Matthew Dickman and Richard Tillinghast

We welcome back two highly regarded poets, Matthew Dickman of Portland and Richard Tillinghast of Hawaii and Tennessee, to read at 6 pm on Tuesday, September 13th.

Dickman’s new collection Husbandry was recently published by W.W. Norton. Written after a separation, during overwhelming single-fatherhood in the early days of Covid lockdowns, Husbandry is a love song from a father to his children. The poems refuse romantic notions of parenting and embrace all its mess, anguish, humor, fear, boredom, and warmth. They are composed entirely in vivid couplets that animate the various domestic pairs of broken-up parents, two sons, love and grief. Threading his anxieties with bright moments, the volume delights in seeing the world through the clear eyes of childhood and finds meaning in the domestic work of sustaining three lives. Rachel Cusk says of this new collection “It is rare to encounter a genuine poetics of separation and single-parenthood, still rarer one which consecrates the drudgery and the glittering revelations of nurture from a position of candid interiority.” Dickman grew up in Portland (along with his twin brother, the poet Michael Dickman) and after attending Portland Community College and the University of Oregon earned his MFA from the University of Texas-Austin’s Michener Center. Previous collections include Wonderland, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and All-American Poem. He has received the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sarton Award for Poetry, and an Oregon Book Award.

Tillinghast’s new collection, his thirteenth, is Blue If Only I Cold Tell You, winner of the Twenty-Seventh annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize and just published by White Pine Press. These poems of place and displacement are deeply personal at times as they look back over a long and eventful life. Tillinghast also focuses on troubled and troubling aspects of the American story: the Indian Wars of the 19th century and the history of race relations in his native South, from slavery to the country’s current racial reckoning. Joe Wilkins, the final judge for the prize, calls it “a book of journeys and arrivals, of the many far and consequential places we might find ourselves.” And author Laura Kasischke says “Tillinghast’s new collection is the book we need right now, assuring us that music can be heard in the silence and dread will always, eventually, give way to hope.” Travel and change have always been a part of this poet’s life and work. Each of his collections of poetry reflects his restlessness and need to reinvent his way of writing. In addition to his poetry, Tillinghast has written five books of creative nonfiction. For twenty years beginning in the 1980s, Tillinghast reviewed new poems for the New York Times Book Review. In 2005 he retired from the faculty of The Master of Fine Arts program at The University of Michigan and moved to County Tipperary in Ireland. Currently he lives on the Big Island of Hawaii and spends his summers in Sewanee, Tennessee.