Peninsula Poetry

Henry Timm is an actor, director, poet, playwright and publisher who is well known to Peninsula Pulse readers, having written articles about books, local theater and literary events. He and Nancy Rafal published N.E.W. Voices: A Literary Magazine in 2011-12.

In 2014, Timm directed the world premiere of the English-language version of Policy, a play by Antonio Muñoz de Mesa presented by Rogue Theater in Sturgeon Bay.

In 2015, his first chapbook, Minimal Screeds and Transcendental Scrawls, saw the light of day. A second collection, Learning How To See – Art as Vision: Meditations on Poetry and Painting, is scheduled for release. Also in 2015, Timm contributed his poetic and publishing talents to Soundings: Door County in Poetry, an anthology edited by the Door County Poets Collective headed by Estella Lauter.

Timm’s love of myth, theatre and history can be felt in “Lorenzoccio’s Heresy,” a dramatic monologue from a member of the Medici family who killed his cousin, a ruler of Florence in the 16th century. (We leave it to you to decide whether his heresy is love!)

LORENZACCIO’S HERESY

My heresy is to believe in love
Transcendent as the air to breath and lung.
Our borning is a gift purely begun
With God’s connivance not so far above.

“But there is sin!” you say. I know. I know
For nothing is ordained in Heaven’s plan.
Free Will is Nature’s gift to sapient man
So through our choices love of God will show.

The body is the landscape of all Hope.
The way to Spirit is the path of Blood.
The war of Flesh with Soul’s the work of man.

Look to your heart; look to your body’s joy!
Our loins are tuned to Heaven like a harp.
We are the work of Nature’s Artisan.

“Proem” can be found in Soundings: Door County in Poetry.
PROEM: Local Poetry

I will confess, time after time
I try to read those high born eastern lines
but cannot hear a reaching melody,
nor find a heart, the center of all words.

But here our words oblige. Our poems
are not afraid of songs that can be sung,
the turning of a coy, sly, irony,
the rhythm of a soul’s awakening
to moments honed like precious stones
and polished till they glimmer in the sun.