I’ve been slowly putting together my thoughts and writing on Dennis Cooper’s small journal Little Caesar. As of yet, I’ve given a talk called Zine Days on a panel that Bill Mohr put together in 2011, so I guess it’s really been stalled, but I’m going to make a push to get this together as an essay.

I’ve scanned in most of the issues and hope (once I get proper permission) to make them available soon.

Following is my abstract. I never wrote a proper paper for this talk but relied on my PowerPoint presentation to keep things organized.

Zine Days: Rimbaud, Punk and the New York School in the Poetry of Little Caesar Magazine (1976–1982)

Dennis Cooper’s magazine, Little Caesar, marked a revival in “transgressive” poetry stemming out of the Beyond Baroque literature organization in Venice. Poets and musicians including Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Bob Flanagan, David Trinidad, Jack Skelly (poet and editor of Barney) and the punk band X’s Exene Cervenka and John Doe (among many others) were part of a short-lived scene that is still largely under-recognized nationally, even locally. This talk provides a brief overview of the history of the magazine and attempts to outline the distinctive elements of its coterie aesthetics.