Caterpillar was started by Clayton Eshleman as a series of chapbooks by such writers as Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Paul Blackburn, and Louis Zukofsky. Caterpillar, “a magazine of the leaf, a gathering of the tribes,” began publication in October 1967 and ran for 20 issues until 1973.

Commercially produced and substantial in size, it provided considerable space, over the course of its twenty issues, for work by a wide range of younger writers and artists as well as many of those associated with its precursors, The Black Mountain Review and Origin. In the January 1968 issue, for instance, you can find letters by Cid Corman, poems by Hugh Seidman, Robert Duncan, and Cesar Vallejo, film stills by Carolee Schneemann, and paintings and drawings by Nora Jaffe.