“The city she lived in was not/the city I lived in, even though we live in/the same city/In my city people didn’t carry a gun/in the glove box of their car as she did.”
And so opens Richard Tillinghast’s poem “Cake” about Ollie, the Black maid his family hired when he and his brother were growing up in Midtown. “She took care of us,” he says. “She cooked for us and she, as is the case with a lot of people growing up in the South particularly in that time, she kind of raised us.”
Now, at 82, Tillinghast, who now splits his time living in Hawaii and Sewanee, expresses regret for never learning Ollie’s last name, though he remembers her fondness for country music and the cakes she would bake for his birthday. He’s grateful for her, to be sure, but it’s hard to deny the immense privileges afforded to him as consequence of the South’s violently racist past.
“I’m a beneficiary of all the good things about Southern culture,” he says, “but what is the effect on us of the history of our region? Any of us who take those histories seriously, we feel a lot of ambivalence.”
In his latest collection of poetry, Blue If Only I Could Tell You (White Pine Press), Tillinghast explores these histories, especially those that have been overshadowed by the mainstream narrative. These were histories that Tillinghast wouldn’t recognize until he left Memphis, first for college at Sewanee, then Ireland and Turkey for travel writing, then Michigan to teach.
He ponders how the Indigenous people, their history, and most importantly their humanity have gone largely unnoticed: “[I]nvisible most days,” he writes, “their lives unchronicled/in the newspapers crushed underfoot/inside the schoolteacher’s car.”
“When I first moved to Michigan,” he says, “I didn’t realize that there were actually Native Americans in Michigan. It never occurred to me. … I’m a student of history, and I don’t think you can understand American history unless you try to understand the history of what happened in the conflict between the white settlers and the people who were living here when we showed up.”
Through his poetry in this collection, Tillinghast reflects on these moments of reckoning in his travels, cataloging his experiences and thoughts as an outsider looking in. Though no one answer is reached, he ponders how the Indigenous people, their history, and most importantly their humanity have gone largely unnoticed: “[I]nvisible most days,” he writes, “their lives unchronicled/in the newspapers crushed underfoot/inside the schoolteacher’s car.”
As the collection progresses, Tillinghast shifts his verses from reflecting on his experiences as an outsider of Indigenous culture to his experiences as an insider of the South. “I’ve really enjoyed getting to know all these other cultures, but I think when you’re someone who does get to know other cultures, then you kind of circle back around again. That’s kind of what I’ve found myself doing recently — circling back around again and seeing my own culture of Memphis and the Delta. You could say it’s a kind of insider-outsider.”
Indeed, in looking outward first, he was able to look inward with a new perspective and see the complex reality of his privileged upbringing. “I’m trying to address the disturbing aspects of Southern history,” he says, “yet at the same time celebrate all the things that I love about it. I feel so lucky to have grown up in the place that I did.”
Poetry, it seems, holds the space for Tillinghast to come to terms with these contradictions. “Poems come out of some particular kind of feeling,” he explains. It’s an urgency, a need to get his thoughts out, and, though he is well-versed in music and painting, words have always won out as his preferred medium for expression. “I just really like the way that poetry uses language in a musical way and allows me to explore many dimensions to a particular subject,” he says. “And when something is on the page, you can read it and ponder it and spend more time with it.”
In the midst of the creative process, Tillinghast prefers to be slow and methodical and dwell in that feeling urging him to write. A single poem can take a month to finish while he continually rewrites and revises his poems in notebooks. Only when he is satisfied does he type out his poem.
“I think maybe one of the main things that I’m trying to do in my poetry is to communicate pleasure,” Tillinghast says. “I know that I write about a lot of dark subjects, but I don’t consider my points downers. Writing or singing about something that’s really painful, it really does have a cathartic effect. Experiencing it through the art of poetry, you feel better once you’ve done it.”
Tillinghast compares this sentiment to the blues, in that you can sing the blues and not have the blues. In fact, he, being from the Delta, channels the genre throughout his poetry, with his poems taking on a kind of narrative lyricism similar to the early blues. Even his titular poem, a love poem to the color of blue, suggests the blues.
In this way, Tillinghast creates a poetry that is approachable, even for those intimidated by the form. “The wife of a friend of mine read this book and she said, ‘I don’t like poetry, but I really enjoyed your book,’” he says. “And, boy, that’s the way I feel about poetry. … As far as I’m concerned, poetry isn’t particularly asking to be understood as much as it is asking to be loved.”
With such a great passion for poetry, Tillinghast, even in his 80s, has no plans to stop writing, hoping to continue to hone his skill and improve his work. Prior to Blue If Only I Could Tell You, he has written 12 books of poetry, a book of translation from Turkish, and five non-fiction books. Most recently, White Pine Press has awarded Tillinghast the 27th Annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize for Blue If Only I Could Tell You.
Richard Tillinghast will visit Burke’s Book Store on Thursday, February 23rd, to sign and discuss his latest collection. Doors open at 5:30 p.m., and the reading starts at 6 p.m. Order a signed copy here.
