Richard Tillinghast has published thirteen books of poetry and five works of creative nonfiction. His thirteenth book of poems, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, came out in 2022. He studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard and wrote a critical memoir, Robert Lowell’s Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur. In 2010 he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in poetry, along with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in translation for Dirty August—his versions of poems by the Turkish poet, Edip Cansever—written in collaboration with his daughter, the poet Julia Clare Tillinghast. He has been a faculty member at Harvard, UC Berkeley, Sewanee, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Michigan, and is one of the founders of Bear River. Richard retired from the UM in 2005 and lived in Ireland for six years, moving back to this country in 2011. He now lives most of the year in Hawaii and spends his summers in Tennessee.
Workshop
Firing the Poetic Imagination
In this workshop we’ll be looking for ways to stretch and expand our imaginations. I’ll be giving a series of prompts intended to help us free ourselves from habitual ways of thinking and writing. Writing about the things we’re familiar with is great, but when we go inside the amazing labyrinth of our imaginations, we often encounter wonderful surprises. Maybe we can slip outside our quotidian self into something larger and freer, or explore a bird, animal, toy, river, or historical character as a stand-in for the self. Maybe we can entertain the idea that poetry can be a form of fiction. As Derek Walcott wrote, “Every ‘I’ is a fiction finally.” Detroit poet Philip Levine’s wonderful poem “I Was Born in Lucerne” begins “Everyone says otherwise,” and the poem blossoms out of a stubborn defiance to keep other people’s idea of reality from defining the self. The prompts I will give you are designed to trigger associations we didn’t know were there, to take us on journeys we had perhaps never contemplated before. The idea is for you to leave Bear River with a basketful of beginnings for new poems of your own.
