Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns

Last updated

Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns was a mimeographed literary magazine published between 1969 and 1971 in Los Angeles, California by Charles Bukowski and Neeli Cherkovski (then known as Neeli Cherry). The original title was to be "Laugh Literary and Man the Fucking Guns," but Cherkovski convinced Bukowski to substitute a less graphic word due to censorship concerns. [1] In the late 1960s, the U.S. Post Office was actively prosecuting publishers for sending "obscene" publications through the mail. At the time of its publication, Bukowski was working as a clerk at the Post Office, having not yet made the transition to full-time writer.

The mimeographed octavo publication was published by Bukowski and Cherkovski's Los Angeles Laugh Literary press. The first edition in 1969 was 32 pages long, stapled inside of yellow printed wrappers; it contained poems, correspondence, and illustrations by Bukowski. Other contributions were by Douglas Blazek, Roger Margolis, Jack Micheline, Steve Richmond, Jerome Rothenberg and Thomas F. Sexton. The cover of the first edition featured a manifesto by Bukowski that railed against Poetry Magazine and "the dull dumpling pattycake safe Creeleys, Olsons, Dickeys, Merwins, Nemerovs and Merediths." Bukowski intended his magazine to be an alternative to Black Mountain Review and its Black Mountain poets, such as Robert Creeley.

According to Howard Sounes' biography Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, Bukowski proved a poor editor in this, his second stint at editing a literary magazine. (He had co-edited "Harlequin" with his first wife Barbara Frye in the 1950s.) Upset with the poor quality of the submissions, Bukowski would write insulting remarks to writers who submitted their work, even going so far as deface some of their submissions.

I think that the miracle of our times is that so many people can write down so many words that mean absolutely nothing. Try it sometime. It's almost impossible to write down words that mean absolutely nothing, but they can do it, and they do it continually and relentlessly. I put out 3 issues of a little, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. The material received was so totally inept that the other editor and myself were forced to write most of the poems. He'd write the first half of one poem, then I'd finish it. Then I'd go the first half of another and he'd finish it. Then we'd sit around and get to the names: "Let's see, whatta we gonna call this cocksucker?"

The "little" literary magazine was part of the 1960s "mimeograph revolution" and helped make Bukowski a well-known poet. Ever the iconoclast, Bukowski denounced the trend. In the May 1973 issue of Small Press Review, he wrote: "... [W]ith the discovery of the mimeo machine everybody became an editor, all with great flair, very little expense and no results at all."

The second edition of the magazine was edited by Bukowski, Cherkovski, and "contributing editor" Harold Norse, a friend of Bukowski who had helped his career by encouraging publishing house Penguin to publish Bukowski in an anthology with him. (Norse's work had appeared in the first issue.) The second issue included the Bukowski poems "The Grand Pricks of the Hob-Nailed Sun" and "I Thought I Was Going to Get Some," as well as some Bukowski illustrations. It is rumored that Bukowski wrote poems under pseudonyms as they were not able to get enough publishable material.

Related Research Articles

Charles Bukowski American writer

Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer.

<i>The New American Poetry 1945–1960</i>

The New American Poetry 1945–1960 is a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen, and published in 1960. It aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets, and included quite a number of poems fresh from the little magazines of the late 1950s. In the longer term it attained a classic status, with critical approval and continuing sales. It was reprinted in 1999.

<i>Women</i> (Bukowski novel) novel by Charles Bukowski

Women is a 1978 novel written by Charles Bukowski, starring his semi-autobiographical character Henry Chinaski. In contrast to Factotum, Post Office and Ham on Rye, Women is centered on Chinaski's later life, as a celebrated poet and writer, not as a dead-end lowlife. It does, however, feature the same constant carousel of women with whom Chinaski only finds temporary fulfillment.

Neeli Cherkovski is an American poet and memoirist, who has resided since 1975 in San Francisco.

Michael Andre is a Canadian, disc jockey, poet, critic and editor living in New York City.

