RICHARD
WILMARTH PAPERS
1979-2003
MSG# 165
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Richard
N. Wilmarth was born in
Fall
River,
Massachusetts
on December 24, 1949. A high
school dropout, Wilmarth earned a GED and pursued a musical career in the
1960s and 1970s. He returned to school at the
Community
College
of
Rhode
Island
in 1983, and subsequently completed a B.A. in English at
University
of
Rhode
Island
in 1988 and an M.A. in English three years later. In 1991, Wilmarth moved
to
Boulder,
Colorado
to attend the Naropa Institute, where he worked with Allen Ginsberg, Anne
Waldman, Anselm Hollo, Joanne Kyger, and Jack Collom. He received an
M.F.A. in Writing and Poetics in 1994. Not surprisingly, given these
influences, his poetry emulates the clipped, confrontational style of the
beat poets.
Initially,
poetry served as an avocation, secondary to his musical interests. His
priorities changed in the early 1980s when he suffered a nerve injury
playing music. As a URI undergraduate Wilmarth’s early verse appeared in
the
Great
Swamp
Gazette, a
literary paper published by URI students. In 1988 his poem The Reality
of the Dream appeared on page 82 of the URI yearbook.
Aside from work generated as a student, his early poems appeared in
small presses and literary journals located in
Rhode
Island.
Exemplary of the former is Poised
for War: A Book of Poems,
published in 1991 by Sabotage Press of Providence, Rhode Island. Sabotage
Press also published the works of another well known area poet and
Wilmarth friend and correspondent, Dale W. Russell. Both Wilmarth and
Russell’s works are represented in the URI Poetry Collection.
While
residing in
Rhode
Island,
Wilmarth inaugurated the Dead Metaphor Press, a press dedicated to poetry.
Early Dead Metaphor publications, written by Wilmarth, include Minimum
Wage (1985), Between Games (1987),
and Boulder: A Book of Poems
(1990).
The
initial products of Dead Metaphor Press were quite modest in scale design
and production.
Boulder,
for example, features photocopied text, supplemented by clip art including
copies of an airline ticket, liberty bell, and a photograph of Jack
Kerouac. The finished product was stapled, and one hundred and
thirty-eight copies prepared for distribution.
With
his move to
Boulder
in 1991, the scope and productivity of Dead Metaphor
Press expanded. Along with
Wilmarth’s own work, the Press published poetry based on the results of an annual (1995-2003) chapbook contest. Chapbooks, defined as
short,
inexpensive booklets containing poems or prose, became a Dead Metaphor
Press specialty. Featured among the contest winners were Tracy Davis,
John McKernan, Patrick Pritchett, Mark DuCharme, Thomas R. Peters, Jr.,
Randy Roark, William Morgan and Maureen Foley. Based on the contest
results, Wilmarth’s
press published 3-5 titles annually. As the publications
became more numerous, the production quality of the works improved. In lieu
of staples and clip art, chapbooks might feature saddle stitching, custom
ordered paper, and original artwork.
In addition, a series of bookmarks that highlighted the
works of its featured poets was issued.
Richard
Wilmarth produced copious amounts of poetry. Drafts were committed to
notebooks, writing tablets, the back sides of flyers, scrap paper of
various descriptions, and occasionally, coffee house napkins. In the
course of its evolution, a
poem will sometimes appear in several versions, and longer poems will
reemerge as several shorter pieces. While
most of the material was written for publication, a number of items in
this collection are decidedly intimate and refer to Wilmarth’s personal relationships
and experiences.
Wilmarth’s
poems appeared in or were reviewed by numerous small press publications,
including Blank Gun Silencer, Dusty
Dog,
Plastic
Tower, and
Chiron Review. Wilmarth
produced several short story and book length pieces. These include Confessions
of a Red Sox Fan, The Neutral
Zone, and States. None of
these longer works were published, although Confessions
was accepted by a publisher who subsequently after accepting the
manuscript went out of business.
Wilmarth
was a prolific if erratic correspondent, and maintained ongoing dialogs
with fellow poets, friends, publishers, family members and students. By
implication, his letters were succinct, and several recipients commented
on the brevity and infrequency of his missives. Regardless, their contents
sometimes elicited lengthy and personal responses. On occasion, the
contents reveal as much about the emotional state of the author as about
poetry. Exemplary correspondents include Donald Hall, Ed Sanders, (poet
and members of the 60’s rock band the Fugs),
Ann Waldman, and Anselm Hollo.
Wilmarth
died of cancer on April 17, 2003 at the age of 53 in Boulder, Colorado. His
sister, in his memory, donated his papers to the Special Collections Unit
of his alma mater.
Contents
Subject
File
Notebooks
Dead Metaphor Press
