Richard Jackson

My Books

Dispatches: Prose Poems (Wet Cement Press, 2022)

The Heart as Framed: mNew and Select Poems (Press 53, 2022)

The Heart's Many Doors

41 American poets respond to drawings by Slovene Artist Metka Krasovec that are themselves responses to Emily Dickinson lines. Poets include Mark Halliday, Dara Wier, Dean Young, Matthew Zapruder, Mary Ruefle, David Wojahn, Emilia Phillips, Bill Olsen, Jill Rosser, Nancy Eimers, Leslie Ullman, David Rivard, Phillis Levin, Cathy Wagner, Bradley Paul and many others. Wings Press, November 2016

Traversings

Correspondence poems with Robert Vivian
Anchor and Plume, 2016

Retrievals

Winner of the Maxine Kumin Poetry Award. C&R Press, August 2014

Resonance (Spanish Edition)

To be translated and published in Barcelona Spring 2014

OUT OF PLACE

A new book of poems forthcoming February 2014

In California Wine Country

The Last Voyage: Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli

Published by Red Hen Press, April 2010

RESONANCE

Resonance (Ashland Poetry Press, Jan 2010)

"It's true. Richard Jackson's 'underground river beneath the Nile is six times bigger.' many small rivers joined it (him) and empowered his voice. Yes, he does this to his peers. You, tender, wise, wounded, generous and responsible child, your melody is unmistakably yours. Have you eaten us? Do we flow too?"
--Tomaz Salamun

"Richard Jackson has become one of our most important poets. His subjects are those for which poetry originally came into being. The essentials are his songs, his precepts, his adoration, his companions. It isn't any simple solace he offers, but it's solace nonetheless that he lends us."
--James Tate

"What you find in Richard Jackson's great heart and spirit is poetry of generosity and fearless attention you won't find anywhere else. RESONANCE stops me in my tracks, it shifts my brianwaves."
--Dara Wier

"it is the combination of soulfulness, intellectual rigor, and a courtly, almost Petrarchan ardor for the beloved that has always fueled Richard Jackson's poetry. They are also poems of dazzling associative rigor -- funny, elegiac, and political by turns. I wish that more of our poets possessed his big heart and breadth, and RESONANCE is his best collection yet."
--David Wojahn

Potovanje Sonca (Journey of the Sun)

Translated with Ana Jelnikar

Heartwall, U Mass Juniper Prize Winner

Greatest Hits

12 poems and essay on the work

Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems

Selections from 1983-2003 including several new poems and selections from Petrarchan Sonnets

The Fire Beneath The Moon

50 Slovene Poets, facing Slovene

Heartwall

Juniper Prize winner

Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems

Includes about 70 poems. Autumn House Press, 2004

Svetovi Narazen

Translations are by several Slovene poets

Falling Stars

Artwork by Else Kendrot; 4 monologues

Heart's Bridge

Several poems and a Canzone, different selection than half Lives

Alive All Day

Cleveland State University Press Prize Winner

Worlds Apart

U Alabama Press prize winner, Published 1987, Reprinted 1989

Part of the Story

First book

Double Vision: Four Slovenian Poets

Introduction and selection of poems by Ales Debeljak, Alojz Ihan, Brane Mozetic, and Jure Potokar

Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets

Included are Stan Plumly, Mark Strand, James Wright, James Tate, Heather McHugh, WS Merwin, Michael Harper, David Ignatow, John Ashbery, Jean Valentine, Miller Wiliams, Carole Muske, Marvin Bell, Dara Wier, Richard Wilbur, Donald Finkel, Linda Pastan, Robert Creeley,Donald Hall, John Hollander, Stanley Kunitz, Maxine Kumin, Philp Booth, Robert Pack, Daniel Epstein, David St John, Robert Penn Warren, AR Ammons, William Stafford, Fred Chappell

The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary American Poetry

Robert Penn Warren, John Ashbery, James Wright, Charles Simic, John Hollander, Denise Levertov

Listening to Coltrane's Alabama
As the Perseids Fade Out

Nothing can explain how to love a world

that sets the heart's clock always out of synch,

where the meanings of our words are ambushed

by the kind of hate that becomes the 16th Street

Baptist Church bombing, Sept 15, 1963,

nothing to explain the way Coltrane's horn

starts to speak over a trembling bass, tracing

over the words of King's eulogy, borrowing

phrases and cadences until the pressure mounts

into a collision of dirges as if the music itself

were trying to speak.

