Kauri No. 18 -- First Appearance of Sometimes When I Feel Blue I Listen To Mahler (1967)

Published in 1967, Kauri No. 18 (January/February) featured the Bukowski poem:

Sometimes When I Feel Blue I Listen To Mahler

The poem would not be collected until 50 years later in Storm for the Living and the Dead (2017).

There is also a small intro by Inman on Bukowski prior to the poem.

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) and taking interior photographs are not worth risking the integrity of the pages that are left.

This copy is Near Fine condition with just some discoloration to the cheap paper. A Holy Grail for copies of Kauri.

Box 18