Poet returns to Memphis with book about Istanbul
The poet and travel writer Richard Tillinghast has taught at Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan. He moved to Ireland for several years in 2005, and now spends winters in Hawaii and summers in Sewanee, Tenn.
When he answers the question, “Where are you from?”, as travelers often must do, Tillinghast is a Memphis native, as noted in the brief biography that accompanies “An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul” (Haus, $19.95).
On Thursday he will appear at Burke’s Book Store at 5 p.m. to sign and talk about “History of Istanbul.”
“There’s a staggering amount of information packed into this little book, but it reads easily, thanks to Tillinghast’s elegant writing,” said a reviewer for Chapter16.org. And, “It feels like a collection of fascinating, rich stories of the city, delivered by a brilliant friend.”
The onetime capital of both the Roman and Ottoman empires, Istanbul was the backdrop for the exploits of such intriguing figures as Lord Byron in the 19th century and James Baldwin in the 20th. “Istanbul’s glamorous history makes it such a fascinating place,” the author says.
While visiting family in the area recently, Tillinghast, 72, spoke about his connection to the city where he grew up.
“Memphis still feels like home in many ways,” he said. He grew up on South Cox and attended Idlewild, t he old Lenox School and Central High in Midtown before going to college at Sewanee: University of the South.
“When you first leave Memphis, you want to distance yourself, but after a while you start to feel there’s a lot of it still in you,” Tillinghast said.
As a graduate student at Harvard, he worked for “Let’s Go,” a student travel series launched at the school. From 1964- 66, he was the project’s editorin-chief, a post that came about casually when the previous editor got a job in the real world and told Tillinghast, “You can have my job if you want it.”
He discovered Turkey soon after.
“I was in Greece, checking on hotel and restaurant listings. Friends I met there said, ‘Would you like to go to Istanbul?’
“I couldn’t have told you anything about it at the time. I thought the architecture was stunning, the mosques from the Ottoman Empire. I loved the food, the smells of the place. You can take ferries to get from one part of the city to another.
“The exotic nature of it appealed to me. I got interested in Turkish literature. At a certain point it became clear that I wasn’t going to go deeper without learning the language.”
Tillinghast includes some accessible descriptions of how Turkish works in the “Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul.” He explains, for instance, that since there’s no Turkish verb for ‘to have,’ the expression of ownership becomes an expression of existence. Instead of saying “I have a car,” a speaker says, essentially, “My car exists.”
Most of Tillinghast’s published work is poetry, from “Sleep Watch” (1969); to “Our Flag Was Still There” (1984), which includes the long poem “Sewanee in Ruins”; to a “Selected Poems” volume from The Evergreen Press in 2009; and “Wayfaring Stranger” (2012).
The author likes the odds for collecting a crowd at a reading for a travel book.
“When you have a bookstore event that’s a poetry reading, people ask themselves, ‘Am I interested in poetry?’ and they don’t show up. When I wrote about Ireland, (“Finding Ireland: a Poet’s Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture”), people showed up because they were interested in Ireland.”
His next travel book is “Breakfast at the Airport,” which he says will include a piece about Memphis. “I try to recapture some of the things you felt as a child when you write about your home.”