Word: tillinghast
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Aesthete H.P. Lovecraft, Gordon finds florid visual correlatives for Lovecraft's eldritch prose, then adds a heavy dose of '80s psychosexuality. One messy kiss from the late Dr. Pretorious (Ted Sorel), and a cool blond psychiatrist (Barbara Crampton) gets tarted up in dominatrix leather to revive Nerdy Genius Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) by any means at hand. Heady stuff...
Williamson is freshest when he writes about his contemporaries-- Louise Gluck, Richard Tillinghast, Diane Wakoski, Frank Bidart, James McMichael, Robert Pinsky, and Allen Grossman. Each of these poets has confronted the same problems that Williamson's book addresses, and Williamson's refusal to apply premature classifications is the beginning of a fair critical treatment of these poets. It is here that he addresses the complexity of each post's private images and the value of irony...
Williamson's analysis would be sharper if it emphasized irony more. Contemporary critics take poetry for too seriously; this tendency has hastened poetry's tragic descent into obscurity, away from mainstream culture. Williamson praises Tillinghast's early poetry for its gentle irony, a quality which that poet has refined to great advantage in his more recent work. But he almost completely ignores the wonderful humor in most of Plath's poetry--a humor that saves her poetry from becoming an obsessive mythology of self-hatred. A sense of playfulness is the crucial element lacking in much personal poetry as well...
Using themes borrowed from country or folk songs and experimenting at times with reggae ideas--Tillinghast wrote many of the poems which later went intoThe Knife and Other Poems,his most recent volume. The "powerful emotional impact" of good song lyrics, he believes, should be the poet's goal as well...
...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...