Kauri No. 13 -- Two Uncollected Charles Bukowski Poems (1966)

Published in 1966, Kauri No. 13 (March/April) featured two Bukowski poems:

H-Bomb
The Funnypaper And/Or Comic Life

While H-Bomb first appeared in Scimitar And Song, Vol. 22, No. 7 (1960), neither poem has been collected in any Bukowski books.

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 actually in half-decent shape. The pages have not separated from the staples, there is a one-inch tear that travels the full issue where there was a fold for mailing, the usual fading and a few chips. Overall, a pretty good copy of Kauri.

Box 18