Word: tillinghast
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Back at Berdeley. Tillinghast focused his attentions on drumming and writing songs, even though he had already published Steep Watch, his first collection of poems. "I didn't find California a good place to be a poet." her muses. "The literary scene was very eliquish...
Although he concentrated on his music, Tillinghast attended many of the open poetry readings, prevalent in California during the early 60s and 70s. Poets got up on the platform and competed for audience attention. Tillinghast explains, adding that literary figures were recognized more for their readings than their books...
...when then President Richard M. Nixon withdrew American troops from Vietnam, the sixties ended for Tillinghast. At about the same time, he switched from drumming to Poetry, because, he grins, "I realized that I had a chance of being a good poet, but I would always be a mediocre drummer...
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...