Jon-Paul Smith

  THE PHRASE “BUKOWSKI KICKING DOWN WHITMAN’S DOOR” IS TAKEN. YOU CAN’T USE IT. A warning for anyone out there trying to get published in the poetry world. The phrase “Bukowski kicking down Whitman’s door” is taken. You can’t use it. Not because it’s mine. I can’t use it either. That phrase was AI generated. Which kinda sucks because it’s a cool phrase. Here’s how it went down. I wrote a poem called “Ode To My Cock” in a kind of lilting Whitman style, ran it through an LLM for feedback and when we got to the line “I’ve got a snake in my britches” the AI had this to say: “This is not a tonal error. This is Bukowski kicking down Whitman’s door.” Keep in mind this was all part of a broader conversation, a back and forth that would probably fill volumes in its own right. And now you can’t use it whether you’re writing about my cock or not (although I strongly encourage you to - it’s a gripping subject. Really. I looked it up.) Anyway, I liked the phrase so much that I u...

Elmore Leonard’s Night Before Christmas Author’s Note: This short story is the result of a writing challenge.  A close friend of mine, who likes to throw these challenges out there to his writer friends, asked me if I would be willing to do a rewrite of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas” using the writing style of a favorite author.  I told him that one of my favorite writers was Elmore Leonard.  He said cool, do that.  Hemingway was already taken anyway. He showed me the Hemingway version that someone did and it was pretty much a straightforward rewrite using Hemingway's prose style.  That was way too boring for my tastes so when I got home I sat down, started doodling, and when I was about four hundred words in I sent my friend a message on Facebook letting him know that I hadn’t even bothered to re-read the source material yet. That’s just how I roll, ya’ll.  We both thought it was pretty funny. Anyway by the time I had the story more tha...

When I was in my early twenties I worked in a Japanese restaurant as a bartender.   Actually it was my first job but I didn’t start out as a bartender.   I was only sixteen when I started there busing tables but that’s a whole other story.   Things really picked up when I turned twenty-one and the manager at the time, a thirty-ish married Japanese woman named Saori with slightly crooked teeth and a cute smile pulled me aside one day and said “we’re gonna make you a bartender” which was kind of weird at the time because her husband, who had gone on to be the regional manager, only hired women to sling the drinks, but I was twenty-one and I still had a lot to learn about that sort of thing. That’s a whole other story too. I sometimes think that women don’t do near as much fucking as people say they do. Except when they do. But, like I said, whole other story. It was a different world back then in those pre-internet days of 1989.   Pornography was still kind of hard to...