Zumwalt's "journey on the road to oblivion", as he puts it, began in 1973 with the publication of the landmark poem "Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide" in the now-defunct Good Humor Literary Magazine, which also published his poem, "Alizarian Grand Slam."
He had several poems published in a small journal printed out of Canning's Brea Hardware store, though Mr. Canning stipulated that the publication should not be associated with his store. It is not clear how many issues of this journal were printed, or how many copies of each issue, or how many of Zumwalt poems were included, though the few surviving copies do indicate at least six poems were published.
Zumwalt continued to write poetry, on and off, and in 2011, he provided copies of dozens of his poems to be published on his friend's website, zumpoems.com, named after the poet. The website functioned as a digital archive of a significant portion of Zumwalt's poems, though apparently much of Zumwalt's work had been either previously discarded by the poet or unintentionally lost. The website zumpoems.com "serves to distribute those pieces expressly permissioned by the author." This includes the 1973 debut, surviving poems from 1974 and 1975, as well as a larger cache of published and unpublished material written after 1975.
Due to Zumwalt's proclivity for privacy, very little is known about his early life. It is conjectured that he grew up in Orange County, California, either in Brea or Fullerton, or possibly Yorba Linda.
The little we do know about Zumwalt's early life is from interviews, but it is unclear to what degree Zumwalt's answers to interview questions are performative or factual. For example, when he was asked by Zoetic Press, "What first motivated you to write/create art?", he responded with " I came across a box of crayons at the age of three. None of them tasted very good, but I found they made marks on the wall. It was then that I was hooked. Crayons, paint, pencils, pens, typewriters, and ultimately keyboards, all became means of expression."
Born in 1955, and growing up in southern California at a time of explosive economic growth, technological advances, and growing social ferment, Zumwalt, like most boomers, was shaped by the highs and lows of the tumultuous times he lived in, experiencing such things as the divisiveness of the Vietnam war, the triumph of the first moon landing, and the enormity of disco. Yet even as he was a part of his time, his poetry frequently exhibits an alienation from it, expressing frequent themes of social decline, a distrust—some might say an elitist disdain—for the wisdom of the common man, and a foreboding at the inexorable mechanization, automation, and digitalization of society and human existence. Some observers, usually off-the-record, have conjectured that Zumwalt started out as an angry young man and over time seamlessly transitioned to a disagreeable old man.
