The 40 But 10 Interview Series: Richard Jeffrey Newman

 

I had decided to retire the literary Would You Rather series, but didn't want to stop interviews on the site all together. Instead, I've pulled together 40ish questions - some bookish, some silly - and have asked authors to limit themselves to answering only 10 of them. That way, it keeps the interviews fresh and connectable for all of us!

Today we are joined by Richard Jeffrey Newman. Richard has published three books of poetry, T’shuvah (Fernwood Press 2023), Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions 2017) and The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), as well as a chapbook, For My Son, A Kind of Prayer (Ghostbird Press 2016). In addition, he has co-translated three books of classical Persian poetry, most recently The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (Junction Press 2011). Newman is on the executive board of Newtown Literary, a Queens-based literary non-profit, and he curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, NY. He is Professor of English at Nassau Community College. His website is www.richardjnewman.com. 

 

Why do you write?

I write to create—for myself, on my own terms, and in the most expansive way the phrase can be understood—the political meaning of my life; and only if I believe that meaning will be worth someone else’s time and/or money do I presume to try to publish.

What made you start writing?

I am a survivor of childhood sexual violence. I could never have explained it this way at the time, but when I started writing poetry in junior high school, I did so because it proved to me that I had a voice, that my voice had a body, and that I deserved to be heard, even if—because it was some years before I showed anyone what I was writing—the only audience I had was me. There is no aspect of my work, poetry or prose, that does not find its roots in that initial need not to succumb to the voicelessness that the men who violated me tried to force on me.

Do you have any hidden talents?

I don’t know if I would call it hidden, because I don’t try to hide it, but I play piano. I play mostly for myself, and mostly improvisation, since I read music very slowly and never developed a repertoire. I’ve reached the point, though, where I can say, honestly, that I’m good enough to have played professionally if I’d been more disciplined about it when I was younger. I wrote about my relationship with music on my blog and, if you’re interested, you can listen here to some music I composed in the 1990s when, for a brief time, I tried to get serious.

What’s the most useless skill you possess?

I can fold a fitted sheet.

Describe your book in three words.

Hard won peace.

Describe your book poorly.

A self-indulgent descent into second-person navel gazing.

If you could spend the day with another author, who would you choose and why?

June Jordan. She was my first poetry teacher way back in the 1980s. She saw something in me that she tried to get me to see at the time, but I was so afraid of even my own shadow—the ongoing impact of the sexual violence I survived—that I retreated inside myself every time she got close. Still, I read her poetry and her essays assiduously, almost religiously, and through them I learned so much about the kind of writer I wanted to be, that I hope I have become. June is dead now, but if I could, I would love to spend the day with her, to tell her how much she and her work continue to mean to me and to learn something about what I am sure she would still have to teach me.

What is your favorite book from childhood?

The earliest favorite I remember, which goes back to when I was three or four—and this is significant to me because I remember very little from that time in my life—was Harold and The Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson.

What are you currently reading?

Like most people, I am reading more than one book at a time. Because I am also prepping for my spring classes, you happen to have caught me when the pile is higher than usual. Here they are, in no particular order:

a.       The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, edited by Arnold Rampersad

b.      Voices Within The Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets, edited by Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf

c.       Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, edited by Christopher Nelson

d.      Days When I Hide My Corpse in a Cardboard Box, by Lok Fung, translated by Eleanor Goodman

e.       Claims for Poetry, edited by Donald Hall

f.        The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America, by Jesse Zuba

g.       Harlem Shadows, by Claude McKay

h.      Alive At The End of The World, by Saeed Jones

i.         Cruelty, Ai

j.         Peel My Love Like An Onion, by Ana Castillo

k.       Deaf Republic, by Ilya Kaminsky

l.         The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy

What is under your bed?

Nothing but dust.

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