Richard Tillinghast

Richard Tillinghast (born 1940 in Memphis, Tennessee) is a poet and author.

Tillinghast has published eight books of poetry as well as "Damaged Grandeur", a critical memoir of the poet Robert Lowell, with whom he studied as a graduate student at Harvard University in the mid-1960s. He has also published two books of essays, "Poetry and What Is Real" (2004) and "Finding Ireland: a Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture" (2008). His most recent poetry collection is "The New Life" (2008). Three other recent books of poetry are "Six Mile Mountain" (2000), "The Stonecutter's Hand" (1995), and "Today in the Cafe Trieste" (1997), new and selected poems issued by Salmon Publishing in Ireland.

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. For twenty years he reviewed new poetry for the "New York Times" Book Review and now writes frequently for "The Irish Times". He has also reviewed and written literary essays for "The Wall Street Journal", "The Washington Post", and "The New Criterion", as well as writing travel articles for the "Times".

His poems have appeared in magazines such as "The Atlantic Monthly", "The New Republic", "The New Yorker", the "Sewanee Review" and "Poetry", as well as online on "Slate" and "Poetry Daily". In addition, his poems were featured on Garrison Keillor's NPR show, "The Writer's Almanac".

He has studied Turkish since the late 1980s and has been visiting Istanbul since 1964. Istanbul is the subject of some of his essays published in literary magazines such as "Irish Pages", the "Southern Review", "Agni" and "Gettysburg Review". He and his daughter Julia Clare Tillinghast have collaborated on a book of translations from the poetry of Edip Cansever (1928–1986), "Dirty August", to be published in 2008 by Talisman Press.

Tillinghast retired in 2005 from the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts program at 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 and founder of the Bear River Writer's Conference held annually in Petoskey, Michigan. In the early 1980s he taught English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. 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: he released a poetry/music CD, "My Only Friends Were the Wolves", with the Ann Arbor-based jazz fusion band Poignant Plecostomus in 1997.

Tillinghast now lives in Ireland where he writes full-time. He is a fly-fisherman, gardener, cook, and traveler. He also plays the guitar and sings. While a graduate student at Harvard, he was editor-in-chief of "Let's Go: the Student Guide to Europe".

Bibliography

Poetry

*"Sleep Watch", Wesleyan University Press, 1969
*(Contributor) "Ten American Poets", Carcanet Press, 1974.
*"The Knife and Other Poems", Wesleyan University Press, 1980.
*"Sewanee in Ruins", illustrated by Edward Carlos, University of the South, 1981.
*"Sewanee in Ruins" - http://www.pshares.org/authors/authordetails.cfm?prmAuthorID=1536
*"Fossils, Metal, and the Blue Limit", White Creek Press, 1982.
*"Our Flag Was Still There (contains Sewanee in Ruins)", Wesleyan University Press, 1984.
*"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.
*"Six Mile Mountain", Story Line Press, 2000.
*"The New Life," Copper Beech Press, 2008.

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. [http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rwtill/autobio.html]

Essays

*"Poetry and What Is Real", University of Michigan Press, 2004.
*"Finding Ireland: a Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture", University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.