Fiercely independent and robust, The Wormwood Review was a classic, small

Transcription

1 A Preface to The Wormwood Review, Marvin Malone and Gerald Locklin By Michael Basinski Fiercely independent and robust, The Wormwood Review was a classic, small press, little literary magazine and was made so by its editor Marvin Malone. Gerald Locklin was. among the company of poets that Malone frequently'published. Over the past decades Locklin emerged from the small press network and has become increasingly vital and visible in the evolving world of the poetry. Linked as they are in literary history, Locklin s and Malone s literary careers developed along parallel paths. Their relationship was an organic exchange of poetic taste and was, at least' somewhat, symbiotic. The first issues of The Wormwood Review were printed on a hand turned letterpress in a bam, which stood on Wormwood Hill in east Connecticut where wormwood grew abundantly. Wormwood, incidentally, is an herb, part of the aromatic herbal family of artemisia. Artemisia tea, Malone once wrote, repels black fleas, discourages-slugs,-keeps beetles and weevils out of grain and combats aphids. The Wormwood Review published its first number, Volume 1, No. 1 irtthe winter of The magazine was near defunct when Marvin Malone, a Nebraska bom, dust bowl farm boy, Nebraska educated Ph.D. and Professor of Pharmacology arrived at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He was fresh from the University of New Mexico and happened upon an issue. Perhaps it was the name wormwood that attracted Malone. However, it is better to suppose that Malone immediately identified The Wormwood Review as a little 1 literary magazine. An. avid collector of entrepreneurial literary magazines, Malone w as: inspired by Eugene. Jolas s Transition, a Parisian magazine that published Joyce,

2 Hemingway and the modernist writers of 1920s and 30s, and the power of thè little magazine to discover and develop new forms of progressive poetry and to refine, develop, shape and mold literary taste. Malone, as Professor of Pharmacology, had a scientific imagination. He authored more than 170 research articles and was the editor of The American Journal o f Pharmaceutical Education, to name only a few of his academic pharmacological accomplishments. The act of research and discovery was an attribute that Malone brought to small press publishing. Marvin Malone joined the editors of The Wormwood Review and as he emerged in the early 1960s as the principle editor, so began an editorial run that would last for 144 issues and more than 35 years. Malone had a complicated, evolving, directed and purposeful constellation of editorial principals, which evolved and matured over the course of his career. Holding one of the country s largest private collections of little magazines,' he once charted the publishing world in which he thrived. Among those he labeled, currently striving on into the 1970s, were, his own magazine and, among others, Quixote, Kayak, lo, Jargon Publications, Hey Lady, Open Letter, and The World. Each of these publications reflected a different, unique, literary voice and community. He understood that a literary magazine needed a program of writing. Refined by a commitment to a life of wide yet deep and focused reading of literature, from Celine to Joyce, from D. H. Lawrence to Kurt Vonnegut, from Jules Verne to William Carlos Williams, from Walt Whitman to Henry Miller, Malone s aesthetics were anchored in both populace and sophisticated rhythmic poetic prose, in sexually charged literature, in literature in the vernacular and in writing spiced with black humor and from the outsider s perspective.

3 Malone also had a specifically defined poetics. In an article by Mike Dunne titled Classy Poetry fo r the Working Class, published in The Stockton Bee, Dunne wrote, The poetry of The Wormwood Review is fresh, earthy, lively, unpretentious and often hilarious. It s blue-color poetry, written in a working class vernacular, often topical, witty and blunt, the way a carpenter poet might talk after a couple of shots in a roadside honky-tonk. In the same article Malone is quoted as relating, We try to catch the attitude and depth of the human scene at the present time. We concentrate on poems that are being written right now - what poets think, how they feel, how they act And in The Triquarterly Review Malone wrote that The Wormwood Review attempted to capture the,...ironic, perceptive and totally realistic humor of the self sufficient frontier type man... Wit and intelligence coupled with the capacity for love are rare qualities in any age, but desirable. Wormwood is prejudice of works that have such characteristics. Above all the various editorial guidelines that governed the poetry published in The Wormwood Review, first on Malone s list was that an editor had to have, some sense of the absurd to offset the aura of high purpose, which can clot around such a venture. The poetry that fulfilled this most important rule in its most refined and polished form was poetry written in the cadences of Amer-english and expressing the ordinary experiential lives of ordinary people. Poetry had to be drawn from the poet s daily experience with language and the poet s prompt response to that experience. With this in mind, Malone set himself the task of gathering a stable of writers that would project- a specific literary taste.- As poetry editor, the poet Malone first published was Judson Crews, a prolifically publishing, and active poet and bookstore owner from

