In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for.

Read more

We must learn to reawaken 
and keep ourselves awake, 
not by mechanical aids, 
but by an infinite expectation 
of the dawn, which does not 
forsake us even in our 
soundest sleep. 

I know of no more encouraging fact 
than the unquestionable ability 
of man to elevate his life 
by a conscious 
endeavour. 

It is something to be able to paint 
a particular picture, or to carve a statue, 
and so to make a few objects beautiful; 
but it is far more glorious to carve 
and paint the very atmosphere 
and medium through which we look, 
which morally we can do. 

To affect the quality of the day, 
that is the highest of arts.

Subscribe now

You can find this passage in Thoreau’s Walden Pond.

I also removed the Paywall from my essay posted over the weekend. Check it out below. I appreciate your support; thank you.

You don’t have to be a jaundiced cynic to look around and reach the unfortunate conclusion that the world we inhabit is unraveling at a feverish pace. It’s everywhere we look.

Our institutions, our media, our politics, our universities, our economies, our chronic illnesses, our collapsing fertility rates, our dehumanizing behavior, our relationship with technology, the way we interact with each other, our fractured communities, and the loss of meaning in daily life.

From the minds, bodies, and souls of individuals to the institutions supposedly dedicated to maintaining social order, everything is debased to the core. Every day, we are confronted with a new threat, a new tragedy, a new war, a new scapegoat, and another issue to fight over.

Frithjof Schuon saw it early on when he wrote: The modern world is the only one among civilizations to have created a world in which ugliness and triviality are commonplace and in which they appear shamelessly as the 'serious' and the 'reality.’

The dehumanizing nature of the corporate state, entwined with the technocratic leviathan we live under, has unleashed a cascade of corruption, gimmickry, and senseless lunacy. On top of that, we have rampant inflation, unimaginable debt, insane home prices, and stagnant wages (inflation-adjusted), which have completely paralyzed the pursuit of the so-called American Dream for our youth, who are already burdened with enormous college debt. 

Though I’m viewing this subject through an American lens, many nations in the so-called civilized world are in the same boat. 

The two prior generations locked in unprecedented prosperity for themselves - affordable asset prices, dirt-cheap education, rock-solid lifetime jobs, and generous defined-benefit pensions —while deliberately offloading the crushing bill onto their own children and grandchildren.

And now they preside over their dismantling.

This isn’t about blame. The prior generation merely adapted to a “way of life” imposed on them during a post-war economic boom. We humans, with our optimistic nature, tend to overlook the consequences of continuous growth. The future implications of the policies promoted weren’t fully considered, and the politicians did what they always do — kick the can down the road and hope for the best.

In the words of Nicolás Gómez Dávil: “History buries, without solving, the problems it raises.”

Homeownership, “the primary wealth-building mechanism for the two previous generations,” has become unaffordable for most young people today, and foreclosure rates are on the rise, up 30 percent from just two years ago.

The median age of a homebuyer was 31 in 1981. Today, it is 59. 

The cost of college has increased significantly over time, outpacing general inflation for decades. The outstanding federal student loan balance now stands at $1.661 trillion. 

The younger generations work more hours and earn less (in real terms). They pay more for basic necessities while inheriting an economic and social crisis they did not create. They are byproducts of the “growth at all costs” model that once enriched the older generation and has left them in a state of hopeless bewilderment. 

Young people are acutely aware that their prospects appear dim and unpromising, not to mention the dawn of AI and automation, which will inevitably cause job displacement, along with the tech-driven changes that will further erode a sense of privacy, dignity, and meaningful connection to the world. 

Most Americans, being out-of-touch consumption junkies and dedicated servants of the machine, don’t realize how far things have gone to the wayside. They’ve grown used to their chains, their ignorance, and have grown comfortable in their own mediocrity. But deep down, we all know something is off.

The billionaire investor, Ray Dalio, seems a bit concerned, too:

“The stock market is in a historic bubble. When it melts down, the consequences for what’s left of the middle class will be ugly. Especially with the gigantic levels of debt everywhere. The situation is compounded by the fact that the real estate market is floating on a sea of debt. We’re looking at widespread unemployment and social unrest at home, and war abroad.”

There is nothing good or natural about the way things are. As one writer pointed out, “If this were a truly healthy form of human society, we wouldn’t require constant propaganda and fabricated narratives to be able to sustain it.”

The truth is, folks, we’re living in the final stage of a debt-fueled, multi-generational fiscal Ponzi game. The end of a cycle. The “final act of the mad, incendiary project of a totally wired world.” And in the process of a “new world” being born, there will be pain and immense suffering in the form of widespread economic turmoil that will devolve into senseless wars and violent upheavals.

We stand on the precipice of a significant transformation of the social order, not to mention the monumental disruption AI will wreak on our livelihoods and the dubious aims of the technocratic elite who have us all locked in an algorithmic Bastille. 

