How I Didn't Meet William Wantling, but Got to Know Him Pretty Well Anyway

It was the late eighties; the girls had graduated high school and moved to California; the dog died. If I were ever to return to school to do a doctorate in English, it would have to be now. My wife and I packed the books, sold the furniture and retreated to Illinois State University in the sleepy little town of Normal (I’ve lived in Normal, and its sister city Bloomington—don’t try to impress me with the jokes. I’ve heard them all).

The poet William Wantling lived, taught, wrote and died in the area in 1974, about fifteen years before, but his presence was still strong, particularly in the volumes from his personal library for sale in many of the fine used and rare bookshops that graced Normal in those days. A fellow English major, I couldn’t help but notice that he had great taste in modern literature, especially poetry. I remember, too, his name in fine hand, in red felt-tip marker on the fly leaf, the notes, both well considered, and well written inside. Remarkable, I thought, considering Wantling’s reputation as a drug addict, alcoholic and pretty thorough-going wastrel, that he’d be able to be consistently writing so well, let alone making a good deal of sense. My own handwriting wasn’t that good - or readable even on Mondays before noon.

Somehow, maybe given Wantling’s ultimate fate, depending on what you read, and whom you believe - choking on his own vomit a la Jimi Hendrix, mixing up a fatal batch of codeine and Ripple wine, or dying simply from being William Wantling, I could never bring myself to purchase one of his books.

I did, however, pick up, at a Wordsfair Literary Festival, an indie and small press fair held annually in Bloomington/Normal, a copy of John Pyros’ William Wantling: A Biography and Selected Works (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1981). The life was pretty much as I had heard, horrifying. How Wantling enlisted in the Marines to escape the deadening life of small town Illinois, took a load of shrapnel to the legs, was treated mainly with morphine, and discharged in Los Angeles with a pretty major addiction. Not the best of all places to be cut loose with a big monkey following, Wantling’s morphine habit morphed into a heroin addiction, and he took to knocking over convenience stores to make his buys.

Not all that good at it, he was arrested and sent, about 1959, to California’s San Quentin state prison. While there, he studied English, learned to write poetry. The poetry part of Pyros’ book is even more horrifying. The man was writing of what he knew, the life he lived, both in Korea, and in L.A. It was all there, the deaths in combat, the criminal life, the deadly day-to-day existence of the prison yard. Horrifying, yes, but controlled, focused, haunting—a life that could have been lived by Baudelaire, Celine, and by Wantling’s own sometime friend Charles Bukowski. There too, are the urgings toward something more numinous, more meaningful, and reminiscent of the best of the Beats.

After Wantling’s release from San Quentin, he made his way back to central Illinois, he said, to loaf and live off his parents for a while. A couple of things changed that, meeting Ruth, the woman who would become his wife, and learning that even as a convicted felon, he could still go to school on the G.I. bill. So it was off to Normal, and Illinois State University. He finished his bachelors (Sometimes turning in papers originally generated for classes at San Quentin. What played well at Q sometimes did not fare as well at ISU. And sometimes vice-versa. But as any time-constrained undergrad will tell you, recycling is good). It was the sixties, and Wantling became part of something called the “Mimeograph Revolution,” where anyone with access to the materials of reproduction could become a publisher, a presslord, a Tom Paine for the times). Wantling was able to become a major player in the movement, developing a following not only in the U.S, but also in England and in Australia.

His English department chair at ISU recognized the talent, but also Wantling’s troubled nature, offering him teaching assistanceships to finish his Masters, and a one year lectureship upon completion. While Wantling was a popular figure on campus, and an influential one - he ran a weekly freeform (it was the sixties after all) poetry program on the campus radio station, and had a hand in just about every reading and literary publication on campus, corresponding with the major literary figures of the day, Bukowski, Robert Bly, Ginsberg and the guys among them, his home a must-visit for similarly-minded touring writers of the age (Bukowski stayed with him during a writer-in-residence gig in 1974, a month before Wantling died. Buk deals with it in sections of the novel, Women), it looked as though Wantling might survive his demons, even become that rarest of things, a major American poet. And he almost made it through a full two semesters, dying during spring break 1974 (I’m sorry, students, your professor isn’t coming back anymore).

