Robert L. Tyler

	Robert L. Tyler Not quite at home I wander the changed streets looking for that light on brick facades that would prove my world was real . . .

Robert Tyler called himself a kindly old professor of history, but that hardly does justice to his life's work as a writer. In addition to numerous historical articles, books, and chapters in books, Tyler's work comprises hundreds of poems (in magazines, anthologies, and two volumes, The Deposition of Don Quixote and A Hearth of Mental Rock), articles in a free-wheeling range of journals and magazines on topics ranging from Heidegger and Wittgenstein to Mother Goose, two novels, and a children's musical play. Born in Minnesota, Tyler was a medic in World War II, a beatnik in Chicago, and an odd-job man before earning a Ph.D. in history at the University of Oregon. He taught at various universities where he had a knack of annoying the conservative administrations by sponsoring Vietnam War teach-ins and advising such organizations as The Young People's Socialist's League. Tyler played high school football at St. Paul Central. At forty-five, he still got a kick out of booming fifty-five yard punts. Tyler was a Fulbright Lecturer in 1966-67 at the University of Guyana, where he was widely assumed to be a CIA agent. Political paranoia has never been less correct. That year he and Cheddi Jagan, the Prime Minister of Guyana who had been recently deposed with help from the CIA, drank friendly shares of Demarara rum together in a gazebo by the sea. Tyler retired in the late 1980s and spent his last years in Rhode Island, where he continued to write. Tyler died in 1990. ONCE UPON A TIME When I woke up in the world it was really there I mean solid We lived in a house cellar two floors attic many rooms avuncular trees embracing windows nothing moved the house was white and long ago Home \| Rebels