Richard Wilmarth Papers (Mss. Gr. 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.