Nothing to explain how

when I first read the story in the Eagle-Tribune

I still believed our dreams meant something that

we would find out later. Even now the day begins

to leech into the night the way a few hopeful

notes seems to hover like doves over the band,

or the way Anaximander described the world

as a silent rock floating in space.

Now it seems

Coltrane's whole quartet has entered the church,

everyone going everywhere to arrive at the same

note. I can see a thin line of grief shimmer on

the ridgeline. Four girls, Addie, Denise, Carole,

Cynthia, one of them beheaded beneath the rubble.

I can't imagine. I cannot imagine. All I can know

is the way Coltrane lets me into my own soul

for it is the music that brings us all together.

The wind tried for hours to rearrange the dust.

One story followed another like geese until there was

no story, no trial, no conviction. When Coltrane

came in over McCoy Tyner's piano and its slow lament

he already knew the future was exactly the past.

The silences and pauses tell a story these words cannot.

Coltrane didn't play music, he played the heart. Here,

even the insects seem to have stopped out of respect.

There's a wind that is not even a wind in the trees.

Anaximander knew our world was a box whose

sides were endless. Coltrane knew our world was

the church whose sides collapsed. Alabama--

all he needed was that one word, rolling down

the register and trying to lift itself at the end with

a desperate sigh.

I am writing this just north of

the state of Alabama, the meteors in the darkened sky

telling the same stories Anaximander heard, or maybe

the dreams of four girls still wandering off ahead of them

forever. Now Coltrane, too, seems to cry at the end, and

if you listen close you'll swear you hear his voice

whispering against the stories that set the killers free,

stories that staggered along the courthouse halls

until too late.

The music stops and you have to play it

again just to try to breathe. The first shadows on the lake

start to blot out the stars. There's nothing to tell the owl

who continues to accuse us all, nothing to tell even

the fish who continue to nibble at the surface of the water

as if to test, then reject the only world they can see.

The Perseids go on silently year after year, and tonight

there's nothing to explain how the soul's music laments

its own music, a music now lost in the pure music of grief.

Dispatches: Prose Poems (Wet Cement Press, June 2022)

The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems (Press 53, April 2022)

Selected Works

Poetry, Art

The Heart's Many Doors

41 American poets respond to drawings by Slovene Artist Metka Krasovec that are themselves responses to Emily Dickinson lines.

Poetry

Traversings

Poems sent as responses to each other over the course of a year

Retrievals

THE TRAIL

When do you realize the selves you left behind
have gone on without you, living the many lives
you now begin to resemble? So the day hesitates
as if caught in headlights. So the words you write
seem like nonsense someone left on your desk.
The trees pretend to be listening. The owl cares less
who you are. If you are lucky there’s a single word
you can take refuge behind. It seems there is
something happening of great importance but
the heart’s trail guide herself is lost. Almost invisible,
the ants carry bits of leaf twice their weight
back to the nest. The warning squirrels won’t stop
warning. Then you see that what you have written
are wrong directions, scribbled in a language
of condolences, but unable to apologize, missing
the pronouns, missing a destination, missing yourself.

Resonance (Spanish Edition)

Very brief description goes here

OUT OF PLACE

Isn't everything and everyone from a place they are no longer at, that is, out of place?

RESONANCE

January 2010, Ashland Poetry Press. Cover by Metka Krasovec, Slovenia.

Greatest Hits

Puddinghouse Chapbook, 2004

Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems

Ashland U Press, Ohio, 2003

Heartwall

Juniper Prize Winning Book from UMass Press, 2000