Tim Reynolds

Very honoured to get a poem in Walt's Corner of the Long Islander (USA), a fitting tip to Bolton's connection with Walt Whitman (and George Wallace, poet in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace). The poem is a tribute to an early mentor of mine, Tim Reynolds, an American poet and translator who was dropping out of an academic career in Austin, to spend a couple of years as a barman in Oxford while living in a garret and translating the Confucian analects. This was the mid- 70s (74-76). Tim never told me how to write poetry. He showed me what it was to be a poet. I lost contact on moving to Bolton (exactly 50 years ago) and found out he'd died a couple of years ago and finally composed this tribute.

 

A five-hundred-year old alehouse in Oxford (for Tim Reynolds 1936-2022)

 

What noble words have echoed through these smoke-filled vaults?

What breakthroughs have been forged through talk and action?

But tonight Jasper is in the chair and as Chairman has to impress

The dozen young males squeezed into the alcove waiting to hear the distinguished guest.

They bray and fawn until Jasper insists on reading

In its entirety, The Tay Bridge Disaster by William McGonagall

In a mock Scottish accent unworthy of a man with a private education.

Throughout I squirm as the guest’s guest, of no earthly interest to the gaggle of tin-brained toffs.

I sense these people are morons. Rich, entitled morons.

The bridge collapses. We refill our glasses. The reading starts. The guest’s collection is about the Inuit, their life and customs

Their environment and ecology, their beliefs and taboos.

Before this farrago he has been a Professor of Classics

A playwright and translator of Confucius.

The fops feign interest until their attention fails

And their fidgeting prompts Jasper’s speech of thanks.

Later I say, ‘Tim, how the hell can you put up with such patronising crap?’

He is from Texas. He is a student of the sage.

‘Dave’, he says, ‘you have much to learn. A gentleman does not opine.’

With a twenty-pound note in his pocket

He is assured of next week’s rent, a cube of Lebanese gold

And the freedom to return to the world of books and the real art of study.

Dave Morgan 2025