Originally published on “How to Grow a Poem” in May 2023.
"The man who writes like Pablo Neruda."
That's how the acclaimed novelist and memoirist Isabel Allende introduced James Tipton to her family, as she recalled in a foreword to Jim's Colorado Book Award-winning poetry collection Letters From A Stranger.
"Like Neruda, Jim Tipton is a man of the heart and the senses," she wrote.
Allende wasn't wrong, not in my book anyway. Jim had begun his writing career in a usual way--teaching at a small Michigan college for a number of years--but his "heart and senses" had taken him in a sharply different direction. His writing career, begun in academia as it was, eventually led him to a life of solitude in the high desert country of western Colorado, where he lived life as a beekeeper and delved deeply into his heart, senses, and the natural world surrounding him. Later still he moved to Mexico, where I met him and fell under the spell of his remarkable poetry.
But there is a very good chance you don't know his work. Like most American poets, however accomplished, he always remained under the critics' radar, despite a lifetime of impressive publication credits and numerous awards. In this America (unlike other Americas including Allende's native Chile) even the most honored poets remain little known by the public and quickly fade into the background.
And I don't think James Tipton should be left to fade away. This piece was first published in May 2023, to mark the fifth anniversary of Jim's death from cancer just days after the publication of his final book of poetry, The Alphabet of Longing and Other Poems. That's why I'm remembering him, and hoping others might discover his work as well.
You can hear him read from that last book of poetry in this video, recorded just a few weeks before he died.
And here’s a poem of his:
It Is True That I Lack Focus
It is true that I lack focus, but I live each day
with the insane sweetness of honey,
and I live each night with stars
moving over the bed; it is true
that I have little money, but I know
the fragrance of sage after a rain
and the wild heart of the desert wind.
Several lives ago I was born in Ohio,
where I slept with the window always open,
with the moon curled in these arms
like a sacred breast; and always
in the houses that surrounded me,
I listened to some tiny thing
that, like a fish in winter, survived.
Here in the canyons of western Colorado,
many things once important to me
have departed, but I no longer stand
dying of thirst on lonely balconies;
I no longer suffer through bullies
whose blood drowns hope and love.
I find goodness now in every shape of day.
It is true that I remain clumsy, but
I have become a master at following whims—
and that has brought me to those I love,
our lives joined by this moon we dance around,
our hands stretching into the dark
like long loaves of bread,
sharing the wheat of the human heart.
—James Tipton
About James Tipton (Amazon.com bio)
A descendent of Quakers, Jim Tipton was the embodiment of gentleness, kindness, and fairness--but most of all love. He was a philosopher and practitioner of these values, which came to define him. Tipton was a wanderer and seeker who gravitated to San Francisco in the 1960s and hung out at City Lights Bookstore soaking up the influences of Beat Generation poets. For thirteen years beginning in 1992-2005 he lived a solitary life as a beekeeper in the desert highlands of Colorado, where he studied the minimalist existence of creatures and plants as he searched for answers to what is truly important in life. Although he had written and published poems for many years, it was during this passage that he discovered his most powerful, emotional, and authentic voice in poetry.
Tipton published over a thousand poems, short stories, essays, and reviews in journals including The Nation, Southern Humanities Review, American Literary Review, Esquire, International Poetry Review, Modern English Tanka, Modern Haiku, Atlas Poetica, and The Christian Science Monitor. His collection of poems, Letters from a Stranger, with a foreword by Isabel Allende, won the 1999 Colorado Book Award in Poetry. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, French, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Danish, and Norwegian.
In 2005, Tipton moved to the village of Chapala in central Mexico, where he mentored a coterie of promising writers and continued to write and publish. He died at home on May 16, 2018, two weeks after the publication of his last collection of poems,The Alphabet of Longing and Other Poems.
And here is Jim reading a few more poems.
“Extraordinary poems! So simple and so honest, like an arrow straight to my longing.”
—Isabel Allende
A fine poet and a lovely human being. I first knew Jim back in Colorado in his beekeeper days. Already he was a fully-formed voice, in touch with nature and the important truths. His last book, An Alphabet of Longing is a must read. I was privileged to get one of the first edition copies at the lovely memorial service at the Lake.
Beautiful. The kind of poetry we need right now.