If the technological oligarchy has its way, the ultimate aim is to “merge consciousness with AI and conquer the cosmos.” What can go wrong?

In this feverish age of “progress,” where the frenetic pace of technology is accelerating faster than our ability to adapt, an age in which the vast majority of our desires are manufactured by scheming technocrats, and distraction, social breakdown, alienation, and depression are the new norms, the very core of our humanity is at stake.

The United States federal debt is rapidly approaching 40 trillion dollars. The annual interest on this inconceivable debt exceeds 1 trillion dollars, and it will get worse despite politicians’ empty promises. The immense rise in household debt is also concerning, considering the concurrent decline in household savings.

There’s no rosy scenario in which this ends well. 

It’s easy to take the lazy way out by blaming “the other party” and cursing the current stooge in office, as if that were the heart of the problem. However, our sickness runs deeper than the puppet show of politics, which is merely one of many symptoms of a much more profound illness. 

As the remarkable writer Charles Bowden once asked:

“Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can affect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness … then what are we to do?”

For over a century now, wise voices have warned of the very predicament we now face—  warnings we chose to ignore. We have always shunned the wisdom of pessimistic thinkers despite the accuracy of their prophetic forecasts.

In his profound little book, The Revolt of the Masses (1930), the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset warned of the “mass man,” whom he saw as comfortably materialistic, hostile to excellence, and incapable of sustaining civilization. He foresaw a democracy of appetite without responsibility.

Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), exposed how consumer culture bred fragile, self-absorbed individuals who’ve become cut off from community and tradition. He argued that this narcissism was a symptom of societal collapse.

The Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila viewed modernity as a slow suicide: “Modern man destroys more when he builds than when he destroys.”

Throughout his novels, poetry, and essays, D.H. Lawrence railed against the mechanization of life and the loss of “blood consciousness,” believing that industrial civilization was cutting humanity off from the primal sources of vitality.

Whether they employed aphorisms, prophecy, poetry, or systematic critique, many of these great thinkers and writers shared a common theme: a society that abandons transcendence, severs ties with community, and harbors a preference for comfort, control, and incessant progress would one day choke on its own excess.

And here we are. 

We all want solutions to the problems perpetuated by the vile social structure we inhabit, but the truth is that we’re drowning in a sea of solutions. Constantly. Most of the problems that plague us today have arisen from “solutions” to other issues. This is what we call “progress.” Rousseau once reminded us: “Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”

Or as the historian William Ophuls pointed out: “Civilizations are trapped in a vicious circle. They must keep solving the problems of complexity, for that is the price of civilized existence, but every solution creates new, ever more difficult problems, which then require new, ever more demanding solutions. Thus complexity breeds more of the same, and each increase in complexity makes it harder to cope, while at the same time escalating the penalty for failure.”

Is it too late to reverse the unraveling? Many wise minds believe so. Perhaps it’s too far gone. “No weapons, no matter how powerful,” writes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower.”

A society dominated by selfishness, hyperactivity, avarice, and a fetish for status, conformity, and material gain hardly has the spiritual stamina or moral resources to reform itself.

As contemporary writer Paul Kingsnorth concluded, “Our culture is not in danger of dying; it’s already dead, and we are in denial. This, now, is the reality we have to wrestle with —and transcend.” 

There’s no use in trying to inject false hope into a dying organism. As William Ophuls concluded, “Civilization is effectively hardwired for self-destruction…and there is very little that we can do…a genuine cure would require a revolution in human thought greater than the one that created the modern world.”

We live today amid the ruins of the values essential to civilization’s survival. We’ve allowed all aspects of culture to become politicized, digitalized, and monetized to the point of disillusionment. Community, critical thinking, and truth-seeking have given way to fashionable ideologies and groupthink.

We’re all trapped in an abstract system that strips us of our vital essence. A system designed to veil the sacredness of the earth. A system designed to reduce living human beings to interchangeable numbers, uniform cogs, and statistical units.

The media sells fear, the job siphons the spirit, the money is becoming worthless, politics has us at each other’s throats, we spend more time in front of screens than contemplating trees, and we’ve completely forgotten who we are as unique humans on this mysterious planet. 

We know more about strangers on the internet than we do about our own blood. We’ve traded our souls for comfort and convenience at a horrifying cost, while letting ourselves be sedated by the most nonsensical distractions rather than face the actualities of the blood and guts of life. And it’s this materialistic, sense-bound thinking that has severed us from the deeper realities our ancestors once knew.

We’ve created a completely artificial world and are becoming sick because of it.  

As Ramon Elani writes: “Modern man is both the most comfortable and—as evidenced by the ever-growing number of medicated children and adults, therapy patients, suicides, and psychopaths -- the most unhappy being that has ever lived.”