4 Taos, New Mexico. He was also a pressman and in the 1950s published literary magazines like Egg Suck Mule, Poetry Taos and The Naked Ear, and he also published many distinctive and attractive books of his own poetry, which were accented, scandalously, with art nudes culled from 1950s men s magazines. In a preface to Crews s Nolo Contendere, Robert Creeley wrote, Mr. Crews is not simply an autobiographical writer, and I don t know whether or not he s done all the things he talks of in these poems. I m damn sure someone has - and that their wiy, laconic, sensitive perception is fact of very human experience. Integrity is a very apt word for Judson Crews way of being human. He won t do what he doesn t believe in doing, nor will he say something for simple convenience. The poetry by Judson Crews that Malone published in early issue of The Wormwood Review represented an authentic exploration of carnal passions and the slightly veiled steamy, dark, dangerous and brooding other parts of the poetic soul. It was symbolic and utilized the narrative to elucidate volatile emotions within transgressive circumstances. Charles Bukowski s poems of this era are equally dark, brooding, abstract, penetrating and searching. They are old school small press poetry with little emphasis on spontaneity and a focus upon poetic form and a thematic exploration of taboo, untouched or dark themes. Judson Crews was the first poet of the Small Press School to be brought into The Wormwood Review stable, and he is the link in the tradition of small press publishing that allowed Malone to venture forward undaunted. Marvin Malone did not discover Gerald Locklin although he was one of Malone s discoveries. Locklin had only one poem under his publishing belt when he first appeared in the 9th issue of The Wormwood Review in He would come to figure prominently in Malone s community of poets, and Malone supported Locklin s poetic evolution. He both tempered and learned from Locklin. Through the course of their long

5 relationship, Locklin mailed Malone more that 270 letters and postcards and more than 600 pages of manuscript material. This exceeds by far any other correspondence Malone maintained and from this voluminous epistolary relationship one can image that Malone s editorial instincts contributed to Locklin s work. Vice versa Locklin had to have an impact on Marvin Malone s taste in poetiy. In a yet unpublished interview, Locklin noted, Marvin Malone was my ideal reader, a surrogate father, a Father Confessor, and, for my money, the best poetry editor in America. I sent him almost all my best poems first and he published hundreds of them. He also published those other poets I most enjoyed reading. He definitely nurtured me in the style of poetry he most advocated himself, but that was partly because I was already writing in that style when he "discovered" me. Just into the first phase of his publishing life, Locklin s Johnny Rigoletto was the first of his poems to appear in The Wormwood Review. A symbolic dwarf, Rigoletto was an empty faced fool made cold by the gang rape of his daughter by a powerful Duke and. his court. Metaphorically, the rich rape the poor and the poor become bitter and fools; nevertheless, they are superior for their insight into the real nature of corruption. Within the narrative poem the lines break rhythmically and the stanzas control the rising and falling narrative action. Locklin s poem foreshadows his later well-defined literary attitude. He would never become a Duke. Locklin s poems would not appear again until issue 21 in 1966, three years later, and again in 1967, issue 26/27. This was a period of relocation for Locklin. He moved from Tucson, to Los Angeles to Long Beech. The poems of this burgeoning poet are autobiographical, albeit the I of the poems remains undefined and distant, confined within the imagination, and the work, is dominated by stanzas, imposed structures, literary tools and juxtaposed words that interrupt the cadences, all of which befit a young poet

