James Richardson
James Richardson’s Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms will
be published by Ausable Press in the Fall of 2004. His previous books include Vectors:
Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2001), a collection of 500 miniatures, How Things
Are (2000), A Suite for Lucretians (1999), As If (1992), which was
selected by Amy Clampitt for the National Poetry Series, Second Guesses (1984), Reservations
(1977), and two critical studies, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity (1977)
and Vanishing Lives: Style and Self in Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, Swinbrune and Yeats
(1988). Winner of a 2002 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, the Cecil Hemley and Robert H. Winner awards of the Poetry Society of America and
fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for
the Humanities, Richardson has recent poems, essays and aphorisms in Best American
Poetry 2001, Slate, Yale Review, Paris Review, Boulevard, Science
News, Georgia Review, Poetry Daily, Ploughshares, and Great
American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present.
Richardson was born in Bradenton, Florida in 1950, grew up in the suburbs of New York, and
currently lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife, Victorianist Constance W. Hassett, and
their younger daughter. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton
University, where he has taught since 1980.
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On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
1. A beginning ends what an end begins.
2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full.
3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough
even for myself.
4. The best time is stolen time.
5. All work is the avoidance of harder work.
6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from
hearing.
7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music.
8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?
9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless,
hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure
because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all
acts, all languages are already translation.
10. Writer: how books read each other.
11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers
of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love.
12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I
wouldn’t know anything.
13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More
than enough.
14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you
make a new smear.
15. There are silences harder to take back than words.
16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.
17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself.
18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from
reading what they expected you to mean.
19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism.
20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost
self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in
which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece
belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years,
or will never do.
21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of.
22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole
book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.
23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes
that we hadn’t realized was open).
24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it,
to have said it?
Back in 1993, I was looking at Montaigne for an essay to be called "On
Likeness." A note sent me to the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, which I read not only
with delight, but with eager disagreement. "Wait, that’s not right,"
I’d mutter, or "That’s not all," scribbling some
correction or rotation of one of his insights. Soon, aphorisms were fizzing up in response
to whatever I was reading—which was, more and more, Antonio Porchia, Marie von
Ebner-Eschenbach, and The Oxford Book of Aphorisms—and I hardly had the
attention span for longer thought. This was a distracting, obviously useless, and vaguely
guilty pleasure, like playing video games or eating corn chips. Who’d want to hear my
strictures and paradoxes? What about "Show don’t tell"? What about
"negative capability"? If they mean anything, I suppose, they mean a writer had
better be content not knowing exactly what he’s doing, and I certainly didn’t.
And, after all, the best time is stolen time. Though I sometimes struggled heroically not
to write it Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays, a collection of 500
miniatures, was published by Chase Twichell’s new Ausable Press in the fall of 2001.
150 new ones will appear in Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms. As
for that essay, it’s... in progress.
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