Thursday, March 10, 2022

TIM REYNOLDS (July 18, 1936 – March 10, 2022)

About two hours ago, I received a short note from Jessica Renshow, the sister of the poet and translator Tim Reynolds. She informed me that Tim, at age 85, knew full well that he was “winding down” (his words), and that his doctor recommended yesterday that he enter hospice at his assisted care residence, Retma Manor Nursing Center in Harlingen, Texas. This morning, at 1 a.m., he passed. In addition to his sister, he is survived by a brother, Ted, as well as a son, Tony, and his family, as well as a daughter. I believe Tim’s daughter is a college professor in Texas, where his son also lives. Tim lived in Los Angeles County for most of the second half of his life, moving to Texas about a half-dozen years ago. The last time I saw him was at his apartment in Long Beach about a mile and a half from where I live. Even then, he was growing rather frail.

He was educated at University of Wisconsin, B.A., 1961 and Tufts University, M.A., 1962. His books of poems included Ryoanji (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), Halflife (Cambridge: Pym-Randall Press, 1964), Catfish Goodbye (San Francisco: Anubis, 1967), Slocum (Santa Barbara: Unicorn Press, 1967), Que (Cambridge: Halty-Ferguson, 1971), The Women Poem (NY: Phoenix Book Shop, 1973), Dawn Chorus (NY: Ithaca House, 1980), and What Ever Happened, (nee IBM:IRT, Los Angeles: if publishing, 2000), ), as well as two plays: — “The Tightwad” (translation of ‘La”Avare’ by Moliere, produced in YSO, 1978) –“Peace” (published in The Tenth Muse: Classical Drama in Translation, edited by Charles Doria, Swallow Press, 1980)… and poems in 54 magazines, among them The Antioch Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Nation, Poetry and Saturday Review. Almost all of his books are in several dozen libraries.

About four years ago, I posted a blog entry on Tim. I reprint it for easy access:

Tim Reynolds, Paul Blackburn and the Archive for New Poetry
Sunday, November 19, 2017
Tim Reynolds, Paul Blackburn and the Archive for New Poetry: Now Online
I met the poet Tim Reynolds back in the early 1980s. He was working as a word processor for ARCO in DTLA and living in a SRO hotel not far from the Japanese-American Museum and the Temporary Contemporary. I don’t remember how I met him, though I do remember the first poem of his that I ever read, in the September, 1967 issue of Poetry magazine.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=30713
I was 19 years old, and it still makes me flinch to think of what a hapless ephebe I was. Not that I wasn’t trying. With floundering attention, I had stood in the aisle of the library at Southwest Community College the previous spring and read John Berryman’s 77 Dreams Songs, all to no avail; I had not been able in any way whatsoever to figure out what he was saying about a character named Henry. This particular issue of Poetry, whic contained work by Jean Garrigue, Galway Kinnell, Josephine Miles, Aram Saroyan, Richard Tillinghast, and Richard Eberhart, was not much more penetrable. It should come as no surprise that the only poem in that issue that really interested me was entitled “Going Home” and was dedicated to Mick Jagger.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=30713
When I finally did meet Tim in person, I mentioned this poem and he said to me that he had not known which of the people on the cover of the Out of Our Headsalbum was Mick Jagger. He had thought that Brian Jones, who was in the lower right hand corner, was Jagger. “Going’ Home,” of course, was the last song on Aftermath, an album that appeared a year later.
In the years after reading “Going Home,” I had become a slightly more astute reader, and managed to acquire a couple of Tim’s books of poetry. It was a privilege to include his poetry as part of Poetry Loves Poetry, in addition to asking him to read in the Gasoline Alley Poetry Series. He now lives in Long Beach, California.
In 1965, Tim read on Paul Blackburn’s radio program. Blackburn was known for being the host of a poetry program as well as for tape-recording readings at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. It is my understanding that Blackburn assiduously got down on tape a considerable number of readings, many of have been digitized by the Special Collections Department at UCSD, and are now available on-line.
According to Nina Mamikunian, “The collection is available at lib.ucsd.edu/blackburn. Additional information about the collection and its release is available athttp://libraries.ucsd.edu/blogs/blog/paul-blackburn-audio-collection-now-online/.”
But if these links don’t work, try this one:
https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb1436376x

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Additional links:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=29343

Kenneth Rexroth reviews Reynolds (along with Bukowski and Roethke) in the NY Times in 1964:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/12/26/specials/bukowski-catches.html?_r=1