LAMOINE, Maine — A local woman who edited and developed a well-regarded poetry publication for more than 50 years has died.
Marion Kingston Stocking, who had been diagnosed with cancer, died Tuesday, May 12, at Maine Coast Memorial Hospital in Ellsworth, according to her family and friends. She was 86 years old.
Stocking was known primarily for editing the Beloit Poetry Journal, a quarterly publication started at Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., in the 1950s. Stocking, having started her teaching career at the University of Maine at Orono in 1946, arrived at the Midwestern school by way of Colorado in 1954 and promptly got involved in editing the publication with her husband, fellow Beloit College professor David Stocking.
John Rosenwald, a current Beloit faculty member and co-editor of the journal, on Sunday recalled Stocking’s explanation for why the journal never became an official publication of Beloit College, as its original founders had hoped. In 1958, the Stockings published an edition of the journal that, to some, contained offensive language about Jesus in one of the works. Trustees and some other faculty members were upset, he said, which guaranteed that the journal would remain an independent publication.
“You didn’t do this in the 1950s,” Rosenwald said. “She said, ‘We will publish what we want.’”
This enabled the Stockings to bring the journal’s operations with them to Lamoine when they retired from Beloit in 1984. David Stocking died that fall, but Marion stayed with the journal up until recently, even though in 2003 she formally handed the editing reins over to Rosenwald and Lee Sharkey, who is now a retired assistant professor from the University of Maine at Farmington. Stocking wrote 98 reviews for the journal, most recently for the spring 2009 edition.
“She sat in on the editorial meetings up until Christmas,” her stepson, Lamoine resident Fred Stocking, said Sunday. “Her vision of retirement was a very, very busy one.”
Her stepson added that when Downeast magazine listed the top 100 things about Maine in 2005, Marion Stocking was number 72.
According to Rosenwald, the main quality Stocking established in the journal was its eclecticism, which he said earned it the label of the “little Switzerland of poetry magazines.” Poets who had either their first or early published works printed in the journal include Charles Bukowski, Philip Larkin, Galway Kinnell and Anne Sexton.
Stocking’s influence on poetry went beyond editing the journal, Rosenwald said. She was unafraid of embracing new things and often worked with poets to refine their work.
“[The journal] has always been a collaborative effort, but Marion was its dominant force,” Rosenwald said. “She would say, ‘It would be stronger if you did this or that.’”
Stocking, whom Rosenwald described as “notoriously parsimonious,” kept the journal afloat on her own until, in 2000, it raised an endowment of more than $100,000, more than half of which came from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation. It is now published in Farmington, where it is affiliated with the UMF campus.
Besides editing the journal, Stocking also was a renowned scholar of Clair Claremont, half-sister of Mary Shelley and lover to Lord Byron. She was a member of the Maine Arts Commission and wrote a series of memoirs, the last of which, “To the Wilderness,” is expected to be published later this year.
“She was never going to finish those,” Fred Stocking said jokingly. “She should have started writing them before she was 80 if she wanted to finish them.”
He said the Stockings bought their house in Lamoine in 1970 and, before their retirement, spent many summers on Spednik Lake near Vanceboro. Marion Stocking had spent her childhood summers at camp in New Hampshire, he said, and so had a vibrant affinity for northern New England.
“She had a strong desire to get back to the woods,” Fred Stocking said.
Stocking also was active in environmental issues. She was a registered Maine Guide and a registered bird bander and helped create the Quoddy Regional Land Trust in Washington County, according to a paid obituary that appeared last week in the Bangor Daily News.
Those who knew Stocking personally will remember her as a generous and “low-key” scholar who leaves behind an “enormous” academic and creative legacy, according to her friends and family.
“She has a bunch of people out there who will miss her terribly,” Fred Stocking said.
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