Comprises: 5 letters from Bukowski to Connecticut's second Poet Laureate Leo Connellan (1928-2001), 11x8½, all but one with original mailing envelope, four are 1-page and one 2-pages. First one is an ALS with a man drawing, Oct. 8, 1973, talks about writing, includes a short poem. The rest are TLS. Dec. 12, 1973: signed with drawing of man and bottle; mentions he (Buk) and Linda [King] got back together again and some of their relationship troubles also “good of you, though, to wonder if I am hanging from a rope or busting my gut open again with cheap wine.” Dec. 23, 1973: now, “the Linda thing is off for good, she’s off to fuck her homosexual friend over the holidays…so I’ve got this other one, this Stella, she’s got books, Alverez one Suicide…”, includes a dialogue about a young “lovely colored boy”, and ends: “Leo, I’m throwing it in. Fuck it. I’m going to turn homo or become an ice hockey fan. Buk.” Jan. 20, 1974 (2-pages): discusses poetry, women, sex, Buk’s health, horse racing betting at Santa Anita, etc.: “Women are dangerous, Leo. Many a woman has put a good man under the bridge…Your letter sounded on the damned edge of it…I’ve flopped sweating on that bed in the dark staring at nightmare walls and listening to sounds, terrifying, dead sick sounds. But I’ve been fortunate to be so low that when it gets razor hard, I keep thinking, well, you’ve got a bed, there’s a can of soup, a cigarette, even a radio. I know that has little to do with the ultimate totality of a game that doesn’t work for us, of streets full of faces that aren’t even our people…if I became a reformed alky my skull would probably explode and the rats would have their meat soup…al right, kid, let’s get back to the blood line and forget this ballad shit. Joe Silverwood was at the Wine Shed yesterday, maybe Jesus Cristy tomorrow. let the tambourines ring. Buk.” March 12, 1974 (no envelope): about Linda, Buk doesn’t like to dance or go to parties, “You didnt attack me, Leo. Your boy Douskey just got his ass up in the air. What happened to him through my co-editor probably did more for his writing than his last toothache or the last time a woman pissed on him. Everybody has an ulcer (sic). I pour beer on mine and smoke long thin cigars. I don’t see death as any particularly bad fix. o.k., kid, Buk.” * 4½x2 original photograph of Bukowski on stage giving reading inked on verso by Bukowski: “Buk, Dec. 73, S.F. Museum of Arts, Reading Dirty Shit.” Ink stain on verso. * Poetry Flash Eleven, Jan. 1974, single sheet printed on both sides (14x8½) with old folds, top margin with one inch tear & chip. Section at bottom and most of verso circled ink and with arrows (by Buk pointing out what they were saying about him and the event) regarding the reading event with Bukowski and William Stafford at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Poetry Center. “He Was Drunk… Bukowski was up on the stage with his bottle of ‘orange juice’, looking like a wino from Fifth and Minna, vastly entertaining like someone who can fart at will, and he had these groupies…changing clothes and shuffling chairs while Stafford read, and lusting after Bukowski’s body while he read…Bukowski…took time out from his own reading to mock Mr. Stafford…introduced himself by bellowing ‘Let’s get this dirty job done’…[ending with] Jack Micheline, also drunk, taking over the microphone to herd us all toward some final cosmic boredom while Bukowski played with his groupies at the edge of the stage…This reading was shocking. It is insensitive to put anyone short of King Kong on the same bill with a charismatic slime like Bukowski. It is doubly insensitive to put a poet of…Stafford’s unique status on such a bill…[who’s] poetry allows no place for the gross, distorted sensibilities of a Bukowski, nor for the absurd ‘superstar-wino’ posturings…Stafford’s poetry is nothing short of a monument to that admirable sensitivity to the nuances of human feeling that marks the real poet…his calm, self-effacing poetry bears no relation to Bukowski’s chest-beating, masturbatory verse.” But continues: “Perhaps Bukowski is the more ‘real’ of the two poets, and the L.A.-style decadence in his work and his life probably seem a lot more attractive to many readers than the countrified quiet of Stafford.” Together, 5 letters, photo & one other related paper item. Typed letters with scattered holograph corrections and marks.