Caterpillar, Sulfur, transition.

I was excited to discover that the Centre for Expanded Poetics has an Archive section that presents the complete runs of Caterpillar (1967-1973), Sulfur (1981-2000), and transition (1927-1938). I don’t remember being aware of the first (which you can read about here: “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”), but the other two are very familiar; I was excited when Sulfur first came out (I’ve probably got the first few issues kicking around somewhere), and of course transition is known to every aficionado of English-language modernism. What a gift to the online world!

For those who don’t care about defunct little magazines, try sengi, which is really two different words, one meaning ‘elephant shrew’ (from Swahili sengi, probably from another Bantu language) and the other the name of a former monetary unit of Zaire, one hundredth of a likuta and one ten-thousandth of a zaire — you might think it was named after the little mammal, but no, it’s from Kongo sengi, senki, from French cinq (in the sense of five sous). The second is in the OED but not, so far, the first.