Events of Language

ANYA

When I first heard you read from A Hundred Lovers, I was transfixed. By your voice—you read like every word counts, and they do—and by your clean, timeless images. There is something oracular in your work. What has most shaped your poetic voice, on the page and spoken, and can you point to a moment when it clicked into place?

RICHIE

Thank you. I think I’ve always been interested in the strangeness or otherworldliness of poems. They’re filled with air, silence, blankness. In being lineated, they cut against ordinary expectations of the unfolding of time. The unit of the line is so important to me; the way it allows multiple possibilities to coexist for a moment and forever, over breaks in the sentences, rests in the music. When I read poems out loud, I try to honor that distinctness from everyday speech. It’s not a distinction I demand from all poems—and there are poets who masterfully capture cadences of speech, even in meter (Frost comes to mind)—but I think it’s a demand I enjoy making of many of my own poems. They are events of language, we enter them, they hold us, and then they let us go.

The poets I first loved were the modernists–Eliot, Hart Crane, Stevens, Marianne Moore, Williams. Their poems–each in unique ways–are perpendicular to speech in ways that have shaped my own. My education in poetry composition was formalist, and while I don’t always write in rhyme or in meter, or in received forms, I strive to bring shape–sonic and visual–to my poetry.

ANYA

I want to take a moment to acknowledge the idea of poems as “events of language.” Thank you for that gorgeous framing.

More on voice. I was reading Brenda Hillman’s “A Foghorn,” and she said something about an Etruscan mirror. I immediately thought of you and how you center antiquity in your work. In a way, The Bronze Arms seems to state a premise for your work: If antiquity can survive, love can too. / But it must be forceful. Have art and history always been essential to your work? Could you ever exhaust the subject?

RICHIE

I am fascinated by history—these huge sweeps of time—and the manner in which art records moments, values, figures, ideas—makes them physical, makes them lasting. I like the notion of the Etruscan mirror because of how it interpolates us in the ancient thing. We literally see ourselves in it, see our world reflected back. I don’t think those obsessions could be exhausted. From my teenage years, I dreamed of becoming a scholar. My very first poems sought to honor the texts and objects that I admired. The more challenging part was learning to write about human emotion.

ANYA 

When I solicited you, you said you didn’t have much new work post-The Bronze Arms, and then you sent me seven magnificent poems. Did these pieces not make it into the book, or are they bound for a new collection?

RICHIE

I feel wrung out after a book is finished. All of these poems are new. When you solicited me, I knew I had to get back to work! These are all poems I wrote after The Bronze Arms was completed… many of them from a poetic sketchbook I kept in Rome in March 2025. I’m not sure what they all might add up to, but your invitation forced me to look back over drafts and enter that very tantalizing space of tinkering and tinkering until something reveals itself.

ANYA 

I’m honored that I (and Only Poems) got to play a part in getting these poems out into the world! I don’t think I’ve ever read a poet who explores the sacred and the profane so thoroughly. From a section in “A Hole in Berlin”:

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When the chimney sweep arrived 
To clean the white hole 

Of the porcelain stove 
Holes in the feet and hands of Christ

The slick lacerations 
In the mortal helmet the pissing trough the mouth

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It’s obscenely good. Can you talk about what led you through these images? I also don’t think I’ve seen couplets from you—they are such a perfect vehicle for your work! How did you land on the form? 

RICHIE

Thank you! Recently, I’ve been spending part of the year in Berlin; it is a city of holes—bullet holes in the facades, craters in history, missing pieces, missing people. Last summer, I started cataloguing all of the holes I encountered, in increasingly abstract ways. As in other poems, I was interested in our living alongside history–the eighteenth-century porcelain stove in the apartment, the paintings of Christ in the Gemäldegalerie, as well as the modern-day pissoirs and cafes.

I admire couplets for their extreme slowness–and I wanted these to be as extreme as possible. They also very intimately group–I guess, couple–things together, and so I like the tension between proximity and incongruity. That probably corresponds to some of the discomfort of proximity I wanted in the images of the poem, a discomfort of proximity that Berlin symbolizes.

