A Beaumont-Wilshire Creatives Series
A retired English teacher once told me that if you didn’t connect with a poem on first reading, you could just skip it. Nothing like that came close to happening when I came across Tim Gillespie’s poetry collection, Old Stories, Some Not True and other poems at Broadway Books.
The poems dig deep, yet are eminently readable. Some start off with a mundane event like a phone call from an old friend, attending a play, getting a garden ready for spring. Then, near the end, the poem sidles up to the reader to deliver a powerful shift of mood and meaning. Others give common stuff—a spider plant, a walk down a city street, a high school English class—sparkles of new significance. And there are plenty of special treats for local residents: the appearance of familiar landmarks like Lan Su Chinese Garden, a bar in Newport, and Sandy Boulevard cutting literally and figuratively across a poem.
Ordinary events turn to the complex
Until recently, I knew Tim only as the organized, agenda-conscious, now-past president of the Beaumont-Wilshire Neighborhood Association, but I was knocked off balance to discover him as the author of this sweet book of poems, one of which perfectly captures the feeling I had at the time. In “A Hesitant Love Poem,” a dumbfounded child encounters his teacher, not where she is supposed to be—in the orderly environment of her elementary school classroom—but …
pushing her cart at the grocery store past the oranges, mounded high, and her saying hello and chatting calmly with my mother as I stared dumbfounded at my first grade teacher out in the world
Like so many of Tim’s poems, it begins with an ordinary event and ends up exploring complex but familiar feelings and ideas.
Poet elicits reader emotions
Describing hard-to-describe feelings is one thing, evoking them in a reader is another. In “The Bike on the Porch,” Tim sets the reader up by recounting how a group of his childhood friends knew of the fact that a bike left on a neighborhood front porch belonged to a son the family had lost to leukemia. But then, near the poem’s end, what was for the reader mainly an abstraction, hits home when the poet reveals that his own little brother …
swooping down the steepest hill in our hometown, lost control and we lost him in a tangle of bike and bus
When I read that line, I felt a chill.
In the collection’s central section, Tim’s years as a high school literature teacher come through loud and clear as he lays out the relevance of classical old stories to the here and now. In the first two stanzas of “Cassandra in Three Acts,” we relearn the role of Cassandra, “the dark-skinned daughter of the slaughtered Trojan tribe,” in a classic Greek tragedy by Aeschylus. In the third stanza, however, he brings it home, courageously putting his own vulnerability on display with thoughts about his 16-year-old granddaughter playing the part of Cassandra in a school play …
She gets the sting at being dismissed for being a girl; for being too young, too smart; for having darker skin; for holding fiercely to her trust that there are truths that can be known… be forewarned that here’s a girl who won’t be grabbed except by truths she won’t stop telling, that here’s a girl who won’t be lured by hollow golden things, that this girl’s no one’s trophy…
There are dozens of similarly rewarding surprises in Old Stories, Some Not True and other poems. It’s a collection well worth reading and rereading. And you may even bump into the poet at Beaumont Hardware or chewing on his pencil at Jim and Patty’s Coffee shop.
In college Peter Mogielnicki vacillated between careers in writing or medicine. He chose the safer route but since retirement has enjoyed writing short essays for his blog at Cereflections.com, reading, working on environmental and biodiversity issues, and birding and identifying insects (bugging??) with his grandchildren.