Take The Tortillas Out Of Your Poetry

Let's Talk About That Famous Bukowski Line

Take The Tortillas Out Of Your Poetry is one of those short essays everyone quotes but very few people actually understand the full context of. It's by Charles Bukowski and it was written as advice to poets who want their work to land rather than sound like they're trying to impress someone. The whole thing is basically: stop polishing the soul out of your work. Stop making it safe. The phrase itself is metaphor, sure, but it's not some obscure literary reference. Bukowski is telling writers that if you include things that are genuinely part of your life, your voice, your reality, then readers will feel it. Tortillas represent the messy, specific, mundane details of actual living. Poetry without them reads like something written by committee or by someone who's never had to deal with anything real. I first encountered this concept back when I was reading manuscripts for a small press. We'd get submissions that were technically competent. Perfect meter. Clean imagery. No fingerprints on the glass. And you could tell within two lines that the writer had never been angry, never been broke, never stayed up worrying about something that kept them from sleeping. The work was fine. It was also completely dead.

The essay itself runs about 400 words. You can find it in the collection Ham on Rye or online in various places. Here's the gist of what he's saying without all the fluff: write what you know. Not in the high school English class sense of writing about your summer vacation. In the sense of writing about the actual texture of your life, even the ugly parts. Even the parts you'd be embarrassed to tell your mother about. One thing beginners consistently miss is that Bukowski isn't advocating for randomness or laziness. He's arguing for honesty as a discipline. The difference matters. Taking the tortillas out doesn't mean removing all structure. It means refusing to sanitize your experience to make it palatable for people who want art to look pretty and say nothing dangerous.

How To Actually Do This When You're Writing

Here's the practical part. When I mentor writers or give feedback on drafts, this is where the conversation gets uncomfortable because people realize they've been lying to themselves about their own work. Start by identifying the specific details in your poem that feel interchangeable. If you can swap the setting, the objects, the relationships with generic versions and the poem still works, you've taken the tortillas out. A street doesn't need a name unless that name means something to you. A city doesn't need to be New York or Los Angeles unless it's actually where you are and the place has shaped whatever you're saying. I remember working on a poem once that was about loss. Generic grief. Very well-written, very well-structured. Then I asked myself: what specifically happened here? Not the broad strokes. The actual moment. And it turned out I'd avoided writing about the one concrete detail that would have made it honest. It was about a phone call. Not just any phone call. A phone call at 3 AM that I never answered and regretted for ten years. That detail changed everything about the poem. The generic version was forgettable. The specific one was something other people could recognize in their own lives.

The exercise Bukowski is essentially proposing is brutal in its simplicity. Go through your work and ask what you're censoring. What are you leaving out because it feels too personal, too weird, too raw? That's usually exactly what should be in there. The resistance you feel toward including certain details is a reliable compass pointing at the honest material. There's a counter-intuitive thing about this that people don't always get. The more specific you are, the more universal your work becomes. This sounds backwards until you think about it for five seconds. General statements about love or death or joy don't resonate because everyone has experienced them in their own specific way. When you write about the exact shade of blue of a shirt someone was wearing when they died, readers aren't thinking about that shirt. They're thinking about the shirt their own person was wearing. Your specificity triggers their specificity. That's how it works.

Where This Approach Breaks Down

I should be clear about the limitations here. Taking the tortillas out of your poetry is not a universal rule. It's one approach among many, and it's specifically suited to certain kinds of writing. If you're working in formal traditions, sonnets, villanelles, or highly abstract or conceptual poetry, Bukowski's advice might actually be counterproductive. Some poems benefit from restraint, omission, and intellectual distance. Not every poem needs to be a diary entry set to meter. The real problem I see is that writers sometimes confuse transparency with skill. Just because you're including personal details doesn't mean you're writing well. I've read pages of confessional verse that were raw in exactly the wrong way. They weren't honest, they were unprocessed. There's a difference between including the tortillas and dumping the entire kitchen on the reader's table without cooking anything. Another issue is that this advice can push writers toward trauma mining as a default strategy. If your go-to move is to dig into your worst experiences and dump them on the page, you're not being more honest. You're just using a different crutch. Some of the most powerful poetry I've encountered includes tortillas but also includes joy, boredom, humor, and ordinary contentment. Life isn't only trauma. Your poetry shouldn't pretend it is either.

If you're writing in a tradition that values allusion, intertextuality, or constructed personas, Bukowski's approach might feel limiting. There's a whole world of poetry that works through disguise and reference and formal games. That doesn't mean it lacks soul. It means the soul is operating through a different mechanism. Don't mistake one valid approach for the only valid approach.

Take The Tortillas Out Of Your Poetry and Make It Work For You

Read the full essay if you haven't. It's quick and it's worth the fifteen minutes. Then go through a recent piece of your own work and flag the parts that feel safe. The ones where you're being clever instead of honest. The ones where you're showing off technique instead of saying something that needed to be said. Replace one of those safe passages with something from your actual life. Something specific. Something you initially wanted to leave out. See what happens to the poem.