“Thomas Fitzsimmons was born in Lowell in October 1926. He entered WWII as a young merchant mariner following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and left the US Army Air Force after the bombing of Hiroshima. He taught for many years at Oakland University in Michigan and is now professor emeritus of literature. He has received several Fulbright fellowships to travel in Asia and Europe and was awarded three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (in the categories of poetry, translation, and belles lettres). He worked as a writer and editor for the New Republic magazine in Washington, DC, and the Asahi Daily News in Tokyo. He has written, edited or translated 60 books. As of 2003, he was editing two book series published by the University of Hawaii Press: Asian Poetry in Translation: Japan and Reflections. His books from the past ten years include Build Me Ruins: The One-Eyed Boy Grows Another Eye(2002),  Iron Harp: The Birth of the One-Eyed Boy (1999), Planet Forces (1999), Fencing the Sky (1998), and The Poetry and Poetics of Ancient Japan [a translation] (1997). With his wife, Karen Hargreaves-Fitzsimmons, he publishes Katydid Books (distributed by Univ of Hawaii Press), from their home near Santa Fe, NM (www.katydidbooks.com).” [I reprinted this biography from the website.]

In 1981, I published one of Tom’s poem in a broadside form in a series from Loom Press. The original has slightly different spacing for the lines, but I can’t find the original broadside at the moment. Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord, then of Billerica and now a book artist in Newburyport, did the poem in calligraphy as a nod to Tom’s interest in Asian poetry. Here is the poem:

Rainbow Poem

by Tom Fitzsimmons

When I was a kid

Playing hooky

Spending my dime on a loaf of Greek bread

To eat dry

High on a hillside above the Merrimack River

Outside Lowell, Massachusetts,

I did not think I

Would be sitting on Parnassus slope

Above Delphi

Eating my loaf of Greek bread

With feta, black olives,

& retsina

Looking down thru temple valley and time

To when I was a kid

Playing hooky eating my bread

Dry on the hills above the Merrimack River

Outside Lowell, Massachusetts

(written at Delphi, 1976)”