It is my sad duty to report the death of Leslie Mellichamp, the editor of The Lyric. The Lyric has been stubbornly publishing formal poetry for eighty years, and for a substantial chunk of that time its driving force was Leslie and his wife, Elizabeth. In recent years, as Leslie's health deteriorated, his daughters pitched in and one of them, Jean Mellichamp Milliken, officially took over as editor several years ago.
The Lyric has been a place where rank beginners regularly brought promising early poems and got them published, and then saw their work alongside pieces by people like Rhina Espaillat and Paul Petrie, who have been publishing in Poetry and other top journals. It takes a rare individual to have the kindness to put up with new poets and their pretensions/insecurities, and yet still have the fierceness that produces a long-term commitment to a difficult mission. Leslie was that kind of person.
He did all this with good humor, a trait that was still visible in The Lyric as he endured many physical afflictions in his final years. I never actually met him despite almost a decade of correspondence, but I told Rhina that the adjective I always associated with him was "solid"--as in "solid friend" or "solid citizen".
My prayers go out to the Mellichamp family, who know that he was loved and appreciated by people scattered all over the world.
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