To good writing.

Many of you will remember
that Jewel got a publishing contract
for her book of poems. She has
one name, like Madonna, or Cher.
Superman. Batman. Oprah.
Actually, Oprah has an initial. O.

I have a No Oprah logo on the cover of
my pamphlet. Show a No Oprah logo
to a New York publisher and they quail before it,
like a vampire before the cross, or a clove of garlic.
Unclean. I bell myself, like a leper. I wear the stigma
of self-publication like a badge of honor. No fat chicks.
I am lean as whipcord. Raw as a lighter knot. Apropos
of tool-use among hominids only, Brenda's daddy said
he'd seen a bear pick up a lighter knot and use if as a weapon.
From lightwood. Light means heavy. Gravid. Full of sap.
I'm a fat tub of shit who protests too much.

I am invited to read
at The Gallery Above, and write
a pamphlet of poems for the occasion.
No Oprah. It complements the pamphlet Yawp,
which I will hand out at the Howl protest at
Columbia University two days later. I will fly up,
spend the night, fly back. I'm on a tight budget.
My expenses are being paid by me, and I don't expect
to break even, much less make a profit. I'm in it for
the glory. What Drouillard, the signtalker for Lewis & Clark
called lugwah. From la gloire.

Q: What do you have against Oprah? Or Jewel?

A: What did Bukowski have against Mickey Mouse. Or Walt Disney.

Q: He was a realist?

A: A magical realist. Yes.

He believed people should live in the real world.

Or he himself should.

He should engage reality through poetry, and novels. Not escape it. By going to movies and watching television.

He should communicate his vision by writing in the vernacular.

Q: Is that what you mean by calling yourself a vernacular writer?

A: Partly. I write in the vernacular.

Vernacular means of native-born slaves.

A slave is an ambassador in bonds, who speaks boldly, as one ought to speak.

To his master.

Bukowski did that. In Post Office, and Factotum.

I do that in Underground Writer Makes Good: The Last Six Months of My LDA Grant.

Last ditch attempt.

A man must not just get at, but witness to, the truth.

I do that by publishing.

My self-published pamphlets, and my web page, are testimony.

Q: At your web page, you give your enemies a sword.

All a company has to do is type your name in a search engine and they get a hit on what you think of corporations, work, hirelings, apparatchiks.

It isn't favorable to them.

A: I give the Mall Builder culture an enema. Enema vérité. What you see on the end of the fork when you really look.

I give it to them in the vernacular.

Here, Julius--hold this.

Freedom of the press belongs to the man
who owns one, A. J. Liebling said.
I disintermediated. The Daily Bulletin
is not a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation.
I intend to make a profit, I just haven't,
in 30 years, and never will. Henry Miller said,
it's no insuperable burden to pay the reader
to read your work. Those two quotes comprise
my business plan. Along with there's no such thing
as a free lunch and who pays the piper calls the tune.

Emerson said the first thing we ask, when we meet
someone new, is, "How does that man earn
a blameless livelihood, without dishonest customs?"
I ask that of a writer. What did he do to get the money
to live on while he wrote his book. As Rimbaud said,

To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast must I adore?
What holy image is attacked: what hearts shall I break?
What lie must I maintain? In what blood tread?

I think this particularly applies to university professors.
Just because they're simpering Byzantines doesn't mean
they won't eat your lunch in secret, behind closed doors.
Tear the doors loose from the doorjambs, Whitman said.

Q: In a tribute to Allen Ginsberg's Howl, you quote Walt Whitman. In the first two lines, without attribution.

I saw the best minds of my generation,
hankering, gross, mystical, nude,

You mix them up. Conflate the two.

A: Bukowski tried to wrest poetry from academia, to write poems people at the track might read. Co-workers, waitresses. Strippers, bartenders.

I think he succeeded.

Just as Whitman and Allen Ginsberg did.

I'd call Bukowski a success.

Q: Have you succeeded?

A: I'm getting the word right on the page, and getting it out to my coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult.

Q: Do you make a living at it?

A: I'm doing it. I make a living however I have to.

Q: You're running out of money. What are you going to do when your LDA grant runs out?

A: Go back to work.

Q: Where? You're too old for the factories.

You gave your enemies a sword.

Writing about George Bush fucking a pretzel in an AEA incident. Getting a contusion on his cheek.

Autoerotic asphyxiation.

A: I'll find something.

When John Martin got down to $500, the very next week more money came in than went out.

Q: You've put your grant year to good use.

A: Yes. I wrote 18 books, and posted them at The Daily Bulletin.

I read from work in progress, I attended crafts shows and street fairs, I was a presenter at a writers conference, I edited an anthology on underground writing. A book of poems and a novel are under consideration.

Q: Did you make any money?

A: I was on a grant. I gave myself a grant. I took a year of my retirement. Like Travis McGee, salvage consultant. I fell back and regrouped. I got out of the rat race. Now it's time to go back.

Q: Are you afraid? Discouraged? Anxious?

A: Read the books and see.

Think positive.
Look at my upcoming trip
to New York as an opportunity.
There is an underground and I am of it.
It is opposed to the activities of
the mainstream--the backroom deals,
the office politics, the endless quarts of beer.
The dressing for success, the look good on your record.
The ticketpuncher ethos.
I'm more pure than that.
They won't give me a shot at
the title. I'm like some club fighter,
recapping tires for a living, fighting
when I can, half-assed and piecemeal,
one hand tied behind my back. No training camp.
The thoroughbreds, the hothouse flowers, the hirelings.
Let's get it on here, gentlemens.

John Martin says,
paraphrasing Ezra Pound,
that there are innovators,
masters, who flesh out the paradigm,
and imitators, who churn out formula.
These last are who win the grants and prizes,
the teaching jobs and writer-in-residence positions,
the stays at arts colonies, and who dedicate their lives
to stamping out the next innovator, by calling him
an amateur, who doesn't know his craft. An Alibi Ike
and a whiner if he writes about the writing game.
Corpo apparatchiks. The members of the Soviet Writers Union
who expelled Solzhenitsyn. The East German writers who
informed on each other to the secret police, to keep their dachas
and their chit books at the nomenklatura store. Their special privileges.