MARVIN N U O N E 'S WORMWOOD REVIEW

by Brian Dalton

MJL ▼ A arvin Malone, who died in November, 1996, ran WORMWOOD REVIEW. Malone's poetry magazine was a long standing and enduring publication that provided a home for many of America's poets outside the pale, those the big publishers deemed unworthy. WORMWOOD REVIEW was unpretentious, plain looking with no ambitions to be slick or glossy, it allowed the poets to speak for themselves. From 1960 onwards til his death at the close of the Twentieth century, Marvin Malone's publication ploughed a lone furrow and some of his seeds came up.

Why am I writing of an obscure West Coast Ameri­can limited appeal poetry magazine? Besides having an admirable approach to the dissemination of poetry and ideas in a culture hellbent on going for the lowest possible common denominator, WORMWOOD REVIEW, published Charles

Bukowski in virtually every issue they ever published.There is absolutely no question about Marvin

Malone's place in spreading the word about, Hank, Buk, Henry Chinaski, Bukowski, call him what you want. Malone was prepared to publish the early writings of 'the poet laureate of American lowlife,' as some observers would have it. Malone stuck his neck out when plenty of others were letting Bukowski suffer the lengthy aftermath of their rejection slips.And Malone was a magnanimous individual. When early Bukowski publisher Jon Webb died in 1971, Malone devoted a whole issue of WORMWOOD REVIEW to him. Malone recognised Webb's terrific work in bringing this vagabond poet to the public's attention.

WORMWOOD REVIEW got around and Bukowski was constantly watching the new poets, looking for new

contenders. He mentions receiving a copy of WORMWOOD REVIEW No 7, in a letter to writer and artist Sheri Martinelli in October of 1962, Bukowski savs, "Got a book sent me by you: WORMWOOD REVIEW 7 // thanks lots - it is always good to see what those on the bottom are up to in order to prei’ent my conceit from making the same mistakes." And twenty years later Bukowski was still singing the praises of THE WORMWOOD REVIEW, he rated it so highly he waxed lyrical about it at length in a letter written to fellow California poet Gerald Locklin, "kVORMfE (Wormwood Rei'iew)? Well, to me it's the only lit mag. I mean, when I get a copy I can go right to the crapper and read it while I'm shitting and l can jump in the tub or into bed and read it....Malone has the editor's eye, that's all there is to it."

1 asked his daughter, Christa Malone, about Marvin Malone. "Marvin Malone, Ph.D., was a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of the Pacific for 21 years. He wrote more than 200 published scientific articles and was past editor of the "American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education" and the "Journal of Ethnopharmacology." He was also a consultant to the World Health Organiza­tion on fertility regulation. His other research included study of drug absorption, anti-inflam- matorv drugs, and the toxic qualities of fungi. He was widely respected in his field and affiliated with over 20 professional and honorary societies. He died unexpectedly in November 1996.

The Wormwood Review was founded in Storrs, Connecticut, in late 1959 by Morton Felix, Jim Scully, and Alexander "Sandy" Taylor (now publisher of Curbstone Press in Willimantic, CT). Marvin Malone was not involved in the first two issues of the magazine (he was teaching at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque). In 1960, Malone moved to Storrs to join the pharmacy faculty at the University of Connecticut and became involved in editing the 3rd issue of

4 6 above...Marvin Malone [courtesy of Christa Malone]

the Wormwood Review with Sandy Taylor. They continued as co-editors through issue #9. With issue #10, Malone became editor and Taylor became "Honorary Editor." Malone edited all subsequent issues by himself through issue #143, when he died. (I), His daughter Christa published the last two issues of the review, #144 and #145/146, a festschrift for Malone. There were 137 issues total (including "double" issues). The contributor who appeared in the most issues of the Wormwood Review was Charles Bukowski (97 issues, with 4 chapbooks and 5 special center sections), followed by Gerry Locklin (67 issues) and then Lyn Lifshin (44 total issues). Other regular contribu­tors over the years included Judson Crews, Steve Richmond,Phil Weidman, Carl Larsen, Christopher Perret, Ben Pleasants, Gloria Kenison, William Wantling, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Joan Jobe Smith, and Fred Voss.The review was a labor of love for Malone. He invested a huge amount of personal time in it and never made a penny of profit. He did not waste time on socializing or personal politics. He did indeed "just get on with it." Charles Bukowski wrote to Malone in a letter dated 8/24/78:"I have never had any magazine treat me like dear old Wormie . . .I'm lucky. And I'm lucky that Wormie luis been around. I sometimes think of you. Then I think, it's lucky we have never met. It's lucky we have a professional distance. It's lucky you do what you do and I do zvhat I do and we do it without politics and personal relationships. It's lucky, Malone, lucky, we Itave been a splendid pair. I salute your guts and your way.”

Then, in another Bukowski letter to Malone, dated 4/3/85:“You are one o f the quietest, most ini’isible editor-publishers about.You do your fucking work without self-fanfare. And as I've said before, the day you lay it down, that day is going to be a sad sad bad horrible, sad and horrible bad day and time and year for many, including this Chinaski.”

