Poet James Richardson joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and Christian Barter to talk about his collection of new and selected poetry, Within the Hour. Richardson discusses how his early fascination with science and his enjoyment of science fiction has influenced his poetry and considers the way his aphorisms counterbalance his more lyric poems. He reflects on the role that literary criticism has played in his career as a poet and gives listeners a rare glimpse into his process of inspiration and composition. He speculates on the increasing role that politics has played in his new work, particularly since 2016, and reads from Within the Hour.
To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net This podcast is produced by Christian Barter, Whitney Terrell, Valen Williams, Ashley Holmes, Rylee Adamson, and Lucien Hockaday.
Within the Hour: Poems and Aphorisms, 1971-2026 • For Now • During • By the Numbers • Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms • Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
Others
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES RICHARDSON
Christian Barter: This collection goes back to 1971, and I just want to begin by asking what it’s like to put together a work that encompasses so much of the poetry in your life. You have a previous new and selected called Interglacial, published in 2004. Some of those poems are included here; others aren’t. I want to put in a quick plug to pick up that other book, Interglacial, because there’s some terrific poems in there that just wouldn’t fit in this one. But what was it like to put together a collection of this wide expanse? And did you discover things about your own work in doing that?
James Richardson: Well, it was fun. I did it with [my wife] Connie. She’s my in-house reader. She’s an awesome reader. She’s been reading my work for 50 years, so we just went through it and picked out stuff. I mean, I guess you learned a lot. I mean, I could be sad that 55 years fits in a book, even a little logbook, even if it’s only half of what I wrote.
Although I don’t think I am. I’m happy with the book. They tell you when you do this, you can’t revise your old poems. And I said the first time, “Oh yes, I can.” But you know what? They were right. You can’t do it because it’s never just like one little thing wrong with a poem, especially if it’s out of your reach. And in the past, you do a little surgery and you cut a nerve you didn’t even know was there, and then you have to do more and more. So the only way to revise old stuff is to either keep it or take it out. So I kept all that out, more than I maybe would have if I had felt free to have 300 pages and more, and maybe my publisher would have let me do that. But you don’t want to do that to readers.
I’m thinking of somebody who’s never read any of my work. Most people who buy this book probably will be that. I don’t want them to land first thing on a thing I wobbled about keeping in the book. I’d rather have the standard be higher. I mean, when I read it, some things, you know, surprise me.
There’s a poem called “Encyclopedia of the Stones” in my first book, and I still like that poem. I still read it, although in the selection I cut a lot out. I think about the best sections. Gee, I’m not even sure I could write that today. In general, it takes a long time to get to the place where I was writing the kinds of poems I write now that felt like I belonged in this book. It was probably late ’30s and maybe ’40s before I could do it with fair consistency, I’m not sure what that means, “the kind of poem.” I’m not saying the kind of poem I should be writing. Just the kind of poem that I have been writing. You think every book there’s this kind of poem that I should be writing that I can’t write yet, and I still feel that way, you know. I’m past this book already, and I’m into the next thing. This poem is still eluding me, which is probably a good thing. It’ll keep me going.
Whitney Terrell: So your work has always been engaged with science, you know, and research in different ways over the years. I think of earlier poems such as “Are We Alone Or Physics You Can Do at Home” with lines like “Always the vanishingly small but non-zero possibility: all protons in the room might decay spontaneously.” In the newer poems in this book, several are directly connected with the cosmos and the forces at work in large bodies of the universe, like “Cosmological” and “Momentum.” Can you talk about the relationship between your poetry and your interest in science in general? When did that start? Was that always there?
JR: I saw the thing about all the particles in the room simultaneously decaying in a science fiction story I read when I was about nine and that stuck with me somehow. I still read science fiction—in fact it’s my genre, in a way. Science is the road not taken.
When I was a kid, that’s what I thought I was going to do. I learned the high school chemistry course when I was in seventh or eighth grade on my own because I wanted to learn how to balance equations to make explosives. I took two years of chemistry in high school, and I was into a second year of physics and picking calculus before I was lying on the bed one night reading Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and thinking, “Oh my God, this math stuff is hard. And I’ll have to be a poet because I’m going to die.”
I dropped a physics course and took a long vacation from calculus. I did not take any science in college, but it was a couple years before I actually started writing. I still read more science magazines than literary magazines. So it’s like information there, and I think it gives me a lot of things. First of all, it’s just interesting in itself. Maybe I have the engineer genes from my father, and I’m still interested in how things work. The sense of scale in science is I like to feel at all times that there are 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe on the one hand, and on the other hand, this desk I’m leaning on has unbelievable voids in it that I don’t know anything about. And somewhere in between those, there’s this little skin of life on Earth, and within that skin, the tiny skin of the thing we call consciousness, which is mostly unconsciousness. I like to have that sense of frailty and flexibility, because otherwise I would be a person too rigid to write poems, but I feel like it helps me, and I feel science has a kind of magical literalism that helps me see things anew, and you know, I just like the facts.
CB: Jim, I want to ask you about another sort of recurring concept that I see in your work over the years, which is your thinking about endings and the possibility of things ending, or the possibility that certain things never end. A favorite early Richardson poem of mine is called “As If Ending.” It concludes “when a migration, little different from evening / leveling, took its place on the water, / ending nothing since nothing ends.” That idea, that the concept of ending as a paradox recurs in your work, which often plays with the idea of time having a structure at all. I wondered if you would talk about your thinking about time and endings in your poetry?
JR: Yeah, I think about [endings] a lot. I think about the aphorism: “A beginning ends. What an end begins.”
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rylee Adamson, Valen Williams, Ashley Holmes, and Lucien Hockaday.
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