Memphis was all of that to me —
a river town with a name strangely
Egyptian but with pool halls and
Masonic temples Alexandria
could never have imagined.
— Richard Tillinghast, “River Town,” Night Train to Memphis
Memphis-born poet Richard Tillinghast’s voice is warm and mellow and faintly musical, with a gentle creak at its edges, like worn leather. His conversation meanders pleasantly between subjects, touching on the Box Tops, Alex Chilton’s last words, Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, Memphis writer Peter Taylor, but always returning to his principal diversion — poetry.
Though Tillinghast is both an avid consumer and producer of art, both high and low, in a multitude of mediums, the simplicity of rhythm and meter and words arranged in stanzas has clearly captured his attention, and he has published 14 volumes of poetry to show for it.
Richard Tillinghast
Hot on the heels of 2022’s White Pine Press Poetry Prize-winning Blue If Only I Could Tell You, Tillinghast released his newest poetry collection, Night Train to Memphis (White Pine Press), earlier this summer. The slim volume is a mesmerizing swirl of myth, memory, Memphis, and music, a dreamlike, kaleidoscopic mosaic made of pieces of a long life.
It’s no surprise that Night Train to Memphis is such a success; Tillinghast has spent a lifetime preparing to write it and he has the receipts to prove it. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Tillinghast is also a recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
How did one writer rack up so many accolades? The answer, it turns out, is simple. As Tillinghast says, “What I really want to do is write poetry.”
Portrait of the Poet as a Young Man
Tillinghast’s newest poetry collection is often preoccupied with an examination of the author’s roots. It’s all part and parcel to the 84-year-old poet’s mission to examine his life, and especially “how you become an artist, how you become a writer.” As such, his childhood and its setting in Memphis are frequent touchstones for the work, often as Tillinghast pays homage to the artists who inspired him and reckons with his own place in the rich, interwoven tapestry of Memphis storytellers.
“I always enjoyed the storytelling in my family,” he says, when asked what drew him to writing. “My mother was a great storyteller.”
The instinct to give credit where it’s due is one Tillinghast pays much attention to, as the poet is quick to note his appreciation for the slew of storytellers, from his mother to fellow artists to his teachers, who helped him find his passion and hone his voice.
Tillinghast attended Central High School in Memphis, another formative experience for the poet-to-be. “There was a legendary English teacher named Grace Mauzy. She taught English, and her sister, Laura, taught math. They were both really strict and really good teachers,” he remembers, fondly. “We got exposed to things in that English class that a lot of people don’t get exposed to in college these days.”
Tillinghast recalls reading excerpts from The Canterbury Tales, works by modernist T.S. Eliot, and challenging works by other literary legends that helped solidify his burgeoning zeal for the artform, calling Mauzy’s high school English class his first serious introduction to poetry.
The students also read the poetry of John Crowe Ransom, and the small-town Tennessee setting resonated with the young Tillinghast. “That’s when I started really writing poetry. I must have been about 14 or 15 years old,” he says.
Though some teenage boys might balk at any artistic expression, let alone one as characterized by emotional vulnerability as poetry, as shamefully uncool and potentially damaging to their fledgling reputations, Tillinghast was unconcerned. “I played in little rock-and-roll bands in Memphis,” he says with a laugh. “I never had any fantasies about being a big athlete or anything like that. My interests were musical and literary.”
Painting the Song, Playing the Poem
What’s the process of becoming an artist? That question continually motivates Tillinghast, and it’s at the center of Night Train to Memphis, a collection not unconcerned with life’s transitions, its different acts. The stations on its railway line, one might say.
Tillinghast’s approach to art, both as an artist and an appreciator, is one of full immersion. He dove into poetry and music as a teen, and has continued to find meaning and purpose in those pursuits throughout his life.
Running throughout Night Train to Memphis, like a connecting railway line linking a series of cities nestled along the River Subconscious, is a unifying motif. “There’s a sense of how life moves in big circles,” Tillinghast says. “Night Train to Memphis is, in my mind, like completing a circle.”
“I played in bar bands. Nothing to write home about,” Tillinghast says, humbly. Still, he plays drums and guitar and sings, and he’s written songs over the years, he admits. Poetry, as an art form, is almost as closely tied to rhythm as music, and Tillinghast’s sense of melody, as a vocalist, and his sense of rhythm, as a drummer, have no doubt contributed to his metronome-like control of meter in his verses. It’s not the way that the different practices complement each other that matters, though, but the way practicing a different form of expression offers a different perspective. Tillinghast has trained himself as an observer of the world around him, and, perhaps most importantly, of his own inner life.
The training did not come from his musicality alone. In fact, Tillinghast is something of a Renaissance man, it turns out, and his many forays into other mediums all serve to help him find his own way as an author and poet.
“I was interested in painting, and I took classes in the old Art Academy [Memphis College of Art] when it was in the old buildings, before they moved to Overton Park,” Tillinghast recalls. “It was something else to be studying painting. I was really lucky. One of the painters I studied with was Burton Callicott, who was just such a mentor to me.”
Full Circle
For all his love of music, Tillinghast has focused his artistic attention squarely on his poetry for the time being. “I would publish a book and maybe go ten years before publishing another. Now, the books are coming more regularly,” Tillinghast says. “It’s something that I work really hard at, and work really steadily at.”
The author says the decision is simply a matter of prioritizing what’s important, and there’s a real sense, in reading Tillinghast’s most recent work, that he’s striving to say everything he has to say.
Running throughout Night Train to Memphis, like a connecting railway line linking a series of cities nestled along the River Subconscious, is a unifying motif. “There’s a sense of how life moves in big circles,” Tillinghast says. “Night Train to Memphis is, in my mind, like completing a circle.”
The collection’s poem “Restless” is inspired, in part, by the late Alex Chilton’s last words — “Run the red light” — to his wife, Laura, as she rushed him to a hospital after the former Box Tops and Big Star singer had a heart attack while mowing his lawn in New Orleans. The poem’s name is a nod to Chilton’s restless nature — playing punk and rockabilly with the Panther Burns, riffing off the layered studio indulgences of The Beatles with Big Star — but thanks to the permeable nature to the subject in poetry, it’s also about the restlessness that accompanies a project uncompleted.
“When you get to be this old, you realize life has brought you into a position where you’re in your last years. If you want to examine and try to make something beautiful in words about the whole trajectory of your life, this is the time to do it,” Tillinghast says, a fair summation for Night Train to Memphis, a book that serves as a “thank you” to the artists and teachers who inspired him, an epitaph for a Memphis long gone but lovingly remembered, and also a musing on life and legacy.
“I don’t know how many more books I’m going to write,” he says. “A couple more, I hope.”
