The poet, long a resident of Oak Park, was sitting high above downtown a few days ago as rain fell, telling me, “Poetry is the journalism of the imagination” and all sorts of other interesting and ambitious things.
His name is J.J. Tindall, John Joseph more formally, and he is a talkative, enthusiastic man who has had a number of jobs during his working life, all of which have been based on words and music.
He is now 63 and is, he says, “proud of it. You wouldn’t believe the discounts I can get. I am looking to get a wisdom discount.”
He’s accumulated plenty. Born in Minneapolis and raised in Naperville, he’s the son of an insurance man and a mother who was the longtime humor columnist for the Naperville Sun newspaper. He loved them both and vividly remembers the day his mom gathered him and his father to announce that she was going to start work full-time, and taught them both how to use the family washing machine.
He attended Illinois State University and Northeastern Illinois University, eventually earning a master’s degree in English literature. He studied journalism and communication but his real aim was to be a songwriter. He played drums and guitar in various local bands and wrote lyrics.
He got hooked on poetry through music when he watched an old film clip of Mick Jagger’s reading of Percy Shelley’s “Adonais” at the 1969 memorial of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones.
It is a great poem by a great poet and it led Tindall to the work of other poets, even as he started a career in journalism, working for a financial industry trade publication here. He published his first poem after his magazine’s editor, Bob Tamarkin, asked him to write a short poem for his 1990 book “The Merc: The Emergence of a Global Financial Powerhouse.”
That led to his first collection, “Joe the Dream.” Newcity called it “much worthwhile.”
He loved going out to hear music but was never drawn to the stages of the city’s lively poetry slam scene.
“I would go to listen often and respected many of the poets performing,” he says. “But for me, the performance aspect distracted me from the text. For me, I had a need to perform my poetry with music and musicians.”
He did so traveling and performing with musicians in Europe and across this country. His primary income came from working as a tour guide for the Chicago Motor Coach company and then, after he was recruited, for Shoreline Sightseeing.
“It is as poetic a job as you can have,” he told me. “There is a lot of freedom, within certain limits. I write what I say, and the four- to six-hour-long tours I do every day also satisfy certain performance desires.”
His writing got a lot of exposure from 2007 to 2019 when he was the “poet in residence” for the lively and smart but sadly no-longer-in-operation political/cultural online publication Beachwood Reporter, run by journalist Steve Rhodes.
In the foreword to Tindall’s 2010 collection, “Ballots from the Dead: Poems by J.J. Tindall selected from the Beachwood Reporter,” Rhodes wrote, “J.J.’s dreams are heavy, but must they be so? No reader with any depth of soul could think so. His poetry is about the constant interference by outside forces of those things, which we — he — really cherish. Or ought to. A life of dreams shouldn’t be so hard when the dreams are so real.”
Around that time, I wrote of Tindall’s work: “(It) is conversational and direct, clear-eyed and less wistful than palpably in love with Chicago’s past and, more guardedly, its present.”
His tour guide work would come to an end when COVID-19 came. “The pandemic really shut things down,” he says. “But it also allowed me to explore new ways to use my poetry with music.”
And so he now devotes most of his time — in addition to making a living by using his academic credentials to do some private consulting to pay the bills — to the creation of material for YouTube and Bandcamp. You can also find him on other streaming sites.
To hear and watch his latest work is to see his future. Some of the work is from the past but given a new and exciting life with music and videos and photos. But at the core, at his core, it’s all about the word and here are some from his poem “Ozymandias at Damascus”:
Picture Lawrence on a ridge above Damascus
munching olives in his military rolls.
Masked as a high sharif, September, 1918.
A far cry from private rooms in Cairo:
silk sheets, damask rife w/oil dust.
On the brink of a dreamed betrayed
he thinks perhaps it’s
time to leave.
Perhaps it’s time to leave Damascus, leave the mask behind.
Out the window of the room in which we are sitting and listening and watching, one can see boats gliding up and down the river.
“That was my life for so many years,” he says. “Now I have my third book ready. And I’m particularly excited about my new platforms on YouTube and Bandcamp. I believe that artists don’t have to leave town to make it anymore if they use these platforms effectively. We can keep cool independent artists here.”
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
