About Tim Kelly

I went to a boys-only Jesuit High School on west 30th St. in Cleveland; it was a hidebound place, excellent for the basics and classics, and great for long friendships.  But the English class sampling of Poetry featured the likes of John Milton and William Blake.  Three years later, as an undergraduate in my junior year (I majored in Neurosciences) I signed up for a Contemporary Poetry Class, and studied Rich, Kinnell, Bly, Bishop, Plath, and I was never the same.  Who knew?

My senior year featured a heavy dose of contemporary fiction, and a year-long poetry writing intensive.  At the end of that year, I applied to two medical schools, and didn’t get into either; I took this as a sign that I should study what truly interested me.  After a couple of years of construction work, I applied to Boston University’s MFA equivalent program (it was officially an MA in English with a Creative Dissertation.)  I did deep dives there into Yeats, Elliot, Pound, then Lowell, Ashbery, Strand, Eavan Boland, and Seamus Heaney.

In Boston, I first read Donald Hall’s “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird;” Also essays by Charles Wright, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Eavan Boland, and Adrienne Rich.  I took a year-long side-trip into Surrealism, from France and into America.  In 1979, I realized I would not teach for a living, and began a two year MS program in Physical Therapy in Seattle at University of WA, graduated in 1981, and moved to Olympia, WA to start work alongside my wife, Lisa Johnson.  For the next 9 years I used my free time to read poetry collections, journals and (especially) essays in the public library.  I was a happy PT and a happy reader and writer of poetry, and by then we felt we had enough money to start a family.

We had our first son, Cole, in 1988, and a second son, Emmett, in 1990, and time to read and write shrunk a bit, but never disappeared entirely.  I published The Extremities, fourth book,  in 2008, did a short stint as an adjunct faculty member of The Evergreen State College, but the teaching was too time-intensive, and paid too poorly to continue to do both PT and teaching, and my own involvement with my kids increased (maybe counterintuitively) as they became tweens, then teens.  I spent some years writing, but without the time or drive to prioritize publishing.