Field Recordings welcomes Tad Richards, the celebrated poet, painter, and artistic director of Opus 40, a sculpture park in Saugerties, New York. Richards work stretches back to the 1960s and has written a variety of work in a variety of fields. You can read more about Tad Richards career here and connect with Tad Richards here.
Name: Tad Richards
Pen Name: Same
Most recent title published: Fiction – Nick and Jake (Arcade Books), poetry – Take Five: Poems in 5/4 Time (eFitzgerald e-publishers)
Where do you write? I can’t stay in 0ne place. I move around, sometimes within the space of a single peom.
What are your rituals with regards to writing (ex: Must have tea, a cat on the lap, etc) Hard to imagine writing without coffee. And I must have a pen that I really like – a Micron, a Tech-Liner, or failing that an ultra-thin Sharpie or a Pilot Precise.
Describe your writing process: I start in longhand in 6x9 sketchbook. Every time I come to a halt (this is poetry – fiction a little different), I start again, copying everything I’ve already written onto a new page.
What do you when you begin to revise? What's the first thing you do during that process? My revision process begins when I turn that first page in my sketchbook and begin recopying – and revising what I’ve written.
When revising, how many drafts do you go through before you feel comfortable with the final product? – All of which adds up to “no way to count the number of drafts.” I’m revising all the way through the first draft. After I get to the end of the poem, it probably doesn’t go through more than a couple more drafts.
When arranging lines for your poems, what do you consider at the micro level-- about the line? (For example...I never end a line on the word “and” etc.) Depends on whether I’m writing in form or free verse, but I don’t have any rules for what I will or won’t end a line with. Even when I’m writing free verse, I’m aware of a sort of loose accentual count, which governs the shape of a line.
As a poet, whose music, or voice, sometimes do you hear as you write or revise? My two great mentors were Donald Finkel and Donald Justice, and I still hear their voices.
How would you classify your poetry? Are you a lyric poet? A Romantic? A Surrealist? I’m a storyteller. Even if I’m writing something as counter-narrative as a villanelle, I’m still a storyteller.
What poets are you currently reading? Nancy Willard, Halvard Johnson, Keats, Yeats.
What poets/poems do you strongly recommend a reader to discover? “Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him,” by Nancy Willard, “Beyond the Hunting Woods” by Donald Justice, “Burden” by Donald Finkel, “Poetry of Departures” by Philip Larkin, are poems that never fail to move me. A less well-known poet who should be discovered by lots more people – Annette Basalyga. Her book is “Lifer.”
The contemporary American poetic tradition is elegy, do you discover elegiac qualities among your own writing as a whole? Are you a poet of loss? Well, Yeats said the only subjects worth writing about are sex and death, and they’re both about loss, so yeah.
Where does your inspiration come from (music, film, other books)? Words. Combinations of words that strike me. They can come from anywhere. One example – a character said this in a Tarzan movie I was watching on Saturday morning. I wrote it down, lived with it for a while, and it became the first stanza of a poem: “They used to practice cannibalism, until they went away from the river when the colonists came. It’s said they have some power over the crocodiles.”
What is your literary guilty pleasure? (trashy sci-fi adventures, bad romance novels, 50 Shades, fanfic, etc.) Country music (not the new stuff), mystery novels.
Explain how your local and regional environment influences your writing, your process, and your product (in other words, how does your reality intersect with the worlds that you create?): I live at a place that is constantly inspiring, Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York.
You have to invite three authors to dinner, who are they? Why? Can they be friends I haven’t seen in a long time? Marvin Bell, Fred Koller, Annette Basalyga. Otherwise – Proust (assuming a universal translator like on Star Trek), Rabelais (someone’s got to tell the dirty jokes), Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Favorite title (you wish you had come up with): How I Made A Million Dollars in Real Estate in My Spare Time.
Line(s) you wish you wrote: Yeats: “A line may take us hours maybe / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought / Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.”
Book you did not read in high school but now have read and have an appreciation for: And why: Middlemarch, because it’s so rich and subtle. Proust, because he is the greatest novelist ever.
Favorite words: Rhythm and blues.
Least favorite words: Right now, twerk.
Advice you would like to pass on to other writers: It’s the doing, the making, that counts. Nothing counts without that.
What you would discuss with your pet if your pet could talk: Food, probably.
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