Richard Tillinghast

Richard Tillinghast Poems

Richard Tillinghast Biography

Poet Richard Tillinghast was born in Memphis, Tennessee. As an undergraduate at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, he participated in nonviolent protests against segregation and was active in the successful integration of the college. He went on to pursue graduate work at Harvard University, where he studied with Robert Lowell and earned his MA and PhD degrees. At the University of California-Berkeley, where he taught after leaving Harvard, he was active in the peace movement during the Vietnam War. For three years he taught in the college program at San Quentin State Prison. Tillinghast is the author of twelve books of poetry including, most recently, Selected Poems (2008) and Wayfaring Stranger (2012). Using formal constraint to shape and sharpen his examinations of historical and personal events, Tillinghast is often concerned with the elusive nature of home. Poet Floyd Skloot, reviewing The Stonecutter’s Hand (1995) for the Harvard Review, observed that in those poems, “the urgency—the impulse to go—rises from a need to strip the self down to its essence, to relocate intimacy and a sense of community by immersing himself in remoteness.” Tillinghast has traveled widely in Europe, America, Asia, and the Middle East. Many of his poems are informed by his travels, which have been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the British Council, the Irish Arts Council, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He has also received the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship from Harvard. He is the winner of the Ann Stanford Prize for Poetry and the James Dickey Poetry Prize. He has reviewed poetry extensively for the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and other periodicals. He has also been active as an essayist, critic, and travel writer. He is the author of the critical memoir Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur (1996), the essay collection Poetry and What Is Real (2004), and literary travel books including Finding Ireland: A Poet’s Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture (2008), and An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul (2012), which was nominated for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. He was awarded the Cleanth Brooks Award for his nonfiction by The Southern Review. In 2000 Tillinghast founded the Bear River Writers’ Conference, which he directed until 2005, when he moved to Ireland. In 2011 he moved back to the United State, and divides his year between Hawaii and Sewanee, Tennessee.)

The Best Poem Of Richard Tillinghast

Wake Me in South Galway

Wake me in South Galway, or better yet
In Clare. You'll know the pub I have in mind.
Improvise a hearse—one of those decrepit
Postal vans would suit me down to the ground—
A rust-addled Renault, Kelly green with a splash
Of Oscar Wilde yellow stirred in to clash
With the dazzling perfect meadows and limestone
On the coast road from Kinvara down toward Ballyvaughan.

Once you've got in off the road at Newquay
Push aside some barstools and situate me
Up in front by the door where the musicians sit,
Their table crowded with pints and a blue teapot,
A pouch of Drum, some rolling papers and tin
Whistles. Ask Charlie Piggott to play a tune
That sounds like loss and Guinness, turf smoke and rain,
While Brenda dips in among the punters like a hedge-wren.

Will I hear it? Maybe not. But I hear it now.
The smoke of the music fills my nostrils, I feel the attuned
Box and fiddle in harness, pulling the plough
Of the melody, turning the bog-dark, root-tangled ground.
Even the ceramic collie on the windowsill
Cocks an ear as the tune lifts and the taut sail
Of the Galway hooker trills wildly in its frame on the wall,
Rippling to the salt pulse and seabreeze of a West Clare reel.

Many a night, two octaves of one tune,
We sat here side by side, your body awake
To a jig or slide, me mending the drift of a line
As the music found a path to my notebook.
Lost in its lilt and plunge I would disappear
Into the heathery freedom of a slow air
Or walk out under the powerful stars to clear
My head of thought and breathe their cooled-down fire.

When my own session ends, let me leave like that,
Porous to the wind that blows off the ocean.
Goodbye to the company and step into the night
Completed and one-off, like a well-played tune—
Beyond the purified essence of hearth fires
Rising from the life of the parish, past smoke and stars,
Released from everything I've done and known.
I won't go willingly, it's true, but I'll be gone.

Richard Tillinghast Comments