On Going Home: Remembering Tyrone Williams

In late February 2024, I heard that Tyrone Williams was very ill and in the hospital. I was stunned. We had talked on the phone just a few weeks earlier, and he told me he was leaving his recent position at SUNY Buffalo, where he was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters. It was too much for him. He was going home, but he wasn’t sure if that would be Cincinnati, where he’d worked for many years, or Detroit, where he had grown up and where his family still lived. We talked about his next trip to New York City, and he assured me that he would stay with me, so we could catch up.

We first became friends in 1981, when Tyrone and I were in a Ph.D. program at Wayne State University in Detroit. Right off, we bonded over our shared interest in poetry and literary theory. We were both born into working class Detroit families, both of our fathers had worked for the auto industry, and we were both critical of a bourgeois mainstream lifestyle and politics. We read and critiqued each other’s poems and attended many poetry readings together. At my first poetry reading at the university, Tyrone introduced me. I had just begun the series of poems I was calling “Ghost Poems,” later published as Smoking in the Twilight Bar (United Artists). I still have his playful, rhyming introduction—

The Cheshire Cat

There once was a ghost chick named Henning
Who slept in her ghosts’ dirty linen;
she roasted her roosters,
and toasted her boosters,
and now she laughs like a cat that fades, grinning. 

                           love Tyrone

I remember Tyrone coming to eat spaghetti with me and my two young children. I remember walking with him and Mookie, my then two-year-old son, through campus. I remember the wide Detroit sky and how we would stop by a decorative pool, a place where Mookie liked to play. I remember sitting on the steps talking, perhaps about our relationships or a book we were reading or about our professors or fellow grad students. Tyrone was genuinely interested in people. By the time he died, he had friends all over the country. He liked to gossip, but he was never mean or malicious. He could be playfully dismissive, but I never knew him to hold a grudge. And he had a brilliant mind—sharp, witty, with a wry sense of humor.

When his Ph.D. coursework was completed, Tyrone accepted an offer as an instructor at Xavier University in Cincinnati. His advisors, Charlie Baxter and Ed Hirsch had discouraged him from taking the position; they thought he would have better prospects if he waited until he had finished his dissertation. But he had already struggled enough trying to live off a teaching assistant’s salary. The promise of a full-time salary, though small, was too much to pass up.

Shortly after Tyrone moved to Cincinnati in the early ’80s, I dropped out of the graduate program and moved to New York City. We didn’t have unlimited phone calling back then, and long-distance calls were expensive and only possible occasionally. Instead, we sent each other many letters—handwritten and typed—with our poems included. Reading those letters now, I’m reminded of how difficult it was for both of us to adjust to new locales. Detroit was a racially mixed city, as was the university, and Tyrone and I had both lived in the Cass Corridor, a diverse community near the university—artists, intellectuals, and mostly on the left. Cincinnati, by contrast, was, as Tyrone put it, “supra-conservative, German-Irish Catholic.” When I visited him in Cincinnati, not long after he’d moved there, we went to a coffee shop and people stared at us—a Black man and a white woman eating toast and eggs.

“Mama’s Boy,” a poem written by Tyrone in the ’80s and first published in Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press, 2011), and later, with revisions, as it appears below, in Stilettos in a Rifle Range (Wayne State University Press, 2022), speaks to some of the difficulties Tyrone faced:

At least once a month a man
boards a bus bound for the Motor City.
One bag, a few books. Nevertheless,
he always tells himself
I just might leave Cincinnati for good—
just cut out—
never look back . . .

When he arrives in Detroit he drinks
and drinks it all in until he’s dead drunk
on all fours, a two-year-old
mama’s boy, bawling
all night, night after night
for the salty milk of his mother
turning in her sleep from a hard back …

When he takes at long last
the last bus back to the Queen City,
long after the only rest stop, 
he notices the first signs: 
merciless thirst, swollen ankles,
what the folks down South
call sugar.

Tyrone dedicated “Mama’s Boy” to Michel Tournier’s novel The Four Wise Men, in which an imagined wise man engages in a frivolous pursuit of a recipe for a delicacy, only to end up in prison where he finds a path forward. By including this dedication, Tyrone offers hope for the man in his poem.

I remember worrying about Tyrone (we worried about each other and consoled each other in our letters). Heartbroken over a recent breakup with his fiancée, he was broke, spending too much money on partying, and, like the man in the poem, he was homesick and taking the bus back and forth from Cincinnati to Detroit.

Somehow Tyrone figured it out. He got off the bus, finished his dissertation, made friends in Cincinnati, and lived frugally until he paid off his debts; he wrote many poems, essays, and reviews, and he became a wiser man.

In the late ’90s, Tyrone and I talked about writing a collaborative poem with clips from our letters. We never actually wrote the poem, but in an email to me, Tyrone reflected on the situation revealed in our early letters.

I suppose my major experience of reading the letters was how uncertain, disheveled and tumultuous our lives seemed [in the eighties]. Not only our personal relationships, but our professional lives and “options” seemed, based on the letters, rather precarious. Yet we made it through, somehow.

When Tyrone was in the hospital dying, I learned that in the early ’80s he had become involved with a church in Cincinnati; in fact, he was one of the founding members. I was surprised because he had never mentioned the church to me, nor to others I’ve spoken with in our shared poetry world. For some reason, he kept these communities separate from each other. We will never know exactly what Tyrone’s religion meant to him, but I can’t imagine him being dogmatic or narrow-minded about anything that was important to him. He was a committed cultural critic and a left-leaning poet, dedicated to writing poems and essays that exposed ignorance and injustice, and to teaching his students to do the same.

When email became popular, we stopped writing letters to each other. No more fat envelopes stuffed with legal-size yellow pages full of Tyrone’s script. We were busy and email was fast, and perfect for making arrangements. We collaborated on a magazine, Long News: In the Short Century; we invited each other to read—in Cincinnati, New York City, and Tucson; we made plans to read together or to meet up in Detroit; we wrote blurbs, reviews, and recommendations for each other; and occasionally we’d send each other long emails about more personal concerns. Tyrone got married; I had two teenage children. At one point, we were both chairs of our respective departments.

After Tyrone began to travel around the country giving poetry readings, I’d occasionally run into him unexpectedly in New York City. In 2012, I was at a fundraiser dance for Belladonna, and surprise, Tyrone was there. I was with a new partner-date, and I remember Tyrone looking at me and raising his eyebrows. We both laughed. We used to know what was going on with each other’s love life. My son was also at the event, photographing, and he took a photo of Tyrone that I really love (see cover image).

Tyrone was taken to the hospital in February 2024 after losing control of his car while headed to the airport to pick up a poet scheduled to read at the university. He had mixed up the date—the poet wasn’t coming for another week. He had no advance warning that he was dying from pancreatic cancer, and that the cancer had already moved into his brain. When I called Tyrone in the hospital, he was lucid but weak. He told me he was going home. I had heard hospice was arranging to bring him back to Cincinnati, but I wasn't sure, so I asked him if he would be going to Cincinnati or Detroit. He said, “Home, Barb, I'm going home.”