In this uncertain era, as the old world dies, we must look beyond the facade presented to us. We must have the courage to face the more profound metaphysical truths we’ve been conditioned to ignore. We must rid ourselves of the reductionist worldview and look at our predicament from a bird’s-eye view rather than be continuously duped and deluded by the shadows on Plato’s wall.

We must refuse to prostitute and degrade ourselves for cheap gain and personal comfort in a system designed to keep us numb and nonchalant behind our social mask. 

We must deliberately exile ourselves, at least spiritually, from a society that has descended into utter madness, a society that has become thoroughly disenchanted, teetering on the brink of self-annihilation, and has devolved into a soulless machine dominated by bureaucratic rigidity and algorithmic manipulation.

We can continuously battle over politics, policies, and partisan worldviews, but it’s all futile until we’re willing to get to the root of the problem. The crisis of our age is that modern humanity has been uprooted; we’ve lost our center and suffer desperately from a spiritual malaise. 

We are a population of restless, anxious, and perpetually unsatisfied people, and the consequences manifest in the mayhem and exploitation we see all around us.

In this age of terminal decline, there’s still a chance for us to live fruitfully if we have the courage and the necessary awakening to restructure our lives away from the rat race of the global machine. We need to localize and live in fidelity to our own land, neighbors, and limits as finite creatures. And we need to participate in work that, in the words of Wendell Berry, connects us “both to Creation and to eternity.”

This isn’t an easy task, I’m well aware, and it might sound utopian (ish) to the well-adjusted, but if the distaste of our profane and materialistic lives has become too much for us to bear, and for many of us —it has, we’ll find a way out of the barbed wire metropolis of modernity. We must. 

The deadening effects of the digital age have brought us to the end of our tether. We must return to the source and pick up the old threads that can awaken parts of the self modern life has put to sleep. We must remember, once again, what it means to be human and regenerate our relationship with the living Earth.

As Gary Snyder reminds us: “Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”

Until we as individuals revive a living sense of the sacred, one rooted in truth, beauty, and cooperation, no revolution can save us. Until our inner world is healed, and the veil is torn from our eyes, the outer world will continue to be a catastrophic horror show with no hope for a better future.

I’ll end with urgent words of Paul Kingsnorth: 

We unmade the world. Now we are going to have to remake it again. 

We Western people: we have to learn how to inhabit again. We have to learn how to live sanely in our lands. How to write poems and walk in the woods and love our neighbours. How to have the time to even notice them. How to take an interest in the parts without detaching them from the whole. How to remember that the Earth is alive and always was, and that no ‘culture’ which forgets that can last, or deserves to.

Subscribe now

Thanks so for reading. Everything I write, research, and curate for this Substack is made possible by readers like you. This page is entirely reader-supported — a labor of love, kept alive by the people who find meaning in it. If you’ve been enjoying the work and aren’t quite ready to subscribe, but still want to support it in some way, you can leave a one-time tip through Buy Me a Coffee — if that’s within your reach.

Buy Me A Coffee

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was an American mythologist, writer, and lecturer who is best known for his groundbreaking work in the field of comparative mythology and the exploration of the human experience through the lens of mythology.

One of Campbell's most influential ideas was the concept of the "hero's journey" or the "monomyth." He proposed that many of the world's myths and stories follow a common pattern, where a hero embarks on an adventure, faces trials and tribulations, and returns transformed. This concept had a profound impact on literature, film, and storytelling.

Star Wars director George Lucas was profoundly influenced by Joseph Campbell’s seminal work The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949).

Below I’d like to share with you all a few of my favorite passages from Campbell’s vast works along with a list of my favorite books. I hope you enjoy it.

"Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people’s myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts — but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. Myth tells you what the experience is."

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all.

As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”

“Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.”

“Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end… The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth—that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.”

“Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity.

Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension.”

“A bit of advice
Given to a young Native American
At the time of his initiation:
As you go the way of life,
You will see a great chasm. Jump.
It is not as wide as you think.”

“We must be willing to get rid of
the life we’ve planned, so as to have
the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed
before the new one can come.
If we fix on the old, we get stuck.
When we hang onto any form,
we are in danger of putrefaction.
Hell is life drying up.” 

Joseph Campbell’s Important Books: A List

1. The Power of Myth

2. The Hero with a Thousand Faces

3. Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation

4. Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

5. A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

6. The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work

7. Myths to Live By: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell

   ---

Subscribe now

Thanks so for reading. Everything I write, research, and curate for this Substack is made possible by readers like you. This page is entirely reader-supported — a labor of love, kept alive by the people who find meaning in it. If you’ve been enjoying the work and aren’t quite ready to subscribe, but still want to support it in some way, you can leave a one-time tip through Buy Me a Coffee — if that’s within your reach.

