Before Yoda, Bukowski There Was

Charles Bukowski was a poet from the Sixties, who didn't like to be called either a hipster or a beatnik. He was too conservative in his taste for hipsters, "preferring Bach to Bob Dylan". He was too much of a loner for the college-educated beats, who he saw as cliquish and phony. 

He also wasn't anything like today's hipster: You wouldn't find him in Portland talking philosophy or politics over coffee. He would have been in L.A. in a bar or at the horse track, eyeing women, wishing everyone would just shut up about their politics and stop being a buzz-kill.

On Bukowski's tombstone there is an engraving of a boxer with
the phrase "Don't Try".

Bukowski leaned toward a machismo in the Hemingway tradition, and didn't talk much about writing with other writers. But for all of that self-imposed alienation, he fascinated many poets and artists along the way, and he is quoted often.

One of my personal favorites is "Poetry happens when nothing else can."

While Hipsters and Beats were gathering to listening to Jazz in an underground club, Bukowski would sit in his room and listen to Sibelius.

His notion of "Don't Try" is not the same as the new age philosophy of Yoda's "Do or do not, there is no try." Bukowski's notion is more along the lines of Don't Try to Be Brilliant and then hope for something flashy to come out of that brilliance. To him, the creative process involved an element of waiting for something to come to you while you are working. The energy goes into the working, and not into the trying.

Here is his rough, unvarnished description of people who need to express their creativity, when their circumstances are the least brilliant. They aren't trying at anything, but doing something that bears witness to their experience, waiting for the moment when that "something" comes; rather than waiting for the circumstances to change. He believed less in inspiration than in grit.

From The Last Night of the Earth Poems, illustrated by Gavin Aung Than of Zen Pencils:

from ZenPencils.com

Air and Light and Time and Space

you know, I've either had a family, a job
something has always been in the
way
but now I've sold my house. I've found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I'm going to have
a place and the time to
create. 

no baby, if you're going to create
you're going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you're going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you're on
welfare.
you're going to create with part of your mind and your body
blown
away.
you're going to create blind
crippled
demented.
you're going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.

baby, air and light and time and space have nothing to do with it
and don't create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.