Gerald Locklin knew both Malone and Bukowski, so it seemed the sensible thing to do and ask him about both o f them.When did you first come into contact with Marvin Malone's Wormwood Review?Gerald Locklin: I don't remember how 1 first learned of Wormie's existence, perhaps through one of the very thin first editions of The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, but I was in graduate school (1961-64) at the University of Arizona in Tucson and I submitted poems to it and Marvin Malone accepted one of them, "Johnny Rigoletto."It was the second poem I ever had accepted by a non-student publication (the first was "Hart Crane," by Accent magazine in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania) but Malone always insisted that the Wormie poem actually was the first to make it into print.What attracted you to it? Was Bukowski featured in it by then?Gerald Locklin: Yes, Bukowski was either already appearing there or soon would be and I was intrigued by his work. I wasn't that impressed by it at first because I was a student of and fan of such poets as Eliot, Pound, Auden, Hopkins,Thomas, Yeats, Cummings, etc., and Buk's stuff seemed awfully plain and inconsequential in comparison to theirs, even in comparison to that of a raging poet like Ginsberg. But I did see interesting possibilities in the ordinariness of the things that went on in his poems: getting the morning paper, drinking a cup of coffee, showering, driving to the track, having a roast beef sandwich, winning, losing, winning, losing, driving home, picking up a six-pack, turning on the Beethoven, etc. And then as I became more used to his approach (and linked it to W. C. Williams, Frank O'Hara, Edward Field, and others) and as he began to hit the stride of some of his best work (in the late 1960s), I began to enjoy his best poems a great deal, and once 1 met him (cf.my memoir "Meeting Charles Bukowski" in Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet (Water Row Press, 1995)), I became a firm advocate of his work. And by about that time I had joined him as a regular contributor to Wormwood.

I think I was closer to Malone than any other writer, though, maybe even including Bukowski, because I cast him in so many roles in my life-primary editor, ideal reader, surrogate father, Father Confessor, confidant, etc.-even though we were to meet only twice, and not until we'd been in correspondence for,

Msay, 25 years.

I think when I first learned of Wormie it was still being edited at Storrs, Connecticut, where it wad founded, and where the Univ. of Connecticut is located. Shortly thereafter Marvin moved to Univ. of the Pacific in Stockton, CA. He was from Nebraska and in fact was a schoolmate of the American late-night talk-show host and stand-up comedian, Johnny Carson. In spite of the "Malone" he was not of Irish ancestry but, I believe, of Polish, German or some other Central European parentage. He was a very intense, inner, and principled person, and a true scientist, though his first loves were literature and art, especially the avant-garde.

Kevin Ring: You say you only met Marvin Malone twice. Tell us a little about those meetings, I get the strong impression he was a private man?Gerald Locklin: Yes, 1 think he was in the best sense “the strong, silent type.” 1 think Christa would confirm that. Very self-reliant.Somewhat obsessive, perhaps, about both his vocation of scientific research and teaching and his avocations o f literature, art. and the collecting thereof. I think he was an old-fashioned kind of guy . . . I suspect he was the opposite in personality and life-style of many if not most o f the writers he published. Because there’s no way he could have done all the work he did so responsibly, if he had been even half as disorderly as a lot o f his favorite writers. We may have been his collective alter ego. Maybe we represented a freedom that he could not allow himself.

But the two times I met him were relaxed social occasions. We both liked beer and sausages. He always liked poems of mine about my preferences for hearty, tasteful, and filling common foods-Italian, Mexican, German, pub foods, French peasant dishes- over the expensive, the fancy, the pretentious.Which extended to our tastes in poetry and the arts as well. He had come a long way from the Nebraska plains to the cultural avant-garde, but he retained a powerful work ethic and progressive social values . .. but much closer to the working class or immigrant grit and solidarity of the first half of the 20th century than to political correctness and pieties of the latter decades. He was adamantly anti-censorship.

He always castigated me when he felt 1 had written anything "artsy-fartsy," which meant anything not in the Wormwood mold, the types of poems that I had become identified with. But after I explained what I was trying to accomplish in my poems based on paintings and such, he gradually and perhaps grudgingly came to accept at least some of what I was doing in that direction, and to publish examples of it.Kevin Ring: Did he have other favourite poets, besides Buk and you? Seems to me there should be a collection of the 'Best of Wormwood?'Gerald Locklin: And oh yes, he had dozens of favorite poets besides Buk and myself. You might say that everyone he published in Wormwood was a favorite son or daughter, because it was very competitive to get into the magazine at all and you often had to persevere in the face of many rejections, and to become a "regular" was like a form of underground canonization. Ron Koertge was certainly a favorite, as was Lyn Lifshin. Charles Stetler. Joan Jobe Smith and Fred Voss.Charles Webb. And I'm looking back over the contents of old issues: Steve Richmond and Phil Weidman definitely. Wilma McDaniel. A1 Masarik, John Bennett, Judson Crews, Kirk Robertson, Ann Menebroker, Joyce Odam, Hugh Fox, Anselm Hollo, David Barker, Nichola Manning Lisa Glatt, David Hernandez, John Levin, Ray Zepeda, Gloria Kenison, Leo Mailman, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Alan Catlin, Harold Witt. . . .

But you know I'm bound to be leaving out all kinds of worthy and deserving poets, and that's the last thing I want to do. That's also why, as wonderful as a Wormwood Anthol­ogy might be, it may be an impossibility: how could you possibly include all the people and poems that would have earned inclusion. There were writers who would have killed to get into the magazine. How could an anthologer escape assassination? People should really just purchase the entire run of the magazine, if Christa Malone still has any available for purchase. At any price.

A R V i M M A L O N E S W O R M W O O D R E V I E W

4 7Source: Beat Scene, Charles Bukowski Special Issue, March 2004.