Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns was a mimeographed literary magazine published between 1969 and 1971 in Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...

 by Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...

 and Neeli Cherkovski

Neeli Cherkovski

Neeli Cherkovski: Neeli Cherkovski: Neeli Cherkovski: (born Nelson Cherry, 1945, Santa Monica, California, Cherkovski grew up in San Bernardino, California. Cherkovski has resided in San Francisco since 1975 where he is known as a poet and memoirist. In the 1970s he was a political consultant in...

 (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. http://books.google.com/books?id=63TcUgWHx8cC&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=%22laugh+literary+and+man+the+humping+guns%22&source=web&ots=PRxCi_mMKa&sig=GTlv7hdDBbayPZZrhps7i3C-0mU In the late 1960s, the U.S. Post Office

U.S. Post Office

U.S. Post Office may refer to the United States Post Office Department or to the United States Postal Service . The term may also refer to individual buildings, many of which have historical or architectural significance. Some noted examples of U.S...

 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

Douglas Blazek

Douglas Blazek is a poet who affected American letters during the 1960s as the publisher of the literary chapbook Ole and proprietor of the Open Skull Press. Blazek was a major force in "underground", i.e., non-mainstream press poetry...

, Roger Margolis, Jack Micheline

Jack Micheline

Jack Micheline , born Harold Martin Silver, was an American painter and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. His name is synonymous with street artists, underground writers, and "outlaw" poets...

, Steve Richmond

Steve Richmond (poet)

Steve Richmond was an American poet from Southern California whose notoriety comes primarily from his association with the mid-career of poet Charles Bukowski in the 1960s. He is also associated with the "Meat School" of American poetry, known for a direct, tough and masculine style of writing...

, Jerome Rothenberg

Jerome Rothenberg

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.-Early life and work:...

 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

Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...

, Olsons

Charles Olson

Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...

, Dickeys

James Dickey

James Lafayette Dickey was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966.-Early years:...

, Merwins, Nemerovs

Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov was an American poet. He was twice appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1963 to 1964, and again from 1988 to 1990. He received the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize for The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov...

 and Merediths

James Meredith

James H. Meredith is an American civil rights movement figure, a writer, and a political adviser. In 1962, he was the first African American student admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi, an event that was a flashpoint in the American civil rights movement. Motivated by President...

." Bukowski intended his magazine to be an alternative to Black Mountain Review and its Black Mountain poets, such as Robert Creeley.

According to Howard Sounces' 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 inconoclast, 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

Harold Norse

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.- Life :Born Harold Rosen to an unmarried Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn...

, 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.

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)