Richard Tillinghast
Encyclopedia
Life
Richard Tillinghast is a native of Memphis, Tennessee, a graduate of Sewanee (BA, 1962) and Harvard (MA, 1963; PhD, 1970). He has taught at Harvard as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, at the University of California at Berkeley, in the college program at San Quentin Prison, at Sewanee, and the University of Michigan.Tillinghast has published ten books of poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
as well as three non-fiction books: Damaged Grandeur, a critical memoir of the poet Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
, with whom he studied as a graduate student at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
in the mid-1960s; Poetry and What Is Real (2004), a selection of his critical writings about poetry; and Finding Ireland: a Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture (2008), an introduction to the country through its literature, architecture, history, and art. His most recent poetry collections are The New Life (2008)., and Selected Poems (2009). Three other recent books of poetry are Six Mile Mountain (2000), Story Line Press, The Stonecutter's Hand (1995), David R. Godine, and Today in the Cafe Trieste (1997), new and selected poems issued by Salmon Publishing in Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
.
In 1997 he also edited A Visit to the Gallery, a collection of poems written in response to paintings at the Museum of Art at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
. For twenty years he reviewed new poetry for the New York Times Book Review and has also written frequently for The Irish Times
The Irish Times
The Irish Times is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Kevin O'Sullivan who succeeded Geraldine Kennedy in 2011; the deputy editor is Paul O'Neill. The Irish Times is considered to be Ireland's newspaper of record, and is published every day except Sundays...
. He has also reviewed and written literary essays for The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
, The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...
, and The New Criterion
The New Criterion
The New Criterion is a New York-based monthly literary magazine and journal of artistic and cultural criticism, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball. It has sections for criticism of poetry, theater, art, music, the media, and books...
, as well as writing travel articles for the Times.
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.” Louis Simpson wrote, "Tillinghast's poems range confidently among different cultures. He has a sense of history as a living force. The experiments in metre, rhyme and free verse in The Stonecutter's Hand are important. He is a wonderfully gifted poet, one of the few." And the late Anthony Hecht commented: "Of all the many complex, sometimes self-cancelling, tasks a poet must address, it may be that the most demanding and severe is getting things right. Richard Tillinghast performs that office with an honesty so strict that over and over his poems prove themselves faithful in ways that bring a quiet, undisputed delight."
Tillinghast’s poems are informed by his travels, which have been supported by grants from the Creative Arts Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation, and the Michigan Council for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the British Council, and the Irish Arts Council. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Harvard, and was also awarded a Sinclair-Kennedy Travel Grant as a graduate student. During the years 1964-66 he was editor-in-chief of Let's Go: the Student Guide to Europe.
He has received the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship. The winner of the Ann Stanford Prize for Poetry, the Cleanth Brooks Award for creative non-fiction, and the James Dickey Poetry Prize, Tillinghast was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. In 2010, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
His poems have appeared in magazines such as AGNI, The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...
, The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, the Sewanee Review
Sewanee Review
The Sewanee Review is a literary journal established in 1892 and the oldest continuously published periodical of its kind in the United States. It incorporates original fiction and poetry, as well as essays, reviews, and literary criticism...
Ploughshares, and Poetry
Poetry (magazine)
Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...
, as well as online on Slate
Slate (magazine)
Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
and Poetry Daily. In addition, his poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor
Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio personality. He is known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor (born August 7, 1942) is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio...
's NPR
NPR
NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
show, The Writer's Almanac
The Writer's Almanac
The Writer's Almanac is a daily radio and on-line program and podcast of poetry and historical interest pieces, usually of literary significance. It is hosted by Garrison Keillor and is produced and distributed by American Public Media...
.
He has studied Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
since the late 1980s and has been visiting Istanbul
Istanbul
Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...
since 1964. Istanbul is the subject of some of his essays published in literary magazines such as Irish Pages
Irish Pages
Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing is a literary magazine published in Belfast and edited by Chris Agee and Cathal Ó Searcaigh. It was launched in 2002 and appears biannually....
, the Southern Review
Southern Review
The Southern Review, a literary journal co-founded in 1935 by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks and located on the campus of Louisiana State University, publishes fiction, poetry, critical essays, interviews, book reviews, and excerpts from novels in progress by established and emerging writers...
