James Richardson (poet)


James Richardson is an American poet.

Career and education

James Richardson is an American poet and critic. He is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1980. He grew up in Garden City, New York and attended Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude in 1971. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1975.
Richardson is the author of several collections of poetry, criticism, and aphorisms, and has been awarded or nominated for some of the top awards in American literature, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
His work has appeared in multiple editions of The Best American Poetry, and in publications including The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Slate.

Awards

;Collections
;List of poems
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collected
Essay on clouds2015
How I became a saint2016

Aphorisms

James Richardson became an academic and a poet by the usual means, but he is, by his own admission, an accidental aphorist. He regarded Vectors, his book of five hundred aphorisms and “ten-second essays,” during its construction as “often… more as a questionable habit than as a book in progress.” The book became a cult favorite almost immediately.

It is easy to see why some would call James Richardson a “nature poet”; not only do his poems, and especially his early ones, draw on fairly common images and the phenomena of the physical world, he also shows a likeably human relationship to his environment, the kind we tend to imagine Wordsworth had—this work is feeling and respectful, written very much from open-minded observation and experience.