About James Richardson

James Richardson is the author of the best-selling Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Ausable Press, 2001). His poetry includes Reservations, Second Guesses, As If, which was chosen by Amy Clampitt for the National Poetry Series, A Suite for Lucretians, and How Things Are. He is the author of two critical studies, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity, and Vanishing Lives: Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Yeats. The recipient of the Cecil Hemley and Robert H. Winner Prizes from the Poetry Society of America and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University.

“There is a sense that nobody cares about poetry, which is fine—you’re doing it because you love to do it, and it’s interesting, and you know a few people will read it.”

“I think I have an internal version of all of Keats and all of Wordsworth and a lot of George Herbert and Thomas Hardy and Yeats . . . it’s all there. I’m usually not aware when I’m accessing it, but it’s all there.”

On Teaching:

“One reason that students have poetry anxiety is that they were taught by people who feel the same way . . . They either didn’t know what to do with it or conveyed the fact they didn’t like it, or they made up these incredibly elaborate interpretations that no one could believe, and students then think, ‘Oh, that’s what poetry’s about, poets put in these elaborate interpretations in order for you to decode them.’  But decoding them isn’t that fun, so they think they have no natural pleasure in it . . . If anything, what I’ll do is convince them that I like the stuff, and that I’m not kidding. Hopefully they’ll like it too.”

“As a graduate student, I was very young, I really wanted to read and write, and I was incredibly shy. I was one of the people who never talked in class, so how was I going to teach a class?  I tried not to think about it.  The idea of public speaking, if I’d ever gotten that far, or lecturing, that would’ve appalled me.”

On Writing Interglacial:

“Compiling Interglacial and revisiting my past work was kind of odd. I don’t know what I thought it would be like . . . It’s strange because as soon as you start, you want to fix things that you did 30 years ago, thinking, ‘I can do better now.’"

“Putting together Interglacial was a way for me to begin anew. Sometimes it’s hard to get to that place where you feel free enough from the past to start again.”

On Writing Aphorisms:

“Aphorisms are the perfect literary form for someone with a short attention span.”

“I approach writing aphorisms as though conducting scientific experiments with words and ideas.”

“. . . a distracting, obviously useless, and vaguely guilty pleasure like playing video games and eating corn chips.”

(Quotes from an interview with Jillian Kalonick, TimeOFF Magazine, September 2004).