Buy Me A Coffee

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

Read more

It was in the town of Tucson in Nineteen Eighty-Three
A man named Edward Abbey come a walking up to me
He pulled his cigar from his mouth, said, "I smell lawyers here"
The politician, running-dogs, they crawled away in fear

Ed walked across the desert at least a thousand times
He spoke with javelina, slept 'neath piñon pine
And if he saw a billboard there, he'd chop that bastard down
Said, if a man can't piss in his own front yard, he'd never keep close to town

Singing do-ra-do
Singing do-ra-day
Lord, I wish Edward Abbey were walking round today

Ed had a taste for women, in fact he married quite a few
He said, "I'd fall in love, boys, but I'm only passing through
You know I like 'em all, boys, and some more than the rest
I've tried my hand at monogamy, now I'm off to save the west

Ed died one day at sundown in his Tucson riding shack
They wrapped him in a sleeping bag and drove him way out back
Beneath the wild saguaro, the coyotes chewed his bones
And on a hidden marker, was 'No Comment', carved in stone

Singing do-ra-do
Singing do-ra-day
Yeah, I wish Edward Abbey were walking round today

Now I'm living in the desert, but the town is a-closing in
Those cracker box developments, Ed would call a sin
We stole this land from the Mexican and now we'll sell it back
And they'll live like mortgage prisoners in those goddamn housing tracts

Tell me, who votes for the mountain lion, tell me, who votes for the fox
Who votes for the spotted owl who hides there in the rocks
I wish that Ed would come again with a chainsaw in his hand
And carve all up those housing tracts and take on back the land

Singing do-ra-do
Singing do-ra-day
Yeah, I wish Edward Abbey were walking round today

Subscribe now

You can find Tom Russell’s “The Ballad of Edward Abbey” on his 2004 album “Indians, Cowboys, Horses, Dogs.” You can watch him perform it live here.

If Poetic Outlaws has become a welcome part of your reading life, I hope you’ll consider becoming a PAID subscriber. Your support does more than unlock additional essays, recommendations, and exclusive content—it makes this work possible.

Paid subscriptions give me the time to read more deeply, write more thoughtfully, and continue uncovering the poets, artists, and literary rebels who deserve to be remembered. In a culture that rewards speed, distraction, and nonsense, you’re helping sustain a space devoted to careful reading, beautiful language, and enduring ideas.

If this newsletter has informed, inspired, or simply given you a moment of joy each week, becoming a paid subscriber is one of the most meaningful ways you can help keep Poetic Outlaws thriving.

Thank you all so much.

In the mid 1980’s, one of France’s prominent philosophers, Jean Baudrillard, traveled to America to undertake a road trip across the country. He was especially drawn to the vast open spaces of the West (California, deserts, highways), as well as cities like New York and Los Angeles.

Then he wrote a remarkable book on his observations, simply titled America.

He described driving thousands of miles, immersing himself in the landscapes, freeways, deserts, cities, and everyday American life. To Baudrillard, America was neither a dream nor a reality. It was hyperreality— “a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved.”

He came to see that America lives in a perpetual present of signs, images, and surfaces (TV, advertising, Hollywood, deserts as blank canvases). It has no deep historical “origin” or authenticity to cling to — it is the simulation.

America, he tells us, has realized the utopian ideals of modernity (wealth, speed, verticality, optimism about quantity and statistics). Its “crisis” is that of maintaining an already-achieved utopia, not struggling toward one.

Baudrillard’s America reads like a poetic travelogue mixed with sharp philosophical observations: driving on endless highways, observing billboards, shopping malls, TV culture, deserts, and the “banality” of American consumer life, which he contrasts with Europe’s heavy historical baggage.

The following extended passage perfectly captures the book’s spirit. I hope you enjoy it.

Admittedly, the irony of community is missing here (in America), as is the playfulness of social life. The charm to be found in social graces and in the theatre of social relations outwards into the advertising of life and lifestyles.

This is a society that is endlessly concerned to vindicate itself, perpetually seeking to justify its own existence.

Read more

It’d be hard to find a more book-devouring savage in the music world than the great Tom Waits. Of course, we all know Waits as a gravel-voiced poet of the back alleys and broken-down bars, but he was also a bookworm with an insatiable thirst for the written word.

He’d spent much of his life reading late into the night and into the raw hours of dawn. His girlfriend in an early time in his life once said that: “He’d tell me how inspired he was by some short story or other,” she recalled, “and I think that was the source of his muse.”

Like many other artists, he was inspired by the Beats, especially Kerouac and Burroughs, but his literary “Godfather” was the Los Angeles poet, Charles Bukowski, whom he believed to be one of the greatest American poets. The man “levels me,” he once said.

Below is Waits’ answer to an interview question about meeting his literary Godfather, Charles Bukowski.

Did you meet Bukowski?

Tom Waits:

“A couple of times. It’s like when I met Keith Richards, you try to match them drink for drink. But you’re a novice, you’re a child. You’re drinking with a roaring pirate. Whatever you know about holding your liquor, you’d better let go of it right now.

