(Selected and arranged by Marcia Karp and forwarded by George Kalogeris)
Cover: A Conversation, Neta Goren, mixed media on paper 2019.
Praise for Ted Richer
“Drastic. Caustic. Ted Richer’s radically ascetic style cuts to the heart of things: love, solitude, self-contradiction, extinction. It’s a style composed as much of silence as of words. Calibrated silence; words dipped in acid. It’s like learning to read all over again.” Rosanna Warren, Author of So Forth(poems)and Max Jacob: A Life in Art in Letters (biography)
Wedlock
1.
it happened
...
in dinkytown
...
a long time ago
...
it happened there
...
our wedding where
...
I lied
...
to you
2.
it happened
60
...
in dinkytown
...
a long time ago
...
it happened then
...
our wedding when
...
I died
...
boohoo
About the Author
Ted Richer was born in 1931 in Mason City, Iowa, the home also of Meredith Wilson, who called it River City. He spent his life reading, writing, and teaching others to do these. He received a Fellowship in Creative Writing to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Upon receiving
his MFA there, he taught at universities in Ohio, Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, and Massachusetts.
He was the subject of a BBC Radio 3 presentation by Christopher Ricks on Twenty Minutes (2002). Out driving with the radio on, the writer and publisher Richard Grenville Clark heard this, found his way to Richer, and soon published a collection, The Writer in the Story and Other Figurations (Apocalypse Press, 2003).
Richer had plays staged and stories published. His poems were published in Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford 2004-2009 (Waywiser, 2010), Daedalus, Literary Imagination, AGNI, Harvard Review, Poetry Porch, and Free Inquiry, where he was poetry editor from 2017 until his death in June 2022.