Caterpillar 8/9 — Bukowski Poem, Black Sparrow, Hirschman, Duncan, Meltzer and Jess!

Description

The 1960s saw a proliferation of independent “little magazines” that reshaped postwar American poetry—rough-edged, radical, and deeply tuned into both global currents and countercultural aesthetics. These hand-assembled journals—sometimes mimeographed, sometimes offset—became vital platforms for emerging voices in experimental literature, visual art, and underground politics. From Kulchur and Yugen to Floating Bear and Caterpillar, they created space for poetic risk at a time when mainstream publishing had little appetite for it.

Issue 8/9 of Caterpillar, edited by Clayton Eshleman, delivers an essential cross-section of that radical energy. Highlights include Charles Bukowski’s “What a Man I Was,” a brutal, darkly comic piece that later appeared in The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. The issue also includes work by Paul Celan (18 poems!), Carolee Schneemann, Clayton Eshleman, Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure, Ronald Silliman, and Robert Duncan. Beautiful collage covers by Jess. The back matter includes a wonderful period advertisement from Black Sparrow Press listing forthcoming and current titles—offering a snapshot of literary ferment in the fall of 1969.

A vital “little” with Bukowski and a host of 20th-century heavyweights—this one’s for the collectors who know where the real poetry lived.