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Richiard Tillinghast, Poetry
Richard Tillinghast is the author of ten books of poetry and three books of creative non-fiction. His most recent poetry books are Selected Poems, Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2009, and Dirty August, translations from the Turkish poet Edip Cansever, Talisman House, also 2009, in collaboration with Julia Clare Tillinghast. In 2008 Tillinghast published Finding Ireland: A Poet’s Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture. He has been awarded the Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship from Harvard, grants from the NEA and the NEH, and is a 2010-11 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. His non-fiction travel book, Istanbul, City of Forgetting and Remembering, will be published in England in November. He is currently dividing his time between Tennessee and California.
Workshop: Poems as Journeys
Every poem is a journey. We start in one place and set off. Is the poem about the act of departure, the goal of our quest, or is it about the journey itself? Can we describe ourselves, as Walt Whitman does in “The Song of the Open Road,” as “healthy, free, the road before me,” or are we like Arthur Rimbaud in “The Drunken Boat,” “floating down unconcerned Rivers,” embarked on a confused and ambiguous voyage? In this workshop, for experienced writers as well as beginners, we will try our hands at the poetry of the journey, as old as when Adam and Eve stumbled out in tears from the Garden of Eden, as new as a child’s first steps into a world as fresh as morning dew.
Richard Tillinghast on the Web