So I thought I could hang in there, but I wasn’t able to hang in there with either one of them. They’re made out of different stock. They’re like dockworkers. But it was interesting.

I met Bukowski at his house. Barbet Schroeder was a friend of mine, and they tried to get me to be in that movie, Barfly, playing Bukowski. They offered a lot of money, but I just couldn’t do it, plus I didn’t consider myself a good enough actor to do something like that. But Bukowski... I guess everybody when you’re young and you enter the arts you find father figures.

For me it was more profound because I had no father - no operating father - so I found other men that supplied all that for me. I was looking for those guys all the time.”

Below, you can hear Tom Waits reading "Nirvana," one of Bukowski’s more sentimental poems. It’s beautiful. Check it out.

If Poetic Outlaws has become a welcome part of your reading life, I hope you’ll consider becoming a PAID subscriber. Your support does more than unlock additional essays, recommendations, and exclusive content—it makes this work possible.

Paid subscriptions give me the time to read more deeply, write more thoughtfully, and continue uncovering the poets, artists, and literary rebels who deserve to be remembered. In a culture that rewards speed, distraction, and nonsense, you’re helping sustain a space devoted to careful reading, beautiful language, and enduring ideas.

If this newsletter has informed, inspired, or simply given you a moment of joy each week, becoming a paid subscriber is one of the most meaningful ways you can help keep Poetic Outlaws thriving.

Thank you all so much.

Subscribe now

We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—and the World’s Getting Worse (1992) is a provocative, conversational critique of modern psychotherapy by Jungian American psychologist James Hillman and writer Michael Ventura.

In brief, the book argues that after a century of therapy focused on the inner self, people may be more psychologically aware—but society itself has not improved, and may even be deteriorating.

Hillman argues that psychotherapy has become too inward-looking, encouraging people to interpret their problems in terms of personal history, childhood wounds, and private emotions, while ignoring the social, political, and environmental conditions that also shape suffering.

Instead, he calls for a reorientation of psychology toward the “soul of the world”—meaning culture, community, and imagination. He argues that distress is not just inside individuals but also embedded in the world around them.

It’s a provocative yet insightful book that’ll spark a rethinking about the many issues we face today in an era of obvious decline. Below are a few passages from the book that shed light on a culture obsessed with self-analysis that has lost sight of the deeper task: engaging with and healing the world itself.

I hope you enjoy it.

We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse.

Maybe it’s time to look at that. We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go inside to locate the psyche, you examine your feelings and your dreams, they belong to you. Or it’s interrelations, interpsyche, between your psyche and mine.

Read more

I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end.

We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life.

I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them.

You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it.

But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

[…]

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness.

The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.

Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

Subscribe now

You can find this passage in — The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4.

Thanks so for reading. Everything I write, research, and curate for this Substack is made possible by readers like you. This page is entirely reader-supported — a labor of love, kept alive by the people who find meaning in it. If you’ve been enjoying the work and aren’t quite ready to subscribe, but still want to support it in some way, you can leave a one-time tip through Buy Me a Coffee — if that’s within your reach.

Every gesture, every note of encouragement, every quiet reader who lingers here — you’ve helped turn this into something rare and luminous: a small, strange, beautiful corner of the internet. I’m deeply grateful. Thank you for being part of it.

Buy Me A Coffee

Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifesta­tions of that unique part of human sentience, identical in all men, which the individual shares with his Creator.

The suppression of contemplative individuality is nearly complete.

The only immediate historical data that we can know and act on are those fed to our senses through systems of mass communication.

These media are exactly the places where the deepest and most per­sonal sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, suppressed.

At the same time there is a crack in the mass consciousness of America—sudden emergence of insight into a vast national subconscious netherworld filled with nerve gases, universal death bombs, malevolent bureaucracies, secret police systems, drugs that open the door to God, ships leaving Earth, unknown chemical terrors, evil dreams at hand.

Read more

Ketchum, Idaho, July 2nd, 1961.

The 61-year-old Nobel Prize-winning author, Ernest Hemingway, shot himself in the foyer of his home with a double-barreled shotgun while his fourth wife, Mary, was asleep upstairs.

In 1928, Hemingway’s father, a man suffering from severe diabetes, financial difficulties, and depression, also took his own life. Hemingway remarked shortly afterward, "I'll probably go the same way."

Throughout his bold, highly adventurous life, Hemingway endured heavy chronic pain and traumatic brain injuries from surviving two plane crashes in Africa in 1954. Early in his life, during the onset of World War I, poor eyesight prevented him from joining the U.S. Army, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy.

In 1918, he was badly wounded by mortar fire while delivering supplies near the front. Despite his injuries, he reportedly carried another wounded soldier to safety before collapsing himself. He spent months recovering in a hospital, where he fell in love with a nurse whose rejection later influenced his novel A Farewell to Arms.

