An audience that continues to grow

[bluebird69]

His relatively minor fame hit, Bukowski spent decades mailing his poems and stories to small press magazines, mimeographed booklet makers and the like. Thousands of pages, hundreds of thousands of words. Usually going out to editors as originals, no carbon copies. He once estimated that he’d lost hundreds of poems this way, the publisher often wouldn’t return the rejected work, and it was gone forever. It forced him to move on, to work deliberately, to type through it again and again and again without sentiment. The poetry business, in my opinion, is a largely inbred, favor-driven, audience-less racket.


Most people never even think about poetry until Terry philippines photo editor Gross drags some poor, expressive soul into her studio for a literary interview. And when The Poet begins to talk, most people switch the channel. Bukowski eventually earned himself a sizeable audience despite this reality.  18 years after his death. An audience that begs, borrows and steals to get at his books. An audience that he — famously — never chased after. An audience that he largely pushed away. How did he do it? How did he go on to sell endless books of poetry and finally lay himself down in the dirt earning an almost six-figure literary income? It’s not a simple answer, but, like so much of his work, he states it simply for us.




The secret is in the line. ~ Charles Bukowski That’s it. He didn’t have a 10-point PR plan. No elaborate marketing structure. No budget. No reader polls. No blog. And there was, of course, no Twitter in 1970. Such is the faith he placed in the power of the written word alone. Sentence by sentence. Line by line. Eventually, John Martin built Black Sparrow Press and offered him $100 a month for life if he’d quit his job and write full time. And much of his early fame came from writing a column in the free weekly newspaper Open City (content marketing anyone?). But Bukowski attributed so much weight to the single line that it eclipsed all else in his philosophy of writing.