Word: berkeley
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Richard W. Tillinghast, who teaches English Cbr's two poetry sections, the road began and ended according to the blueprint. But somewhere in the middle his path took an unusual turn: the road from Cambridge to Cambridge led, not through Oxford, but through radical Berkeley, Istanbul, and Tennessee...
...leave he did. In 1968, after earning his Ph.D Tillinghast accepted a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley and landed in the middle of a left leaning college community in turbulent times...
...incidents which Tillinghast remembers most vividly occurred in the vacant lot since celebrated as "People's Park." When Berkeley announced plans to turn the land into a parking lot, local inhabitants mobilized in protest. Bearing flowers, trees and grass to plant, they converged, on the plot and many refused to leave on the day bulldozing and demolition began...
Winning a travel grant from Harvard, he took a 10-month leave of absence from Berkeley and travelled overland from Istanbul to India, crossing the border on the final leg of his trip one day before the Indo-Pakistani war began. "You could still go to Iran then, and you could still go to Afghanistan." Tillinghast recalls wistfully. When New Delhi had a blackout, he rode around in a taxi, looking into the darkened streets...
Tillinghast left Berkeley in 1973 and after a year in Tennessee accepted his current teaching post at Harvard. He's back where he began and were it not for his collections of Ginsburg and McClure, you'd never know the route he followed...