Kauri No. 12 -- Letter to the Editor Referencing Charles Bukowski (1966)
Kauri No. 12 -- Letter to the Editor Referencing Charles Bukowski (1966)
Published in 1966, Kauri No. 12 (January/February) does not contain a Bukowski poem, but there is a funny letter to the editor referencing Bukowski. It’s odd because Inman added strips of paper by hand to cover up some contents of the letter that seem of little importance.
A fun example of Bukowski’s mischief that made his contributions to Kauri entertaining.
Kauri was published by Will Inman, a true 1960s rebel who was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 where he was accused of being the head of the Communist Party in North Carolina. Inman pleaded the fifth in response to all questions.
From 1964 to 1977, Inman edited and published the seminal poetry newsletter Kauri, part of the Mimeo Revolution of the 1960s, where he published the work of Charles Bukowski, Clarence Major, Walter Lowenfels, William Packard, Ron Silliman, and John Sinclair. The title, Kauri, is the Hindi word for the seashell known to English speaking peoples as a cowrie shell. In 1967 he was appointed Poet-in-Residence at American University.
Inman didn’t particularly care for Bukowski’s poetry, but he felt his poems balanced out the various poetry schools of poets who appeared in Kauri. If nothing else, Bukowski (who contributed to eight issues of Kauri) was certainly entertaining with various letters and raw poems that appeared in Kauri.
Please Note: Surviving issues of Kauri are all fragile, some more than others.
This copy is Near Fall Apart condition. The covers are missing, hald the pages have separated from the staples, there’s a library stamp on page 3, there are numerous chips, and all the pages are brittle. For the true Bukowski collector.
Box 18