As a war correspondent, Hemingway repeatedly placed himself in dangerous situations to get the story out. Throughout his life, Hemingway accumulated an extraordinary list of injuries: concussions from accidents, deep cuts from fishing and boating, broken bones, car accidents, boxing injuries, a ruptured kidney, severe burns, and chronic pain from repeated trauma

His body was bruised and battered from a lifetime of battling the forces of the world, which many historians believe might have contributed to his later cognitive decline.

Later in life, he became increasingly paranoid that he was being watched. At the time, some people believed these fears were delusional, though later records showed that the FBI had in fact maintained a file on him because of his activities and contacts in Cuba.

However, the extent to which this surveillance affected his mental health remains debated.

In his final years, Hemingway suffered from profound clinical depression, paranoia, and psychosis. He was treated with electroconvulsive therapy at the Mayo Clinic, which he felt severely damaged his memory and creativity.

His mind became mush, and his body and soul were failing him. The robust health Hemingway was known for was all but gone. He felt he could no longer write. His art was dying. What’s the purpose of life when the one gift you were put on earth to give is no longer there?

So yeah, on this fine summer morning, the 64th anniversary of Hemingway’s death, I’d like to share two poems by Charles Bukowski with you. Bukowski admired only a few writers in his life, Hemingway being one of them. Neither writer was especially interested in glamorous heroes or heavy romanticism. Instead, they found dignity and authenticity in people trying to get through another day.

I hope you enjoy these poems.

Hemingway Never Did This

I read that he lost a suitcase full of manuscripts on a
train and that they never were recovered.
I can't match the agony of this
but the other night I wrote a 3-page poem
upon this computer
and through my lack of diligence and
practice
and by playing around with commands
on the menu
I somehow managed to erase the poem
forever.
believe me, such a thing is difficult to do
even for a novice
but I somehow managed to do
it.

now I don't think this 3-pager was immortal
but there were some crazy wild lines,
now gone forever.
it bothers more than a touch, it's some-
thing like knocking over a good bottle of
wine.

and writing about it hardly makes a good
poem.
still, I thought somehow you'd like to
know?

if not, at least you've read this far
and there could be better work
down the line.

let's hope so, for your sake
and
mine.

The Fighter

Hemingway feels it from the grave
every time the bulls run through the streets of
Pamplona
again
he sits up
the skeleton rattles
the skull wants a drink
the eyeholes want sunlight
the young bulls are beautiful, 
Ernest
and you were
too
no matter 
what they say
now.

If Poetic Outlaws has become a welcome part of your reading life, I hope you'll consider becoming a PAID subscriber. Your support does more than unlock additional essays, recommendations, and exclusive content—it makes this work possible.

Paid subscriptions give me the time to read more deeply, write more thoughtfully, and continue uncovering the poets, artists, and literary rebels who deserve to be remembered. In a culture that rewards speed, distraction, and nonsense, you're helping sustain a space devoted to careful reading, beautiful language, and enduring ideas.

If this newsletter has informed, inspired, or simply given you a moment of joy each week, becoming a paid subscriber is one of the most meaningful ways you can help keep Poetic Outlaws thriving.

Thank you all so much.

Subscribe now

The Lord gives everything and charges
by taking it back. What a bargain.
Like being young for a while. We are
allowed to visit hearts of women,
to go into their bodies so we feel
no longer alone. We are permitted
romantic love with its bounty and half-life
of two years. It is right to mourn
for the small hotels of Paris that used to be
when we used to be. My mansard looking
down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,
and me listening to the bell at night.
Venice is no more. The best Greek Islands
have drowned in acceleration. But it’s the having
not the keeping that is the treasure.
Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon
and said he was giving up poetry
because it told lies, that language distorts.
I agreed, but asked what we have
that gets it right even that much.
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.

Subscribe now

You can find this poem in the Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert.

Thanks so for reading. Everything I write, research, and curate for this Substack is made possible by readers like you. This page is entirely reader-supported — a labor of love, kept alive by the people who find meaning in it. If you’ve been enjoying the work and aren’t quite ready to subscribe, but still want to support it in some way, you can leave a one-time tip through Buy Me a Coffee — if that’s within your reach.

Every gesture, every note of encouragement, every quiet reader who lingers here — you’ve helped turn this into something rare and luminous: a small, strange, beautiful corner of the internet. I’m deeply grateful. Thank you for being part of it.

Buy Me A Coffee

 It was attributed to Van Gogh that he said before he shot
himself that there was “No Order in Life.” His mind burn-
ing colors, deep red and yellows opening modern art to
the Twentieth century. Damn the critics, the academies of
organized art, or of abortion. They are on earth to ratify the
status quo. Killers of experiment and imagination. Poor suf-
fering unloved man; the Middle has entered this Art Scene
because there is money in it. A taste of Honey Fame.

