Joshua Bodwell at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
By the mid-1960s, Charles Bukowski had become a sort of king of the underground, the most published poet in the “littles,” as the magazines, alternative newspapers, and small presses that proliferated in the 1960s were known. John Martin read Bukowski’s poems in obscure, poorly printed zines and bought his thin, saddle-stapled chapbooks released in press runs of perhaps a couple hundred copies. Martin believed Bukowski was a genius: “I thought he was the contemporary Walt Whitman, writing right from the street.”
The nascent publisher and the writer with a cult following began to correspond, and shortly after the new year of 1966, Martin visited Bukowski at the poet’s rented 1920s bungalow in East Hollywood. They made an odd pair. Martin was tall, trim, and bespectacled; what hair he had was red-tinged. Bukowski was greasy-haired with a beer paunch, his face pockmarked. Yet their ambitions complimented one another. Martin left with a sheaf of unpublished poems he believed were “immortal.”
More here.
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