Albany Poetry Examiner
Poetic perseverance
‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.’ ---Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2
On January 16, 1987, Tim Nuveen was brain injured in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. It cost him a good part of his memory. ‘I thought I’d be much older than this before I lost my memory,’ is one of his favorite sayings.
Did he stop writing poetry because of his injury? Not Tim Nuveen. He kept right on writing and promoting poetry in the East Bay. He served as president of the Bay Area Poets Coalition for several years, (before, during, and after his accident), as well as the Founding President Emeritus of the Center for the Arts, Religion, and Education for the Graduate Theological Union at the University of California, Berkeley. He helped initiate the arts to the curriculum and taught poetry classes there. He began a poetry group at the North Berkeley Senior Center where seniors are welcomed to participate in reading their own poems or their favorite poems from other poets. He is seen and heard regularly at many poetry venues in the East Bay including the Bay Area Poetry Coalition, Poetry Express, the El Cerrito Senor Center’s poetry group, Contra Costa County poets, and earlier at BAC, Berkeley Art Center.
His forte is writing sonnets, frequently touched with a bit of humor, and always with pearls of wisdom. He attributes much of his love of poetry to music. Socrates seemed to have Tim in mind when he wrote: ‘I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled (poets) to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.’
Besides his activity with poetry, art, and liturgical dance, he practices the religious beliefs which he taught as a pastor, by his supportive actions in the community – giving people rides to church and poetry events, attending and reading scriptures at church, and by his support of local poet’s poetry books. He has been active in the Albany Library’s monthly poetry workshop.
He is active in several local brain injury support groups.
A sample of his poetry from a collection of poetry by Adults with Acquired Brain Injury, ‘Of the Heart,’ follows.
And How
And how shall I be asked now to preside
Over the dissolution of my mind,
Lose track of dates and days and try to hide
From my own gaze that loss, be so unkind.
I’d tell myself a timid little lie
Rather than cite some people I could name,
Whom I admire, who let such flaws float by?
Lies far beyond details machines can count,
Better to let a few bright lights still burn,
Stress certain quality, not just amount;
Major in caring questions, leave replies,
Proposed in tested love, to fresher eyes.
Bio:
Tim Nuveen started writing poetry in grade school, and began studying the arts in high school. He received a BA from the University of Chicago and a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. The Nuveen Center for International Student Learning at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago opened in August 2007 through a gift from his family’s trust, the Nuveen Benevolent Trust. He earned a Master of Divinity from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. Selections of his poetry have appeared in a variety of publications plus five books of his poetry.
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