Read more

It is night, in my study.
The deepest solitude; I hear the steady
shudder in my breast
—for it feels all alone,
and blanched by my mind—
and I hear my blood
with even murmur
fill up the silence.
You might say the thin stream
falls in the waterclock and fills the bottom.
Here, in the night, all alone, this is my study;
the books don't speak;
my oil lamp
bathes these pages in a light of peace,
light of a chapel.
The books don't speak;
of the poets, the meditators, the learned,
the spirits drowse;
and it is as if around me circled 
cautious death.
I turn at times to see if it waits, 
I search the dark,
I try to discern among the shadows
its thin shadow,
I think of heart failure,
think about my strong age; since my fortieth year
two more have passed.
Toward a looming temptation
here, in the solitude, the silence turns me—
the silence and the shadows.
And I tell myself: "Perhaps when soon
they come to tell me
that supper awaits,
they will discover a body here
pallid and cold
—the thing that I was, this one who waits—
just like those books quiet and rigid, 
the blood already stopped,
jelling in the veins,
the chest silent
under the gentle light of the soothing oil,
a funeral lamp.
I tremble to end these lines
that they do not seem
an unusual testament,
but rather a mysterious message
from the shade beyond,
lines dictated by the anxiety
of eternal life.
I finished them and yet I live on.

Subscribe now

You can find this poem in From Roots and Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900-1975, translated by William Stafford and Lillian Jean Stafford.

Miguel de Unamuno was a Spanish writer, philosopher, essayist, poet, playwright, and educator who became one of the most influential intellectual figures of modern Spain. Born in Bilbao in 1864, he was a leading member of the Generation of ‘98, a group of writers who reflected on Spain’s cultural and political identity following the country’s decline as a global power.

Unamuno’s work explored profound themes such as faith, doubt, immortality, personal identity, and the struggle between reason and belief. His best-known novels include Mist and San Manuel Bueno, Martyr, both of which showcase his innovative narrative style and philosophical concerns. He also served as rector of University of Salamanca and was an outspoken public intellectual whose political views often brought him into conflict with authorities.

Through his literary and philosophical writings, Unamuno left a lasting legacy as a thinker deeply concerned with the human condition and the search for meaning in an uncertain world.

We live in a world that traffics in rumors. From prophet to disciple, neighbor to neighbor, nation to nation, the word circulates in whispers or in sermons, binding the living to the dead and the dead to the yet unborn in chains of persuasion.

Society depends upon our natural disposition to assume what we are told: that the gods are of such and such a nature, that the “good” lies in this or that direction, that we are on the earth to meet a set of obligations. We feast or starve at the table of laws, being believers. Sometimes we even believe in “freedom.”

Freedom too is a rumor, as long as one merely believes in it. The pilgrims who set off for America sought in their separation from the European homeland a margin of freedom from the old tyrannies and prejudices of tradition. They arrived on a forested continent, a “well-wooded land,” and undertook an experiment in independence. To what did it lead?

To more parishes of the predicted and predictable.

Concretely speaking, to an even more insidious enslavement to nationhood, property, economy, industry, spectacle, and the monstrous institution of rumor called the press.

By the time Henry David Thoreau took up residence “in the woods, a mile from any neighbor,” the collective experiment of American freedom was over. The neighbors were already in their slumber. It was merely “by accident,” he says, that Thoreau went to live at Walden on “Independence Day” in the year 1845.

Read more

Poetry shouldn’t tell us what we already know, though of course it can revive what we think we know. A durable poet, the rarest of all birds, has a unique point of view and the gift of language to express it. The unique point of view can often come from a mental or physical deformity.

Deep within us, but also on the surface, is the wounded ugly boy who has never caught an acceptable angle of himself in the mirror.

A poet can have a deep sense of himself as a Quasimodo in a world without bells, or as the fine poet Czesław Miłosz wrote: 

A feast of brief hopes, 
a rally of the proud, 
A tournament of hunchbacks, 
literature. 

Charles Bukowski was a monstrously homely man because of a severe case of acne vulgaris when he was young. Along the way he also had bleeding ulcers, tuberculosis, and cataracts; he attempted suicide; and only while suffering from leukemia in the last year of his life did he manage to quit drinking.

Bukowski was a major-league tosspot, occasionally brutish but far less so than the mean-minded Hemingway, who drank himself into suicide. Both men created public masks for themselves, not a rare thing in a writer’s paper sack of baubles, but the masks were held in place for so long that they could not be taken off except in the work.

Throughout his life, Bukowski held a series of low-paying jobs so dismal that they are unbearable to list, though he did keep a position as a mail carrier for many years. Early on he was a library hound, and there are a surprising number of literary references in his work. (Quite by accident while I was writing this, the French critic Alexandre Thiltges paid a visit. He confirmed my suspicion that Bukowski had closely read Céline.)

Even more surprising in this large collection are the number of poems characterized by fragility and delicacy; I’ve been reading Bukowski occasionally for fifty years and had not noted this before, which means I was most likely listening too closely to his critics.

