Kauri No. 17 -- First Appearance of Moyamensing Prison (1966)

Published in 1966, Kauri No. 17 (November/December) featured the Bukowski poem:

Moyamensing Prison

The poem would later be published in Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972).

There is also an intro before the poem with an excerpt from a Bukowski letter.

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 in fairly good condition by Kauri standards. The front cover has browning and fading along the edges with a small tear, there are few chips here and there, the back cover has separated from the top staple, and the pages are brittle.

Box 18