Fast forward to twenty years later: I’m in my office, bewailing to my advisor what every grad student has wailed since the beginning of time, the lack of a decent dissertation topic, “All the good ones are taken, dammit!” My advisor, the world’s foremost authority on Sherwood Anderson (it’s good to be the world’s foremost authority on something), looks at the copy of Pyros on my desk, asks, ‘What about Wantling?’ ‘Worthy?’ I wonder; ‘Bigtime enough? Marketable?’ We are taught such things in the English business. Advisor merely responds, ‘He was a person who would throw up in anyone’s cowboy boots, even his own. But he would always come back the next day and apologize.’ Well, I thought, there’s something good in that.

After the wrangling that is ritual in graduate education, I was finally deemed worthy to access the Wantling papers, ensconced in the local historical society archives. Ten boxes, about the size of those two cubic foot U-Haul boxes that look, in the store, good for packing lots of books, but after lifting about three, you realize, bad idea.

They’d been delivered, the story goes, by Wantling’s widow shortly after his death. Supposedly I was the first person to look though the complete archive in the eighteen years the boxes had been there. It took me probably four years longer than necessary to complete my dissertation, but Wantling’s work is that engaging. And that organized. One of my professors used to spend summers at the British Museum researching Thomas Hardy. He was fond of telling of the time he was reading a letter to a friend about Hardy’s visit to Keats’ grave, talking about the violets that covered the grave while he was there. He unfolds the letter to see the finish and a bouquet of hardy-picked dried violets falls into his lap.

There were things of an organic nature to be found in the unfolding of Wantling’s papers as well, though not flowers: half smoked joints, what could have been dried vomit. I often would go directly home and shower after an afternoon in the files. But always, in spite of the surprises, there was this, and this is why Wantling matters, and why, if you’ve read this zine this far, you’re beginning to realize for yourself; William Wantling lived a life that probably no one, either by choice or by necessity, should have to live—soldier, addict, criminal. But in spite of it all, was able to crystallize the experience, and in multiple drafts pare moment to moment down to one single, telling effect that resonates in the mind (or on the tongue: Wantling’s poems beg to be read aloud), long after the reading is done. In spite of Wantling’s habits and proclivities, here was a careful, caring poet, sometimes working over a poem, revising and polishing a piece a decade or more before sending it off into the world. The poem ‘ah, history’, for instance, in its final incarnation, is an economical, moving piece that began some twelve years before its publication as a ‘lost city’ fantasy worthy, perhaps, of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Yet after twelve years of re-writes, pauses, wrong ways and revisionings, it is, quite probably, Wantling’s masterpiece. The last five lines serve, literally, as his tombstone epitaph:

Now, upon this awkward ball of Mud

At certain times I see

Despite this poison raging through my blood

All

All is ecstacy.

If you’ve read this far, you might begin to be convinced that Wantling speaks, and that thirty-some years after his death, Wantling matters. Why, then, haven’t you heard much about him before? Possibly the times he worked in. Works from the mimeograph revolution, due to their very nature were not necessarily highly valued. And while Wantling would publish with more mainstream houses if the opportunity presented itself, left to his own devices, would insist the copyright phrase be printed ‘All rights reversed. Power to the People.’ And sad to say, Wantling might have been more apt to promote a good drug score than his own poetry. I once interviewed a former colleague of his who claimed that Wantling would trade grades in his Freshman composition courses for codeine cough syrup prescriptions at he University Health Center. And Illinois State Police investigators were not amused to find several gallons of the stuff in one of Wantling’s closets.

And it can be said that what killed Wantling the man was also what made Wantling the poet. If Charles Bukowski can be seen as a twentieth century Byron, complete with celebrations of ego, foibles, transgressions, prone to self-dramatization and self aggrandizement, perhaps Wantling can be seen as a modern Keats, with what he knows about his own mortality burning around him informing and driving his work. Wantling matters, and Wantling speaks to us, though not through movies, and t-shirts and bumperstickers, but rather through that most elemental and effective of literary forms, the poem. And it is time to reconsider his work.