Richard Jackson's Home Page


		Richard Jackson teaches creative writing and poetry, humanities in UTC's interdisciplinary honors program, and is a frequent guest lecturer at the MFA writing seminars at Vermont College, University of Iowa Summer Writers' Festival, and the Prague Summer Program. He is the author of ten books of poems including Resonance ( 2010) (Eric Hocher Award), Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems (2004) and Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems (2003). He has also published two books of translations, Last Voyage: The Poems of Giovanni Pascoli from Italian (2010) and Alexandar Persolja's Journey of the Sun from Slovene (2008). He is also the author of two crucial books, Acts of Mind: Conversations with American Poets (Choice Award) and Dismantling Time in Contemporary Poetry (Agee Award Winner), and has edited two anthologies of Slovene poetry, as well as the journal Poetry Miscellany. His work has been translated into fifteen languages and has appeared in The Best American Poems, among other collections. He has been awarded the Order of Freedom Medal by the President of Slovenia for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans, and has been named a Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, Witter-Bynner Fellow, NEA fellow, NEH Fellow, and has lectured and given readings at dozens of universities and conferences in the U.S. and abroad. In 2009 he won the AWP George Garret National Award for Teaching and Arts Advocacy. He leads a group of writing students to Europe each May. (http://members.authorsguild.net/svobodni/) Poetry Miscellany Homepage Poetry Miscellany Mala Review Meacham Writers Conference PM Chapbooks PM Publications Books Eastern European Poetry Exchange Class Information For further information contact Richard Jackson.
		SONATA for Terri Before I could arrive at this moment when the earth wakes inside you, when the night is still tangled in your hair, before I could see how the moonlight melts on your breasts as you lay beside me, before you opened the hands of your soul, at this moment that is so sudden, so unexpected, I can only imagine how the softness of your voice must be enough to stop the insects for miles, and I begin to understand how the way you open your eyes to the morning must be enough to change orbits of planets, so it must have been necessary for me, if Ive really arrived at this moment alive, to have lived a life where only my shadow planted the garden, only my shadow walked through the market, fingered the keys nervously, drove the car too fast, and it must be the same shadow that curls up in the corner of the room or is hung in the closet collecting moths, and it must have taken centuries of bones turning to light, of rivers changing course, of battles won or lost, of a farmer planting one crop or another that failed or not, one atom hitting another atom by chance, and through all this a single string of time survived volcanoes, lightning strikes, car wrecks, floods, invasions to lead to this moment abandoned randomly to us, this singular moment that is part of time¹s litter or maybe its architecture, because now in this moment which is so wondrous the way it lies beside you, I either do not exist or the past has never existed, either my breath is the breath of stars or I do not breathe as I turn to you, as you breathe my name, my heart, as the net of stars dissolves above us, as you wrap yourself around me like honeysuckle, the moon turning pale because it is so drained by our love, so that before this moment, before you lay beneath me, you must have disguised yourself the way the killdeer you pointed out diverts intruders to save what it loves, pretending a broken wing, giving itself over finally to whatever forces, whatever love, whatever touch, whatever suffering it needs just to say I am here, I am always here, stroking the wings of your soul.
		I. THE APOLOGY Whoever hears in these scattered rhymes the raw sighs my heart devoured when I was younger, or sees the soul's tattered phrases hanging there unclaimed, don't scold this art written by my other self, filled with confusion, not lies, and forgive even this varied style I use now, that flies as darkly as the crow, that scans the secret life of the mole, that covers itself in Hope's blankets, that has always told Love's truth, that now asks for pardon before its words run dry. I know how rumor grew like a moth from a cocoon, how some of you laughed when Shame stood at my door for years, how Regret tracked me with her silent screams - but also how each tree bears some fruit, how the moon and the stars, the wind, the whole earth are images whose doors open other worlds, if they only endure like the half-life of dreams.