What’s your creative process like?
Almost all of my poems grow out of writing marathons in an online workshop during National Poetry Month in April and during November. The goal is to write one new draft a day for 30 days, and I give myself about an hour each morning before I start my day job to get down a respectable draft. Something about committing to that schedule really works for me. For one thing, I can’t be fussy. I have to shut off my internal editor and just write. Many of those mornings, I have no idea what I will write about, but then a line or image comes to me and I riff off of it. So that’s 60 new drafts a year. Of course, not every draft is good. Some are dead ends. But a decent percentage of them are good enough to save and work on later. After those marathons, I generally need a break, maybe a month, maybe more, before I get started on revisions. Every now and then an idea for a new poem will pop up, and I jot down a few notes that may kickstart me during the next marathon.
Who are you hoping to reach with your work? Do you have a target audience? Who do you hope to inspire?
Interesting question(s) that I try my best never to think about. Ha! Seriously, though, I don’t really have a target audience in mind. I just want to be happy with what I create. I do it because it is satisfying to me. Outside of poetry, in my work career, I have spent a lot of time and effort trying to figure out what other people want/need, how best to explain, how best to be heard. Writing poetry, for me, is an escape from that, and I suspect that if I did spend a lot of time thinking about such things, poetry writing would no longer be much fun for me. Of course, I do hope that some of my poems catch the interest of editors and then that at least a few readers of literary magazines in which the poems appear will like them. If someone reads one of my poems and is inspired by it, that would be great. Did I just contradict myself re: not having a target audience in mind? Best to push that thought away…
Are any movies, music, books, or poetry collections (or any media at all, really) particularly inspiring to you?
I find a lot of music, books, etc., inspiring, but I’ll go with the first ones that come to mind here.
Poetry: Though I write nothing like he did (and who could?) I find James Tate’s poetry utterly inspiring. It inspires me to not be so uptight, to cut loose sometimes. If I find myself getting all serious and bogged down, I just crack open one of his books (any will do) and start reading.
As for music: Give me The Allman Brothers Band in its original lineup. The way Duane Allman and Dickey Betts played off each other, switching up rhythm and lead guitar, the improvisation, the eclectic mix of influences, etc. I often tell myself I’d like to achieve a poetry as beautiful as the Allman Brothers’ song “Blue Sky.” Or as powerful as their song “Whipping Post.”
Richard Jordan’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Terrain, Cider Press Review, Connecticut River Review, Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Gargoyle Magazine, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, The Squannacook at Dawn, won first place in the 2023 Poetry Box Chapbook Contest. He serves as an Associate Editor for Thimble Literary Magazine and lives in the Boston area where he works as a mathematician and data scientist.
Read “On Mother’s Day” and “Evenings with Marsupial” in our first issue.