Leland
Hickman (USA)
1934-1991
Leland
Hickman was born on September 15, 1934 in Santa Barbara, California. He moved
with his family to Bakersfield, living on a farm in Carpinteria, and,
ultimately returned to Santa Barbara where he attended high school. In addition
to acting in high school plays, Hickman performed in local theater productions
of the Children’s Theatre of Santa Barbara and the Group L Theater Workshop.
After high school, Hickman attended the
University of California at Santa Barbara, and later studied at Berkeley, where
he performed with the Berkeley Drama Guild.
Completing a tour in the Army, Hickman
moved to New York City to continue his theater career. He toured nationally
with the Bishop’s Company in 1957, worked in the Canal-Fulton Summer Theater in
Ohio in the summer of 1958, and performed with the Equity Library Theatre in
New York. Subsequently, he studied at the New York Academy of the American
Shakespeare Festival.
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In 1961 he returned to California,
performing at the Equity Library Theatre West in Los Angeles. He remained in
Los Angeles for three years, returning to New York. But in 1969, He moved to
Los Angeles—briefly living in San Francisco—where he and his companion, Charles
Macaulay, lived the rest of their lives.
His literary career began in the mid-1960s.
In 1967, The Hudson Review published “Lee Sr. Falls to the Floor,” an
introductory poem to Hickman’s major work, Tiresias, his “ongoing long-poem”
about his feelings for mankind, poetics, and America. He continued to write
poetry through the 1970s, published a section of Tiresias as Great
Slave Lake Suite in 1980. Portions of the work also appeared in numerous
magazines and anthologies throughout this period. His work, highly narrative,
might almost be seen as a sort of Western, mythologized version of Walt
Whitman’s work.
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From 1977 to 1981 (issues nine to
eighteen), Hickman worked as the poetry editor for the Los Angeles literary
magazine, Bachy, published by Papa Bach Bookstore. In 1981, he
co-founded, with Paul Vangelisti, the magazine Boxcar: A Magazine of the
Arts, two issues of which were published. In 1985, he began editing and
publishing Temblor, which continued for ten issues. This magazine, one
of the most important of its day, is noted for the publication of national
figures, particularly those connected with “Language” writing, and
international poets.
Throughout these years, Hickman also
worked intensely with local established and emerging poets, questioning and
challenging their poetic values and methods. Accordingly, he became an
influential figure within the Southern California poetic community, one who
would apprise his peers’ works honestly, tolerating little self-satisfaction
and personal eccentricities in their writing.
In 1991 Hickman died of AIDS-related
conditions.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Great
Slave Lake Suite
(Tieresias I:9:B) (Santa Monica, California: Momentum Press, 1980); Lee Sr
Falls to the Floor (Los Angeles: Jahbone Press, 1991); Tiresias: The
Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (Callicoon, New York: Nightboat Books /
Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2009)
From
Tiresias
“He
Who Delights in Signs”
tilphussa
without to drink thee
both
tilphussa within
as
when suckt about poet into poem’s
more
ruin in flame my deathmost
tilphussa
of his goddess’s juices
as
of her serpent’s tongue in my ears a
tiresian
upwilling voracious not yet gone luminous down on honest as early as
sign
as down on a
child’s
rift, rift of her portions fresh in
face
eyes throat seeping arroyos make shift at,
threshold,
as he who delights in signs as ascend from my glistening
madre,
thru my well of her startlings, tilphussa,
in
downcaster plain, at alphabet close, in cringing, in hiding
as
in goddessskin of his harness her godskin who am
[…]
Press
this link for a tribute to Leland Hickman:
http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/02/tribute-to-leland-hickman.html
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