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Richard Meier has published five books of poetry: A Duration (Wave Books, 2023), February March April April (Oxeye Press, 2017), In the Pure Block of the Whole Imaginary (Omnidawn, 2012), Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar (Wave Books, 2006), and Terrain Vague, selected by Tomaz Salamun for the Verse Prize and published by Verse Press in 2001. In recent years he has practiced and taught workshops on writing and walking and other daily and durational writing practices. He is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Carthage College and lives in Somers and Madison, WI.
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Reviews
I realized what a gift it was to still have such pockets of genuine being, if we allow ourselves the time. And that is just what reading works like Richard Meier’s A Duration prepares a person to be mindful of. [. . .] Like the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop or Iliassa Sequin, A Duration operates by a different kind of logic, a different mode of thinking—like trying to write on a plane experiencing turbulence.
Abigail Chabitnoy, Colorado Review
The reader is sometimes jerked into a world subtly or radically altered, with the poem’s subject, setting, or other details changed… The effect is momentary confusion—and delight. Repeated across a book, this device kindles a sense of dream logic, or of daydreaming while ambling with a friend. There is flora, fauna, weather, and domestic detail, yet the poems live in a cerebral space.
Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation
In his second book, Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar, Richard Meier takes his title from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s gift of a poem and guitar to Jane Williams shortly before he died at sea. In Shelley’s poem, a guitar waits for the gentle reader/musician to play it; it stands in for both the poem and the giver. By evoking Shelley in his title, Meier renders the myth of poetry and the poet inherent to Shelley’s name and also suggests something about the transfer of experience into language and the gift of language to another. ...The poetry is vested in the world and in looking carefully even if this means losing its bearings. It is sensual and lyrical as awkward love poems, showing a self-awareness tempered by self-effacement, and it is lovely for this humility.
J’lyn Chapman, Denver Quarterly
Reviews of books by Richard Meier
A Duration
Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar
Terrain Vague -
Poems
- “Conflicting Testimony” (in Bold Type)
- “Endless Topic” (in Boston Review)
- Two poems (in Konundrum Engine Literary Review)
- Untitled (in RealPoetik)
- Nine poems and an introduction (in H_ngm_n)
- The Weather at Five O’Clock, a collaboration with Sandra Doller, Lucas Farrell, Lisa Fishman, Sara Mumolo, Brandon Shimoda, and Jared Stanley -
A reading from A Duration:
“In the Pure Block of the Whole Imaginary”:
