians?
A short account of Charles Bukowski’s thought on style and structure of the poetic establishment.
Bukowski wrote to Anthony Linick at Nomad Magazine on April 2nd 1959 suggesting that a sequence of words in his short Manifesto essay should be edited. “Or should it? Are there any grammarians on Nomad?” he asked.
In Manifesto: A Call For Our Own Critics, Bukowski railed against the academic establishment and their poetic dicta, and lamented the isolation of he and his fellow unwashed pool hall loiterers.
He was considered part of the so-called beat generation literary movement of the 1950s which included Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. But I’m not certain Bukowski would have been comfortable placed in a clique that he didn’t choose himself. Nonetheless, Nomad sought to publish these writers and Bukowski fit the bill.
Earlier, in 1954, Bukowski wrote that Charles Shattuck at Ascent thought he’d never find a publisher for his work, but perhaps “public taste will catch up with you” Shattuck said.
It inevitably did.
How much conviction does one need to keep going back to the well even though there’s no water? Aside from seven or eight years of drinking heavily, writing very little, selling his typewriter for…
