William Wantling was an American poet, novelist, ex-Marine, ex-convict, and college instructor born in East Peoria, Illinois. After graduating high school he joined the Marine Corps until 1955. He served in Korea during 1953. Wantling died of heart failure, possibly brought about by his extensive drug use. This booklet contains what are undoubtably William Wantling's best poems. The first in the book, "ah, history," the poem which became his (actual) epitaph in 1974, a year after this book was published, is perhaps his strongest, and continues to haunt, thirty-some years later. Many of the other poems in rpm chronicle his on-the-road antics from Berkeley, CA to Bloomington, IL and back. And if one has any doubt as to Wantling's rightful place in the Beat era pantheon, read the book's last two works--"Great American Novel," and "for jack spicer, for you, for me."