Column107 — September/October 2011
Len Fulton, 1934–2011
Small Press Review,
Volume 43, Numbers 5/6, May/June 2011
I never even spoke with Len on the phone. The few letters we exchanged during the twenty years we knew each other were more notes than real letters, although sometimes personal, such as when he quickly asked for reassurance that I was okay after Hurricane Charlie blasted into my town (and house), and just a month or so before his death when he checked up on me after an operation I’d had for an arthritic hip.
I also remember with a smile one letter in which he revealed his not being all that sure who wrote the works of Shakespeare after I’d mentioned an Internet discussion group about the Authorship Controversy where I rather fanatically argued for my boy Will against Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford and the others advanced as The True Author by authorship skeptics. We didn’t get into a fight about it, though!
My strong impression of him was that if we had, he wouldn’t have held it against me. He was a man of solid, firmly-held, common sensical views of life that he was confident enough of not to be bothered (much) by those who thought differently from him. An excellent exemplar of the kind of Openness that has made California America’s research and development leader in the arts and sciences–as well as the home of the world’s largest collection of flakes (I one of them for the fifteen years I lived in North Hollywood).
Len’s contribution to cultural research and development, of course, was to literature. I’m sure I’m not the only unmainstream poet forty or fifty years ago who would have been lost if not for the annual directories of small press literary markets he made available, one of which I used to connect to the haiku magazine that first published anything of mine. Another one gave me the most important address I ever used as a poet, one Writers Digest and its directories would never have thought worth listing, the one (in California, unsurprisingly) for Karl Kempton’s Kaldron.
Small Press Review was next in importance. When I first came across it in the late seventies in a college library (at Cal State, Northridge, I think, although it could have been at Valley Junior College), I thought the Atlantic and The New Yorker were about the only poetry markets in the country. Suddenly I learned of a whole new literary world the Establishment hadn’t enough gatekeepers to block, a world with a place in it even for the kind of work this column of mine would become devoted to.
I particularly remember the columns and reviews of Robert Peters and Laurel Speer, both of them writing of interesting work in a manner that made me feel they were colleagues of mine rather than representatives of some far-off cultural region I could never be a part of. Family members almost, as was Len, long before he became my long-time editor. That happened in the early nineties when I reviewed a collection of poems by d. a. levy, a highly experimental poet that Establishment is still not giving anything like the attention he merits, whom both Len and I admired.
I may be wrong but I believe Len took me on as a regular columnist almost entirely out of his conviction that the whole continuum of literature be represented. I’d only been writing my column for a year or so when he carried out a survey of readers in an attempt to find out which columns were most, and which least liked. I never found out how I did. He wouldn’t tell me, which makes me suspect I didn’t do well. But he kept me on. And with me, news about kinds of poetry no other publication in the country with a circulation above a hundred had.
Besides his contributions to literature as an editor and publisher, Len was the author of two novels, The Grassman, a fine western, and Dark Other Adam Dreaming, the story of a young man’s coming of age, several plays, and American Odyssey, a still entertaining and informative Bookselling Travelogue about his beginnings in the book business.
According to an article about his death from news and review, an independent alternative news and entertainment resource located on the Internet at http://www.newsreview.com/chico, he was also “an exceptionally strong (Butte) county supervisor when he represented the Paradise area from 1982 to 1993.
“Tall and lanky,” the article goes on to say, “with a thick moustache, he looked like the horseman he was, often showing up at supervisors’ meetings wearing Western boots and a bolo tie. He brought a no-nonsense, take-care-of-the-land-and-its-people attitude to the board, and worked well with other supervisors to foster good government in Butte County.”
I was amused to read in another piece on the Internet, a fine tribute by Erick Silva of The Paradise Post, that he’d been a life-long fan of the baseball Giants–and saddened that I hadn’t shared his happiness for them when they won the world series last year. I’d rooted for them when they were the New York Giants, then for a while after they abandoned their New Jersey, New York and Connecticut fans, but only because of my emotional investment in their players. I eventually dropped them for the Mets. But last year they were my team–I liked their players and felt the organization had been punished long enough for having skipped out of the Polo Grounds. Now that I find they won one for Len, I’m even more for them!
As I write this, I have no idea what the future of Dust Books will be. Needless to say, I hope it continues, and that Small Press Review remains one of its products. Whatever happens, I’ll remain permanently grateful to Len Fulton for having made me part of
SPR’s later history. And wishing I had better words to remember him by.