Leland Hickman; Poet, Publisher

Leland Hickman, poet, publisher and editor, died Sunday of the complications of AIDS.

Bill Mohr, a longtime friend whose poems were published in such Hickman magazines as Bachy and Temblor, said Hickman was 56 when he died at his North Hollywood apartment.

Hickman’s first book of poems, “Great Slave Lake Suite” was nominated for The Times’ book award for poetry in 1980. One Times critic called it “rough, discomforting, scary,” dealing as it did with the tangled homosexual underworld. But another found in it “passages of ecstatic, even hallucinatory incantation” and others of “quiet lyricism.”

Hickman’s early poetry appeared in magazines in the 1950s but Mohr said it was after “Lee Sr Falls to the Floor” in 1966 that he began to be considered seriously.

That work brought him an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Broady Arts Fund awarded him a fellowship in literature in 1988.

In 1977 Hickman became editor of Bachy magazine. It went under in 1981, and in 1983-84 he edited two issues of Boxcar before starting Temblor in 1985. A typesetter by profession, Hickman also designed the magazine, which published eclectic poetry from no particular school.

The final issue of Temblor was its 10th in 1989 and by then it had been praised by the Village Voice as “an important American literary journal . “ UC San Diego has purchased its correspondence and manuscripts.

Hickman’s survivors include his mother, Mary, two brothers and a sister.