6 learning the craft. However, with issue 31, in 1968, the first time he publishes a significant body of work in The Wormwood Review, Locklin had centered. As a group these poems mark the beginning of a freer, less restrained poetry. It is in this issue that Locklin s early classic Beer appears. Beer is a Whitmanesque celebration of our greatest legal American intoxicant, and beer is nicely wed to baseball in the poem. Beer has the easy rhythmic reading cadences that will become Locklin s mature poetic voice. However, while Locklin is beginning to use humor within his poetry, Beer is light, the poems as a group remain dominated by traditional poetic form. In 1973 in issue 67, Locklin publishes Son o f Toad, his first center section in The Wormwood Review. Within this substantial selection of poems, he begins to harvest his memories of Rochester and to record meaningful incidences as they occur, for instance, at the 49er, the bar he most often frequents. He also, more importantly, steps out in front of his still formalistic poems by utilizing the persona toad, the mad poet of Long Beach, the small case i who is the drinker, lover, professor and father who engages each day as a poet, harvesting poetry, the natural flow of language, from diverse encounters and events. With the publication of Son o f Toad Locklin s poetic apprenticeship concludes with the bonding of poetry and poet. After 1973 his poems become increasingly ironic, playful, critical of all pretentiousness and often critically reflective. In the late 1970s Marvin Malone published his article The Gall o f Wormwood in Printing Over 66 Issues and Still Continuing in The Triquarterly Review. It was in this article that he wrote that an editor must have a sense of the absurd, and he also wrote, the editor dictates the contents of Wormwood... In 1978, Malone published his 67th issue, an all Locklin issue, titled Pronouncing Borges. The issue reveals that Locklin had

7 continued to evolve as a poet and that Malone, likewise, responded as an evolving editor. Locklin s poems extend beyond his early imposed structures and the form of the poems reflects poetry as the poet gathers it in all its variety. For example, the first short, humorous poems appear, and they will continue to appear with regularity. Both Malone and Locklin are in their very productive literary rhythms. There is a sense of trust. Locklin continues to publish in Wormwood, with regularity and Malone considers Locklin one of Wormwood s regulars. Some Toad Songs appear in issue 76. The forms of the poems have become completely flexible as Locklin writes with a marvelous direct clarity. Everywhere the structure of the poems expand and contract, reflecting the poetry as Locklin comes upon it. There are long prose lines and short joke like, minimalist poems. Confident, Locklin criticizes, for instance, feminist ideology, but not without calling himself, Mr. Typical all-american male adolescent asshole. The world, the absurdity of life, the dumb things people say, misreading and mishearing, conversations, his students, the university, his aunts and uncles, his children, all provide Locklin with an endless supply of poetic events and poetry. In the 1980 s Locklin s poetry evolves to encompass all he encounters. The poems of the 1980s are not about life they are about living. Slowly new themes begin to appear poems about paintings, for instance, and Malone continues to provide the space for that development. He has found his absurd poet, the poet who writes with frank prose rhythms without fear and in a perfected candid style. In Locklin s poetry, Marvin Malone found a literary mind equal to his own! Both were vastly well read, and both understood the absurdity of life. Both were academics who lived in the pretentious environment of campus life and both demanded lives beyond

8 that narrow, narrow world. They were both transplants to California, as was Ron Koertge and Willa McDaniel, other regulars in the pages of The Wormwood Review. As in all relationships among creative people, it was not all bliss. Locklin noted, again in the yet to be published interview: He was furious at me, for example, when I first sent him The Firebird Poems, but he gradually came to publish poems of mine that were more in that vein. I suppose you could say that he had published the poems that sprang from the animus, and that The Firebird Poems gave space to, as its editor Donna Hilbert stated, those that were driven by my anima... In the end, however, regardless of subject matter, the ruling notion that governed the, poetry of The Wormwood Review is the captured cadence of ordinary communication, in all its tremendous variety, which is the music of words, of language that Malone heard in Locklin s poetry and what Locklin hears and writes. In an interview done by Mark Weber with Marvin Malone there is a passage where Malone speaks about reading Finnegins Wake. In a wider context, it is about reading poetry, manuscripts and editing and it speaks direct to the way Malone read Gerald Locklin s poetry through the course of their 3(J-year relationship. Malone wrote, [it], is a lifetime project, so one should relax... in a quiet room, in a good chair with a good source of light over the left shoulder. Be willing to read aloud and savoir the flow of words. Source: Basinski, Michael. "A Preface to The Wormwood Review, Marvin Malone and Gerald Locklin." St. Vitus Press & Poetry Review 6 (Fall 2005): n. pag.