November 26, 7 p.m.


Brian Richards 


at MOTR

RIAN RICHARDS is a 1966 grad of Bowling Green University, ‘67-‘69 poetry fellow at UMass; then rambling coast to coast, working in the
woods in the Olympics and Vermont; came to Shawnee State Forest west of Portsmouth near the
Ohio in ‘74 to homestead; field hand, carpenter, mill hand, printer; last quarter century teaching
research writing part time at Shawnee State. Proprietor of Bloody Twin Press. Free-lace editor.

Niedecker, Bunting, Dorn, Spicer, O’Hara, Blackburn, Creeley, Olson, Notley, Irby, Cavafy, Rilke, Hesiod, Tu Fu, Meng Chao, Lansing, Dickinson, Pound, Sappho, Shelley, Ovid, Praxilla, McCord, Gilfillan, Stephen Ellis, Skip Fox, Bernadette Meyer, the list goes on in no particular order of poets I consistently return to. Numerous books and pamphlets, selected into Occasional Cleavage, 2017. Since then, small
collections in Dispatches from the Poetry World on line and, from Joe Napora’s Bullhead Editions, Birds on Brushy (2019).

                          

---

 Chestnut oak in a stand of young beech
​
Far downslope from
home on the ridge
slim in
              its prime forty
feet to first crotch twice
that to the twigs
                                 supple
in the wind root locked among
 
beech saplings in flooding
light after the ice
storm fractured white
oak and tulip neighbors
 
spare chestnut oak
alone then rung
round
              sere umber
leaves persistent normal to
juvenile beech
                             rare
upslope in limited
light without room to spread
pythagorean limbs

Launched by poets Mark Flanigan and Jim Palmarini in 2014, Word of Mouth  was inspired by the late Cincinnati poet Aralee Strange. Poets of all stripes are welcome to show up, listen, and mouth off.

MOTR Pub, 1345 Main Street, Cincinnati