, Agni and Gettysburg Review. He and his daughter Julia Clare Tillinghast have collaborated on a book of translations from the poetry of Edip Cansever
Edip Cansever
Edip Cansever was a Turkish poet.-Biography:Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Cansever attended Trade Academy for some time, and worked as an antiquity salesman in Grand Bazaar, Istanbul...
(1928–1986), Dirty August, published in 2009 by Talisman House. The father-daughter team was awarded a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to assist with their work. Richard is currently engaged in writing a non-fiction travel book about Istanbul, which will be published by Haus Publishing in London. This book attempts to do for the city of Istanbul what "Finding Ireland" did for Ireland. It is an introduction to Istanbul through its history, art, architecture, religion, cuisine, etc., framed as a memoir of Tillinghast's many visits to the Turkish city beginning when he was a graduate student.
Tillinghast retired in 2005 from the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
, having been there since the program's inception in 1983. He has also been a Director of The Poets' House in Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
, and founder of the Bear River Writer's Conference held annually near Petoskey, Michigan
Petoskey, Michigan
Petoskey is a city and coastal resort community in the U.S. state of Michigan. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 6,080. It is the county seat of Emmet County....
on Walloon Lake.
In the early 1980s, he taught English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee
Sewanee, Tennessee
Sewanee is an unincorporated locality in Franklin County, Tennessee, United States, treated by the U.S. Census as a census-designated place . The population was 2,361 at the 2000 census...
. While there he wrote a five-part poem about the history of the village and University entitled "Sewanee in Ruins." He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of the South in 2008.
Tillinghast has also done performance poetry
Performance poetry
Performance poetry is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution.-History:...
: he released a poetry/music CD, My Only Friends Were the Wolves, with the Ann Arbor
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...
-based jazz fusion
Jazz fusion
Jazz fusion is a musical fusion genre that developed from mixing funk and R&B rhythms and the amplification and electronic effects of rock, complex time signatures derived from non-Western music and extended, typically instrumental compositions with a jazz approach to lengthy group improvisations,...
band Poignant Plecostomus in 1997.
Tillinghast now writes full-time. He recently moved back to the US after living for five years in County Tipperary, Ireland He is a fly-fisherman, gardener, cook, and traveler. He also plays the guitar and sings.
Poetry
- Sleep Watch, Wesleyan University Press, 1969 ISBN 9780819520487
- The Knife and Other Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 1980. ISBN 9780819511003
- Sewanee in Ruins, illustrated by Edward Carlos, University of the South, 1981.
- Fossils, Metal, and the Blue Limit, White Creek Press, 1982.
- Our Flag Was Still There (contains Sewanee in Ruins), Wesleyan University Press, 1984. ISBN 9780819560995
- A Quiet Pint in Kinvara, Salmon Publishing/Tir Eolas (Galway, Ireland), 1991.
- The Stonecutter's Hand, David R. Godine, 1995.
- Today in the Cafe Trieste, Salmon Publishing, 1997. ISBN 9781897648841
- Six Mile Mountain, Story Line Press, 2000. ISBN 9781885266903
- Richard Tillinghast Greatest Hits, Pudding House Publications, 2002, ISBN 9781589980204
- The New Life, Copper Beech Press, 2008. ISBN 9780914278832
- Selected Poems, Dedalus Press, 2009, ISBN 9781906614126
Anthologies
- (Contributor) Ten American Poets, Carcanet Press, 1974.
- "Rain"; "Convergence"; "Envoi", The made thing: an anthology of contemporary Southern poetry, Editor Leon Stokesbury, University of Arkansas Press, 1999, ISBN 9781557285799
- "Father in October"; "His Days", New poems from the third coast: contemporary Michigan poetry, Editors Michael Delp, Conrad Hilberry, Josie Kearns, Wayne State University Press, 2000, ISBN 9780814327975
Memoirs
- Robert Lowell's Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur, University of Michigan Press, 1995.
- An extended autobiographical essay commissioned by Gale Research can be found in Contemporary Authors, Autobiography Series, vol. 23, published in 1997.
Essays
- Poetry and What Is Real, University of Michigan Press, 2004. ISBN 9780472098729
- Finding Ireland: a Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture, University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. ISBN 9780268042325