ANYA

“Troubadour” has such a strong sense of place; there are mountains, farmhouses, “a gate darkened by moss,” and “a town up the road / Where locals sell their bodies / Their cows”. Where is the speaker of this poem? 

RICHIE

Unlike the Berlin poem, “Troubador” really has no specific geography. I was dreaming in the poem, maybe of Provence, but also of the middle ages.

ANYA

I think I felt that, but I also wanted it to be a specific place so I could go there! I guess I’ll have to dream my own Troubador’s village 🙂

In all of these poems, the body meets some kind of violence, if only in the imagination. The speaker in “Touch Me” says: “I mount his torso / In my clean underwear / I think of the altarpieces hacked out of their gold frames.” Do you think sex and love are inherently violent? 

RICHIE

I probably wouldn’t make a claim such as this, but I’m interested artistically in a consuming love, an annihilating love, the gossamer veil between sexuality and death… all of the old subjects.

ANYA

In your opinion, where is the most romantic place in the world to write?

RICHIE

For some reason I’m feeling romantic about time, and so I’d say in the stolen hours. Early in the morning before anyone is awake, or late at night when everyone is asleep.

ANYA

“Amor” has an elegiac tone—the body is spent, Rome is ashes, the roofs are shattered. The speaker says, “It’s too expensive to be alive.” I might be reading into it the wrong way, but I see a parallel to the current collapse of civilization (democracy, human rights, bodily autonomy) that we are living through. How do you think politics fits into your work? And an even more obnoxious question: What power do you think poetry has to shift the arc of history?

RICHIE

It does really feel like we’re living and writing at the end of something. I like to wonder if things always felt this way. It’s a dark time, a depressing time. My friends are experiencing the malaise of middle age at this moment of global catastrophe, American decline, economic uncertainty, etc etc etc. I hate it. Art cannot evade these realities and atmospheres.

What can poetry do? I think probably poems can shift individual ideas about seeing the world, and maybe that can be meaningful. I’m personally grateful for the fellow artists and students and lovers of beauty that gather around poetry—they are such a wonderful presence in my life. As are all the dead people who keep teaching me new things through their poems, written in their own moments of civilizational collapse and fear.

Most importantly, though, I think poetry’s political value is its indeterminacy, its aversion to simplicity, to easy consolations, to orthodoxy, to the abuse of language at the heart of politics.

ANYA

Can you share one book, one film, and one piece of art (or artist) that has moved you this year?

RICHIE

Book: This Elegance: poems by Derrick Austin (2026)

Film: Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984-1992, a documentary by Dagmar Schultz

Art: Albrecht Dürer, The Virgin Praying (1518), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

ANYA

Karan always asks poets whether they identify their work as poetry of the body, mind, heart, or soul. I’ll ask the question a little differently: on what axes do you think your work falls on a literal level? And what about on a figurative level? I’m thinking of this as a rising sign/sun sign distinction.

RICHIE

What an interesting question! Probably a poetry of the body on a literal level and a poetry of the heart on a figurative level. 

ANYA

Thank you for being so generous with this process and for writing poems that I will read for the rest of my life. My last question is: what is something you wish you had known when you were an “emerging” poet?

RICHIE 

Thank you for believing in my poetry. I still think of myself as emerging; I hope I always do. My advice for young people is to cultivate meaningful relationships outside of poetry–with lovers and friends and family and neighbors. These will sustain you through the tumult of an artist’s life.

ANYA

Finally, Richie, who are the poets who have influenced you most?

RICHIE

My work is a chorus of ghostly voices—like mediums, we channel other voices. Like a choral conductor, we shape the sound into something coherent and dignified, with resonance and force. Just a few of the writers in my chorus (sticking with contemporary Anglophone examples) include Seamus Heaney and Claudia Emerson, Lucille Clifton and Franz Wright.