Thom Tammaro

Selected Works

Poetry

Poems inspired by travels in Italy.

"This book is the steady logging of details that are our breath. Hold on to these poems for the dear life of your humanity. Here the poem and prose-poem master sings with seeming ease." —Diane Glancy, author of Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears and Rooms: New and Selected Poems.

Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan

100 poems by 100 poets inspired by the life and work of Bob Dylan. Contributors include Robert Bly, Charles Bukowski, Johnny Cash, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Tony Hoagland, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dorianne Laux, Paul Muldoon, Linda Pastan, Patti Smith, and Charles Wright.

Minnesota Writers Directory

688Blog

A link to my blog for MFA 688 Poetry Workshop, taught during spring semester 2013. I used this site to communicate with my students and to post class-relevant materials.

Here you'll find poems, essays, photos, course assignments, and links to related course materials.

Authors Guild Directory

A compendium of member websites

Authors Guild

Advocates for published authors since 1912

Works

Italian Days & Hours

Travels through Rome, Florence, Assisi, Rapallo, San Gimignano, Venice (searching for Ezra Pound's apartment), and Sepino, Tammaro's ancestral village in Molise.

Holding on for Dear Life

"Tammaro's poems are class acts of reliving, rejoicing and remembering the spectacle of the mundane, the everyday matter that we all know and too often ignore in the rush of moving forward. In the sweep of a prose poem and the slap of a lyric, his meditations on life, family, work, love, and death help us all to let go of the real and hold on to the spiritual. It's rare to have your own memory so touched by the writing of another"

—Fred Gardaphe, author of Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture and Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative.

Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan

"The poets included in this collection want no explanations from Dylan; they are busy, if anything, using him to explain themselves. These are the people who could hold entire conversations using only Dylan quotes and a few conjunctions. Some of them are people who first realized that the words count when they first listened to Dylan. That the way it's said is as important as what is said. They get it, and reading them makes me feel that I am in very congenial company." —Chris Smither, from the Foreword