Timmy Straw

William Blake talks about the “Poetic character,” without which, he says, we would be locked in “the ratio of all we have already known . . . unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.” He who sees the ratio only, he warns, sees only himself. I think this might be true, and for this reason I don’t believe in the idea of finding one’s voice; it seems to me that the point is instead to escape it. Every new poem is a break into the living world—a break that can’t be used twice, because your voice will come after you, and you’ll always need to find new ways to outwit it. One way to do this is to have a constraint, a limit, an adversary—formal or substantive. In my first book, The Thomas Salto, Ronald Reagan is that enemy. As a kid growing up in a low-income family in 1980s Oregon, I saw Reagan as a threat shimmering at the edges of our daily life. Through him, I came to recognize what I loved in the world, because he, in turn, seemed to menace everything I loved. Reagan would take away the old woman with the flower-patterned wheely-cart on the bus; he would take away the blackberries in the weeded lot behind the Kmart; he would take our house, our food, and he would replace them with ketchup, blue Chrysler minivans, and the parts of the Bible concerned monomaniacally with salvation. In the poems I’m working on now—mangled and key-shifted translations of the biblical psalms—my adversary is the original psalms’ mythical author: the warlord and early singer of songs, our western lyric antecedent and our revenant, the so-called King David.

Timmy Straw is a poet, musician, and translator. Their poetry often seeks its shape in techniques of music—counterpoint, polyrhythm, ornamentation—and in the experience of the body as a bearer of social meanings. Straw’s first collection, The Thomas Salto (Fonograf Editions, 2023), takes its name and guiding image from a difficult and dangerous gymnastic move: a leaping triple flip popularized during the final years of the Cold War. The poems shadow Reagan-era politics, the AIDS epidemic, the war on drugs, U.S. proxy wars, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The collection, Jesse Nathan wrote in McSweeney’s, “marries politics and aesthetics in a way maybe not seen since George Oppen...the gift of this collection is both the lyric mystery it generates and the position of moral clarity from which it operates.” 

Straw spent their twenties working what they describe as a series of “odd, low-wage jobs” and making music; their album State Parks was released in 2010. In their thirties Straw received a scholarship to Reed College, where they majored in Russian. Straw went on to study at the Iowa Writers Workshop and is currently finishing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. They are also working on two poetry projects—the psalm series, and a longer work about Los Angeles—and on translations of Russian poets Osip Mandelstam, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Grigori Dashevsky. Their work has been supported by a Fulbright fellowship (to Moscow), a Kone Foundation grant, the Provost’s Visiting Writer fellowship at the University of Iowa, and Callie’s Berlin. The Thomas Salto was listed in the top ten poetry collections of 2023 in the New York Times and Washington Post. 

Recent and selected works by Straw include “Psalm 88 / Flowers cut will sing their clime” (The Yale Review, 2026), “Psalm 3 / You have kissed the wig” (Harper’s, 2025), “The Bournemouth cliffs of America” (Bennington Review, 2025), “Pinwheels of Goshen” (Harper’s, 2023), “Little song in the Locrian” (The Yale Review, 2023), and “Brezhnev” and “Oracle at Dog” (The Paris Review, 2023).