Our perceptions of Bukowski, like our perceptions of Kerouac, are muddied by the fact that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits who love him to the exclusion of any of his contemporaries.

I would suggest you can appreciate Bukowski with the same brain that loves Wallace Stegner and Gary Snyder. It is uncomfortable to realize that I have been monitoring American poetry for fifty years and am now even a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which a friend refers to as “the Dead Man’s Club.” All the scaffolding around the five-story building of this poetry is actually a confusing blemish and should be ignored in favor of the building itself, but this is probably impossible until a date in the future far beyond our concern.

Time constructs the true canon, not critics contemporaneous to the work, whether they are the Vendlerites of the Boston area, the Bloombadgers of New Haven, or the Goodyear Tires of New York City. Bukowski was a solo act, though his lineage is fairly obvious.

You detect Whitman, Bierce, Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, perhaps Villon and Genet, and strongly Céline. He loved classical music, and there is an amusing poem in which he feels for Bruckner because he wasn’t a better composer.

He despised Fitzgerald because to a man from the lower depths, Fitzgerald seemed sensitive only to the sufferings within the upper class. Bukowski seemed far more worried about his cats’ health than his own. One had been shot and run over but survived, though its front legs didn’t coordinate with the back, a metaphor for something, probably Bukowski’s life.

He had several failed marriages—but then historically, poets are better off with imaginary lovers. He observed birds, but one cannot imagine anyone less a nature poet, if you discount the infield of a racetrack, where you could see him in the long line at the two-dollar window.

He was deeply enthused about bars and keeping company with whores, and seemed to like the spavined landscapes of the nether regions of Los Angeles, which I myself used to visit. They are so resolutely charmless compared with the slums of New York I knew in the late fifties, which I visited because I was advised not to.

I have wondered, when asked about Bukowski in Brazil and France, if that’s not why so many foreigners admire him: he’s simply the American of their imagination, a low-level gangster as poet. Some are Abel poets and some are Cain poets, and Bukowski is clearly the latter (there are those who think of themselves as Cain poets but shift to Abel when they get a job in academia).

It is clear from reading him that Bukowski didn’t live in a gated community, whether academic or economic. His was the hard-found music of the streets. But then, fuimus fumus—it all drifts away in smoke. It is not poetry that lasts but good poems, a critical difference.

An attractive idea is that the test of poetry should be the same as Henry James’s dictum for the novel, that it be interesting. Pasternak said that despite all appearances, it takes a lot of volume to fill a life.

Bukowski’s strength is in the sheer bulk of his contents, the virulent anecdotal sprawl, the melodic spleen without the fetor of the parlor or the classroom, as if he were writing while straddling a cement wall or sitting on a bar stool, the seat of which was made of thorns. He never made that disastrous poet’s act of asking permission for his irascible voice.

The Pleasures of the Damned is an appropriately long collection because it is likely to stand as the definitive volume of Bukowski’s poems.

It is well edited by John Martin, the publisher of the estimable Black Sparrow Press, who was Bukowski’s editor for most of his working life. It is hard to quote Bukowski because there are virtually none of those short lyrics with bow ties of closure that are so pleasant for a reviewer to quote. I will excerpt a poem evidently written quite near the end of his life:

it bothers the young most, I think: 
an unviolent slow death. 
still it makes any man dream; 
you wish for an old sailing ship, 
the white salt-crusted sail 
and the sea shaking out hints of immortality 

sea in the nose sea in the hair 
sea in the marrow, in the eyes 
and yes, there in the chest. 
will we miss 
the love of a woman or music or food 
or the gambol of the great mad muscled 
horse, kicking clods and destinies 
high and away 
in just one moment of the sun coming down?

I am not inclined to make elaborate claims for Bukowski, because there is no one to compare him to, plus or minus. He wrote in the language of his class as surely as Wallace Stevens wrote in the language of his own. This book offers you a fair chance to make up your own mind on this quarrelsome monster. It is ironical that those who man the gates of the canon will rarely if ever make it inside themselves. Bukowski came in a secret back door. 

(New York Times Book Review)

Subscribe now

You can find this brief essay in Jim Harrison's non-fiction book -- The Search for the Genuine

Read more

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming 
       a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

Subscribe now

"Part Two, XII" ["Want the change"], from The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the original German and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.

No other English poet had touched me quite so closely as Wordsworth. All cultivated men delight in Shakespeare; he is the universal genius; but Wordsworth’s poetry has more the character of a message, and a message special and personal, to a comparatively small circle of readers.

He stands for a particular phase of human thought and experience, and his service to certain minds is like an initiation into a new order of truths. Note what a revelation he was to the logical mind of John Stuart Mill. His limitations make him all the more private and precious, like the seclusion of one of his mountain dales.

He is not and can never be the world’s poet, but more especially the poet of those who love solitude and solitary communion with nature.

Read more