This retired clown sends poems to reporters. He’s turned his attention to Idaho
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Retired clown Tim Torkildson has sent reporters thousands of poems since 2014.
- He turned his focus to Idaho news in preparation for his move to Jerome.
- He prefers writing haiku for brief reflection and avoids topics like murder or Epstein.
Reporters are accustomed to receiving feedback on their stories in a variety of forms: angry phone calls, emails offering corrections, letters to the editor.
But the haiku in my inbox was unexpected.
It came from Tim Torkildson, a retired Ringling Bros. clown and self-described “poet for hire” who has written thousands of such poems based on news articles that resonated with him.
Torkildson, 73, has been writing these poems — and sending them to the articles’ authors — since 2014. The New York Times, long a recipient of his poetry, wrote that he was “pretty close” to being their newsroom’s poet laureate.
“When I started reading stories that affected me, I just felt like I should write something,” Torkildson told the Idaho Statesman by phone. “I used to write a lot of letters to the editor, and then it just kind of morphed into emails, because you don’t have to pay for postage. And it continued to morph into short poems.”
In May, it morphed into poems about Idaho.
Torkildson turned his focus to Idaho news in preparation for his recent move from Washington, D.C., to Jerome. He sent Statesman reporters poems, mostly haiku, based on stories about Latter-day Saints church members’ politics, a computer outage that led to canceled final exams at Boise State, and a column on Idaho prisons charging for phone calls.
On Latter-day Saints members’ politics, he wrote:
pews are bolted down but cushions can be shifted — parking lot dogma.
Statesman columnist Scott McIntosh said receiving a poem “just brightened my day.”
“It’s always nice to know that someone is reading your stuff,” he said. “It’s even better when someone acknowledges it with a personal note. Better yet is when someone puts effort and time into a creative message.”
Though Torkildson has sent limericks to reporters in the past, he generally reserves that form for silly or lighthearted stories, he said. He writes all kinds of poetry but prefers haiku, he said, because they are brief and can be left open to interpretation.
“I love looking at photography. You get a snapshot of something, and you look at it, you appreciate it, and boom — you’re done, and you can move on,” he said. “That’s kind of the way I use my poetry.”
As for topics, he said, “the stories choose me.” He writes haiku based on any article whose headline draws him in, though he avoids especially touchy subjects.
“Anything involving murder, you know, or mass killings, I tend to stay away from,” he said. “And I am so sick and tired of this whole Epstein affair. Any story that has to do with Epstein and his emails and his letters — I don’t touch those with a 10-foot pole.”
He has sent poems to reporters at other Idaho news outlets, he said, but none of them responded. He seems unfazed: It’s not his first time getting the cold shoulder.
“From reporters, the reason they usually give is time constraints. They say: ‘I can’t. I’m snowed under with emails, and I don’t have time to really read your stuff and do justice to it,’ ” he said. “That may simply be a polite way of saying, ‘I don’t like your stuff.’ ”
‘Why would you write poetry if it’s about the rules?’
Haiku date back to 13th-century Japan, when the short poems were used as the opening phrases of longer works.
Poets nowadays often break the rules around haiku — how many syllables are in each line, for example — but keep its philosophy, focusing on a brief moment in time and a “sense of sudden enlightenment,” according to Poets.org.
At times when Torkildson has left his haiku in news articles’ comments sections, readers often comment on his success or failure at following the haiku’s trademark syllable pattern: 5, 7, 5.
Those replies are missing the substance of his poems, he said. He doesn’t read them anymore.
“Why would you write poetry if it’s about the rules?” he asked. “That’s obviously not what poetry is about.”
He hasn’t always been so laid-back. He spent much of his career working as a clown with Ringling Bros., and during the offseason included his kids in his acts at local schools. It was fun, but he acknowledges now that he was too strict with them.
“I always took my clowning very seriously,” he said. “They wanted to have fun being a clown, and being a clown is a lot of fun. But I was kind of like, I don’t know, some kind of maestro, and I wanted them to get it exactly right. And when they didn’t, I’d give them a hard look, maybe a couple of hard words.
“That’s one of the things I do regret.”
But these days, a sense of whimsy seems to pervade his life: In 2018, he wrote a book of satirical poetry called Clump of Trump. His LinkedIn profile boasts a made-up patent for a “Jingle Bells Comb: A battery-operated comb for people with dandruff” and an award, issued by Plastic Surgeons of Iowa, for “Best Face for Radio.”
During a period of unemployment decades ago, he took to D.C.’s Capitol Hill in his clown costume and sat on a bench holding a poster that read: “Unemployed Circus Clown. Please Help Put Me in Congress, Where I Belong!”
The move wasn’t intended as a protest, he recalled.
“I don’t know what I was doing,” he said. “I was just desperate to make a little money.”
The through line, for him, has been a willingness to inhabit the “spirit of the buffoon.”
“In retirement, I think, most men have a hobby. You know, I ought to be out fishing — this is a great place to fish. Or, I would have a garden, collect stamps, or travel,” he said. “But, no. I prefer to sit in my recliner and read stories, and when they move me to write something about it and share it with the reporter, I do.”
