Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: 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 (and for the unaverage man too); 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, the clearing up of the language has something to do with it (w. c. williams came along and asked everybody to clear up the language) then I came along. 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 artist haven't been powerful enough, maybe the politicians, the generals, the judges, the priests, the police, the pimps, 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. (people don't like it when I talk this way. Chinaski, get off it, they say, you're not that great. but hell, I'm not talking about being great.) what I'm saying is that art hasn't improved life like it should, maybe because it has been too private? and despite the fact that the old poets and the new poets and myself all seem to have had the same or similar troubles with: women government God love hate penury slavery insomnia transportation weather wives, and so forth. you write me now that the man in the cell next to yours didn't like my punctuation the placement of my commas (especially) 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. the word should be like butter or avocados or steak or hot biscuits, or onion rings or whatever is really needed. it should be almost as if you could pick up the words and eat them. (there is some wise-ass somewhere out there who will say if he ever reads this: "Chinaski, if I want dinner I'll go out and order it!") however 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 (in his novels, that is). Bach taught us how to lay one melody down on top of another and another melody on top of that and Mahler wandered more than anybody I know and I find great meaning in his so-called formlessness. 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. but I'm not defending my work (to you or to him) I'm defending my right to do it in the way that makes me feel best. I always figure if a writer is bored with his work the reader is going to be bored too. and I don't believe in perfection, I believe in keeping the bowels loose so I've got to agree with my critics when they say I write a lot of shit. 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 but I need the money for the track, Santa Anita is opening on the 26th, so give him a copy of Newsweek (the dead have no future, no past, no present, they just worry about commas) and have I placed the commas here properly, Abbott?           ,         , , ,       , , , , ,     , , , , , , ,   , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,         , , ,         , , ,