Tim Lynch

Wilmington

Emerging
Literature: Poetry

By: Gail Obenreder

“I draw inspiration from poets of marginalized identities who have had to find themselves in a culture that makes its own assumptions of them.”

Tim Lynch has long been “enraptured by the beauty and excitement of horror movies.” But as a poet, he’s come to realize that this genre also has fostered his curiosity about the many dualities and conflicts that we face in adult life: “fate and choice, low brow and highbrow art, gender, racial, and sexual identities, and the sociocultural context.”

For Lynch, it made sense that he began to write poetry. In his youth, he didn’t speak much, but he wrote copiously. He realized that he was “comparing myself to people who just used a lot of words . . . [and] I just didn’t need as many words.” The compressed language of poetry, he discovered, let him “say what I need to say and shut up when the right question gets asked.”

His early poetry was formal, something that taught Lynch how form could alter meaning. “Formal poetry made it safe for me to be curious and discover my identity in all its intersectional glory.” But as he works to bridge the gap between reality and possibility, and to recontextualize the world and “the parts of myself I thought I knew,” Lynch has found that the lyric narrative mode now speaks most powerfully to him, “offering the draw of storytelling” to reach into the unknown.

As a “white, male poet,” Lynch finds that (perhaps unexpectedly) he is most inspired by women and women writers like Audre Lorde, Marie Howe, or Louise Glück. “I know what it’s like to be a man. I don’t know what it’s like to be everyone else.” He reads to explore those whose differing identities “challenge me to really look at my own and what it means in the world.”

excerpt from van gogh’s ghost rents my body to tell me about the stars some say are dead

“even death is holy
enough for me to say god
damn look at these shitty
shining stars
how they outlast
that they are nothing”

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Lynch grew up in Middletown, Delaware and lived there with his parents and brother until he left to attend Salisbury University. He then lived in Pennsylvania and New Jersey while teaching creative writing workshops and completing his 2019 Master of Fine Arts at Rutgers University / Camden, after which he moved back to Delaware, where he works in education as a paraprofessional.

He finds it a practical challenge challenging, to find the time to write. But “the work itself offers me . . . something that makes me want to make the next thing.” His manuscript-in-progress (currently titled From Inside the House) references the horror movie scenario where the audience finds that “the [threatening] call is coming from inside the house.” In the way that horror movies “are built out of known encountering unknown,” in his work Lynch seeks to create work “that best allows for all of my internal and external conflicts to resonate with one another.”

Lately, he has also been writing narrative fiction, and his first work in that genre was published in 2024. Also a musician, Lynch loves playing guitar, banjo, and “any instrument I can get my hands on,” and he formerly played slide guitar in a folk trio. He also is featured frequently in the Philadelphia area reading his poetry and is “an enthusiastic supporter” of his colleagues’ writing and careers.

The Fellowship means that Lynch will be able to “finally snag those pesky twins, time and solitude,” and he plans to seek informal or formal residencies that will enable him to finish his poetry manuscript and complete the draft of a novel. The Division’s award is “pretty incredible to me . . . I don’t take this gift lightly.”

 

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