2010 National Book Award Finalist,
Poetry
James Richardson
By the Numbers
Copper Canyon Press
Photo credit: Pryde
Brown
ABOUT THE BOOK
For James Richardson, poetry is serious and speculative play for both intellect and imagination. By the Numbers is striking for its range of line and movement, for is microlyrics, crypto-quatrains, “ten-second essays,” and the twist and snap of aphorisms. Drawing from myriad fables—Ovidian, Shakespearean, georgic, and scientific—Richardson makes familiar scenes strange enough to provoke new and startling insights.
James Richardson’s books include Interglacial: New and Selected Poems & Aphorisms, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays; and As If, which was selected by Amy Clampitt for the National Poetry Series. The recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Robert H. Winner, Cecil Hemley, and Emily Dickinson Awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, he is currently a professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Richardson’s
books include Interglacial: New and Selected Poems
& Aphorisms, which was a finalist for the National
Book Critics Circle Award; Vectors: Aphorisms and
Ten-Second Essays; and As If, which was
selected by Amy Clampitt for the National Poetry Series.
The recipient of an Award in Literature from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, the Robert H. Winner, Cecil
Hemley, and Emily Dickinson Awards from the Poetry Society
of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the New Jersey State Council
on the Arts, he is currently a professor of English
and Creative Writing at Princeton University.
SUGGESTED LINKS
James Richardson's Webpage
at Princeton University
www.princeton.edu/arts
Richardson's Copper Canyon
Press Webpage
www.coppercanyonpress.org
EXCERPT
In Shakespeare
by James Richardson
In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. Others confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
when they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, to die—yes, finally—in
glad pain.
You marry a woman you've never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don't remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. O god, it's all so realistic
I can't stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.
Such a relief to burst from the theater
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who's who and what's what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.