"Lisping Egos"

Cynthia recently did an excellent entry in her blog, Sorting the Pieces.    She presented the Charles Bukowski poem, "Poetry Readings."  Bukowski's poem elicited agreement in her readers about the prevalence of stale writing.  Here is a brief sampling of the poem:   

I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.
if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:
a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant's fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke
anything
anything
but
these.  

In my response to Cynthia's entry, I pointed out that I have been as guilty as anyone of producing elaborate yet dry, stuffy writing.   

One of my major bugaboos has always been the desire to be taken seriously.  So when I took my first creative writing class way back in 1981, a 300-level workshop, I set out to write a masterpiece.  And I was sure I'd accomplished this goal when my first story came up for workshop, for my classmates praised me up and down.   

However, after class my teacher asked to speak to me.  Much to my horror, he revealed to me that my classmates had been wrong about my story.  He told me my writing was terrible, that the language was inflated  and that the story lacked heart.   

Indeed, my story would have fit Bukowski's description perfectly, for it was the product of a "lisping ego."  

When I wrote my second story, I  sent my family out of the house and sat looking at my Smith Carona typewriter humming on the Formica tabletop a long time before I began typing.  Five hours later, I felt I'd produced the most dreadful story in the world.  I'd put words on the page without giving any thought to symbolism or grand themes.  My story was too simple to ever be thought of seriously, I thought.  

However, on the day my story was supposed to be workshopped, the teacher, who had seriously burned his foot that very morning, told us he was in a lot of pain would have to dismiss us.    But before we left, he told me he admired my story and looked forward to workshopping it.  I felt my jaw drop and thought he must be mad.   

As it turned out, this second story, while it had its fair share of flaws, was a very good story.   I'd gotten it down in a rush, before I'd had time to think about it too much and ruin it with intellectual gobbledygook.  

As the years went on, I had my ups and downs with writing, mostly downs.  It took me years to crawl out of my dismal hole of self-doubt.   But eventually I came to believe a few things about writing that have carried me forward.  

*  We should write toward simplicity.  

*  If you don't know what your poem, story, memoir, or novel means, you can't expect your reader to know either. 

*  Fearlessness is the furnace of desire, and without fearlessness, writing is cold and dead.  

It would be terrible to think Charles Bukowski would rather experience anything (even an elephant's fart in a circus tent), rather than read something I had written.  I love Bukowski's poems; they continue to teach me about simplicity;  the power of honesty;  fearlessness.  This tough, gristled man eschewed sentimentality in favor of brutal honesty, and I love his work for this very reason.  

Whenever I feel my work is coming from a "lisping ego," I stop what I'm doing.  Writing that comes from my ego lacks guts.   It may be pretty, it may be slick, it may be praised by people who read it.  Indeed, it may even get published. 

But it is dead in all the ways that matter to me and so it is useless to me.  As useless as all the "anything[s]" in Bukowski's poem, "Poetry Readings."