Ole' magazine was one of the first small literary magazines produced by mimeograph to reach a nation-wide audience. Published by Sacramento poet and editor 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...

, Ole was at the heart of the "Mimeo Revolution" which saw underground presses publish non-establishment poets who could not get published in mainstream literary magazines such as Poetry Magazine.

The first edition of the magazine, published by The Mimeo Press of Bensenville, Illinois

Bensenville, Illinois

Bensenville is a village located primarily in DuPage County, Illinois, with a small section near O'Hare International Airport in Cook County, Illinois, overlapping into the city of Chicago. As of the 2000 census, the village population was 20,703. Bensenville is home to the Edge Ice Arena, home of...

, was "Dedicated to the Cause of Making Poetry Dangerous", and featured three poems 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...

 ("Watchdog", "Freedom" and "Age"). Bukoswki's work would be featured in all eight editions; other contributors were 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...

 (whose work would be featured in a special issue, Ole #5 in 1966), Al Purdy

Al Purdy

Alfred Wellington Purdy, OC, O.Ont was one of the most popular and important Canadian poets of the 20th century. Purdy's writing career spanned more than fifty years. His works include over thirty books of poetry; a novel; two volumes of memoirs and four books of correspondence...

, 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...

 and William Wantling

William Wantling

William Wantling was an American poet, novelist, ex-Marine, ex-convict, and college professor born in East Peoria, Illinois. After graduating high school he joined the Marine Corps until 1955. He served in Korea during 1953. After leaving the Marines he moved to California and eventually had a son...

.

The print runs of each issue were limited to 400 copies, which were individually numbered. Beginning with Issue #5, the publisher became Blazek's own Open Skull Press (some/all printed by Charles Plymell in San Francisco, CA, who is featured in many issues), also of Bensenville. Other contributors to Ole included Bukowski acolyte Neeli Cheery

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...

, as well as James Baldwin

James Baldwin (writer)

James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.Baldwin's essays, for instance "Notes of a Native Son" , explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th century America,...

, Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...

, William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs

William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

 and William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

, all of whom contributed work to the "Harold Norse Special Issue" (#5).