THE TALK ABOUT TITO
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So much music that you begin to picture the writer with a guitar in his hands. The spareness, bawdiness, and understated (often macabre) humor that runs through this book reminded me a lot of the school of Charles Bukowski.
- Bethany Reid, A Habit of Writing, bethanyareid.com
I'm entranced by [Tito's] Haunting Bolinas . . . . This is a poem that holds the reader in suspense from beginning to end. I used to read Richard Brautigan and I admired his work. I may have imitated him a bit, but that makes Haunting Bolinas even more vital to me.
- Garrison Keillor, The Writer's Almanac
Poet Tito Titus is a born storyteller and a word lovers word lover. Professional poetry-likers as well as people who never read poetry will find something on every page of Errol Flynn to startle our tears and raise the hair on the backs of our necks. He "shows [us] his heart / until its last breath."
- Lydia Swartz, Shufflepoems
(Minor Arcana Press)
Tito. . . you are a naturally gifted storyteller, and one of the things I like best about your work is how very much story you get into the naturally compressed space of the poems. Your work contains beautiful and evocative images. . . Your language is often gorgeously musical.
- Francesca Bell, Bright Stain
(Red Hen Press)
“
He's verbose but interruptible.
- David Shaheen, M.D., Psychiatry
HERE'S A LITTLE SOMETHING ABOUT TITO
He spent his early years with his sheepherding family, isolated in a remote stretch of Hells Canyon on Snake River, 100 miles upstream from the nearest city, Lewiston, Idaho.
A lifetime later, he lives with his wife Kate in Seattle’s most populous community, Capitol Hill—"a northern cultural outpost of San Francisco.” Along the way, he worked on ranches and farms, fought range fires, barked in a carnival, went to war (the one John Prine called “the conflict overseas,” earned a master's in urban planning, ran for public office, joined a theater troupe (Little Red Studio), made art (Sev Shoon Gallery) modeled for artists, wrote quasi-judicial environmental reports, and served two terms on the Seattle Design Commission. He writes because he doesn’t know how to stop.
In 2015, Empty Bowl Press published his first poetry collection, I can still smile like Errol Flynn. His poetry and/or satire have appeared in Puget Soundings, Argus, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Red Light District: Seattle Erotic Art Festival’s Literary Art Anthology (Foundation for Sex Positive Culture, 2011), Poets Unite! LitFUSE 10th Anniversary Anthology (Cave Moon Press, 2016), Paco-Michelle Atwood’s World Inside Designer Jeans (AuthorHouse, 2013), The Little Red Anthology (Little Red Press, 2009), Pandemic Poetry (Headline Poetry & Press, 2020), and In Parentheses Journal, 2020)
Tito received the 2003 MLK Humanitarian Award from King County Washington, in recognition of his "outstanding commitment to the values and beliefs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."
In 2023. Empty Bowl Press and 2022/23 Washington State Poet Laureate Rena Priest included Tito's poem "Salmon of a Man" in the anthology I Sing the Salmon Home.
Garrison Keillor featured two of Tito’s poems on The Writers Almanac in May 2020: "Haunting Bolinas," about the suicide of poet and writer, Richard Brautigan, and "The Night John Prine Died," written during the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic.