Yesterday I said that Screams From The Balcony was a book of Bukowski’s poems. It’s not. It’s a book of letters. Never mind. I thought I ought to set the record straight.

Sartre wrote novels like Nausea in order to preach philosophy. Literature was a pedagogical tool for him. Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz, et al, saw literature as a way of going where philosophy couldn’t follow. Whether this is right or wrong, at least they didn’t reduce literature to an instrument, a tool for extraneous purposes. We might get social or philosophical insights from creative writing but we are frequently doing it a disservice if we try to determine some argument it is presenting.

I think that creative writing and mysticism have this in common: they both stand in the same relation to philosophy, they both aim to fill a lacuna. Moses de Leon, the purported writer of the Zohar should occupy a similar place in literary history to the one he occupies in the cabala. The Zohar did something different from all previous pseudepigraphic writings in the mystical tradition, something very modern: it revelled in fictional artifice and in the play of literary forms. Here creative writing and mysticism were inseparable.

In the first volume of his Diary, Gombrowicz included an essay called ‘Against Poets’. Perhaps you feel as he does. He writes of the still venerated ‘cult of Poetry and Poets’, ‘the only deity which we are not ashamed to worship with great pomp, deep bows, and inflated voice.’ He attacks them with the same anger that ‘all errors of style, all distortion, all flights from reality arouse in us… almost no one likes poems and … the world of verse is a fiction and a falsehood.’

This is pretty much true. Poetry in general is an acquired taste, like Wagner and caviar. Sports radio has taken to encouraging verses about football that are in the style of Banjo Paterson. They’re pretty simple rhyming verses. The television-watching masses can understand them. They give them a laugh while they’re waiting for the game to start. The anachronistic rhyming stuff seems to have a largely propagandist purpose. The Beats, on the other hand, well, their verses are for beatniks on smack and strong coffee. It goes with Miles Davis (or perhaps it should be free jazz – who knows?).

Bukowski is interesting because ordinary people who don’t like poetry don’t mind reading his verses. On the other hand, in his correspondence he talks of one publisher who didn’t like it as poetry for precisely this reason. To one publisher who wouldn’t publish his verses he wrote, ‘it has always been curious to me that my writing has been attacked for portraying others as I have seen them, but my writing has never been criticized when I ended up as the jacknape. This could be art, they say, he is calling himself a fucking fool. They like that, it takes the heat off of their frightened asses.’ To Jon Webb, one of his first publishers, he wrote, ‘It appears from many rejections that I do not write poetry at all. Or as a dear friend told me the other day: "You do not understand the true meaning of poetry. You are not lyrical. You do not sing! You write bar talk. The type of thing you write I can hear in a bar on any day."’ That’s the difference between Bukowski’s poetry and the stuff Gombrowicz is criticising – people will read the verses Bukowski writes.

Hegel thought that poetry was the highest form of art. After that thought became prosaic and philosophical. But that isn’t much use if it is only when dusk sets on a way of life that the Owl of Minerva takes to the wing. The nineteenth century abandoned Hegel’s idealism and turned prose into an art-form. The twentieth century is the century in which art became critical. With the novel cast in this critical light, twentieth century literature leapfrogged the nineteenth century in search of that realm touched by poetry, the realm of the hairy parts that are kept out of sight. The Marquis de Sade became the main inspiration. Twentieth century literature became poetic – what else do you call the profuse onomatopoeia of for instance Céline’s books? – but it became poetic in an unprecedented way. The connoisseurs continued to indulge themselves in the old poetic forms while the new poetry took on the voice of the lumpenproletariat. Goodbye metaphor, hallow bar talk. Go back to Bukowski’s poem, ‘History’, which was included a few entries ago and read it with all this in mind.

I’m going to be away until next Thursday and probably I won’t be able to make any contributions to the discussion, so keep the home fires burning. Meanwhile I’ll still be working away at the conversation.