Harold Norse writer

Harold Norse was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Howard Sounes British writer

Howard Sounes is a British author, journalist and biographer.

<i>South of No North</i> (short story collection) 1973 short story collection by Charles Bukowski

South of No North is a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski, originally published in 1973 as South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life by John Martin's Black Sparrow Press. South of No North also is a play that debuted off-Broadway in 2000 based on nine stories from the book.

Ole' magazine was one of the first small literary magazines produced by mimeograph to reach a nationwide audience. Published by Sacramento poet and editor Douglas Blazek, Ole' was at the heart of the Mimeo Revolution which saw underground presses publish non-establishment poets who could not get published in mainstream literary magazines such as Poetry Magazine.

Linda King is an American sculptor, playwright and poet. She is best known for having been the girlfriend of American writer Charles Bukowski for several years in the early 1970s.

<i>Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life</i>

Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, a book by Howard Sounes, published in 1998 by Grove Press, is a biography of American writer Charles Bukowski.

The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, edited by Alan Kaufman, is an anthology of American underground poets spanning the post-war era to the present day. First published in 1999, the collection features work from several notable poets, including Jack Micheline, Patti Smith, Harold Norse, David Trinidad, Tuli Kupferberg, D.A. Levy, Bob Kaufman, Jim Chandler, Jim Brodey, Daniel Higgs, Jack Kerouac, Bonny Finberg, David Lerner, Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, Carlos ac Libera, Ken Kesey, Justin Chin, DianDi Prima, Charles Bukowski, and FrancEyE, among others. S.A. Griffin served as a contributing editor.

Whit Burnett was an American writer and writing teacher who founded and edited the literary magazine Story. In the 1940s, Story was an important magazine in that it published the first or early works of many writers who went on to become major authors. Not only did Burnett prove to be a valuable literary birddog for new talent, but Story remained a respectable though low-paying alternative for stories rejected by the large-circulation slick magazines published on glossy paper like Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post or the somewhat more prestigious and literary slick magazines such as The New Yorker. While Story paid poorly compared to the slicks and even the pulps and successor digest-sized magazines of its day, it paid better than most of, and had similar cachet to, the university-based and the other independent "little magazines" of its era.

Second Coming Press was a San Francisco-based small press founded by A. D. Winans that was in existence from 1972 to 1989. It specialized in publishing poetry and essays. Its published writers included Douglas Blazek, Charles Bukowski, Neeli Cherkovski, Art Cuelho, Paul Fericano, Gene Fowler, Hugh Fox, Linda King, Diane Kruchkow, Gerald Locklin, Al Masarik, Jack Micheline, Pablo Neruda, Morty Sklar and William Wantling.

Mark Terrill American writer

Mark Terrill is a well-traveled American poet, translator and prose writer who has resided in Northern Germany since the mid-1980s.

Apostrophes was a live, weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. It ran for fifteen years from January 10, 1975 to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television. It was broadcast on Friday nights on the channel France 2.

Nomad was an avant garde literary magazine that Anthony Linick and Donald Factor edited and published in Los Angeles between 1959 and 1962. The first issue came out in the winter of 1959. Linick and Factor were particularly drawn to the poetry and writing of the Beat Generation, who wrote of their own, frequently chaotic, lives.

Hostage is a 1985 spoken word and poetry album by Charles Bukowski. The single track was recorded live at Redondo Beach, California in April 1980.

Yannis Livadas Greek poet and writer

Yannis Livadas is a contemporary Greek poet.

References

  1. ↑ Howard Sounes (1 December 2007). Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated. p. 98. ISBN   978-0-8021-9930-0 . Retrieved 16 November 2015.

Sources

Bukowski, Charles. Upon the Mathematics of The Breath and the Way, Small Press Review (May 1973). (Bukowski's take on "little" literary magazines and the mimeograph revolution, from)

Sounes, Howard. Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (New York: Grove Press, 2000)


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.