Kauri No. 19 -- One Uncollected Prose Piece by Charles Bukowski (1967)

Published in 1967, Kauri No. 19 (March/April) featured a Bukowski piece simply titled:

Notes From Underground

Bukowski did contribute to a literary magazine named Notes From Underground (edited by John Bryan), so it’s possible the piece was originally intended for Bryan’s publication.

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 by Kauri standards. The front cover has browning at the edges, but the multi-color paper used for this issue was much better quality than the previous newspaper print. All pages are still attached to the staples and there’s just one small chip to the cover and a crease to the upper right corner.

Box 18