ARTISTS POET WRITES FOR LOVE, NOT MONEY

There is a place/so far away/I shouldn’t even think about it/and a city of glass/clear as an embryo’s mind. /By this time tomorrow/maybe we’ll live there.

-Tim Seibles

Tim Seibles is a poet. And he is black, thirty-three years old, and an SMU graduate. He used to teach English at North Dallas High School, but he quit in June of 1987 to be a full-time writer. “I go to the mall to work,” he says. “I like to watch people, the many faces streaming past.” He is married, but has an apartment/studio where he rewrites what he’s written at the mall and sometimes sleeps. It is packed with paperback books of poetry and philosophy, and has a big. low chair in the center of an otherwise almost bare room. “I like to have a place.” he says, “where I can unplug the phone and latch the door and know that the world can’t get in to me.”

Seibles does not write about Dallas-his poems are not that precisely set in a place-but some images of the city do appear, like those shining towers of glass, “’clear as an embryo’s mind” And he does not write in explicit detail about being black, although some passages obviously suggest that he is. What he does write about are images of life common to us all, like eating French fries at McDonald’s, or the sticky footprints of slugs that crystallize by morning.

Seibles’s first book of poetry (“Body Moves,” available at Shakespeare Books) was published in June by Corona Publishing Company of San Antonio. “Publishers don’t publish poetry books for profit,” he says. “’It’s more like a charity case, because they know it won’t sell.” And the public’s indifference to poetry sets him on fire, “I can really get mad,” he says, “when I think about how poetry is taught in schools. You can’t teach kids Shakespeare and expect them to identify with it because they don’t talk that way.” It’s best to start students with modern poets who write in the language of the streets, he says, and then work back to Shakespeare after students have learned to appreciate the thought and the images behind the poetry. “Poetry is not just rhyme and meter,” Seibles says. shaking his head.

Unfortunately, writing poetry does not pay very well, and Seibles’s days as a full-time poet are about to end. He will be teaching English at the Episcopal School of Dallas this fall. “But that’s okay.” he says, “’because I know that I am al-ways first a poet.”