The Official Bio:
Poet, translator, essayist and educator, Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of The Silence Of Men (CavanKerry Press, 2006), a book of his own poems, as well as Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan and Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications, 2004 & 2006 respectively), translations of two masterpieces of 13th century Iranian poetry. He also co-translated with Professor John Moyne all of the poetry in A Bird in the Garden of Angels (Mazda Publishers, 2008), a selection of work by Rumi, also from 13th century Iran. Newman’s poems and essays have appeared in a wide range of journals, including Salon.com, The American Voice, Circumference, Prairie Schooner, Another Chicago Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine and Birmingham Poetry Review. His work has been anthologized in Access Literature (Wadsworth Publishers, 2005), and the title poem from The Silence Of Men has been translated into Dutch. In addition, he has completed a verse translation of a book-length section of Shahnameh, the Persian national epic. Richard Jeffrey Newman served as Persian Arts Festival’s first Literary Arts Director, and he continues to co-curate the monthly Shab-e She’r (Night of Persian Poetry) that Persian Arts Festival holds from September through June at the Bowery Poetry Club. He currently sits on the advisory boards of The Translation Project and Jackson Heights Poetry Festival, and is listed as a speaker with the New York Council for the Humanities. He is Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York, where he coordinates the Creative Writing Project. You can download a full press kit here. To contact Professor Newman, please use the contact form on this site.
The Unofficial Bio: Calling Myself A Poet
I first called myself a poet during my senior year in college, when I could no longer avoid the question of what I intended to do with the rest of my life. Not that anyone other than myself was pressuring me to make a decision. My father was not around; my mother was happy to let me decide for myself. My grandmother hoped I would choose a respectable profession that would earn me a decent living, but she was not the kind of woman who would say that plainly to my face; and there was a second or third cousin who, on the rare occasions that she saw me, urged me to become either a lawyer or an investigative journalist, but none of them did anything to make me feel I had to make a decision “now.” No one tried to make me feel that not having made a decision yet was a sign of laziness; nor did anyone suggest — as some of my friends had complained to me that their parents had done — that I was lost, or that I lacked the maturity one was supposed to have acquired after four years of college with a grade point average just a couple of tenths below 4.0.
No, the only person who felt any urgency about what I was “going to be when I grew up” was me, but I wasn’t worrying about it in terms of the profession I would enter. Rather, there were things I wanted to say, things I needed to say, and being what I wanted to be meant, I knew, saying them to the world. And so I remember sitting alone one night in the corner of The Rainy Night House Café in the basement of the student union at Stony Brook University, wondering if I had the guts to write in my journal what I wanted to write next. It didn’t matter that I would write it for no one other than myself. I knew with a certainty that frightened me that once I put the words I am a poet onto the page there would be no taking them back. What they announced would be real to me, for me, in the way that the poems I’d been writing since I was in ninth grade had been making my own life, which I often had a hard time believing in, real. That reality terrified me because I knew it involved a commitment to something that had nothing to do with earning a living, with my reputation or with my standing in the community, the kinds of things that people who were about to enter “the real world” were supposed to worry about. I knew without having the words to say it that declaring myself a poet meant making a commitment to language, to exploring and maintaining the integrity of language, as both the only means we have of naming our place in the world and as the ever-evolving environment of meaning into which we are born and that we cannot ever disown. I could never have said it this way at the time, but somehow I knew that once I wrote those four words, I am a poet, and I felt the click of my divided self snapping into wholeness — and the fact of my fear left me no doubt that once I’d written those words I would feel that click — I would be embracing not a profession, but a way of life, making a commitment to and for myself about what it would mean for me to live meaningfully.
I’d tried and failed to find that kind of meaning in religion, where a monotheistic god provided the measure, and meted out the consequences, of how well I followed the guidelines for living a good and meaningful life that he had provided. It was frightening to me to contemplate the loss of the certainty that had been my faith in that god, and so when I imagined the obscurity that, in all likelihood, would be my fate as a poet, I felt, frankly, despair, because the likelihood of that obscurity was something I realized I did not know how not to choose. I would, of course, be lying if I claimed that I never once imagined my poetry as brilliant enough to earn me fame and even money, but the truth was that I cared more about a conversation I had with June Jordan, my first poetry teacher and a writer whose work continues to move and inspire me. June told me that a poem I had published was “important,” that it would make a difference in the world, that it had made a difference to her. We were at an awards ceremony for a creative writing contest that had been sponsored by Stony Brook’s English Department, and she told me that I should keep writing, because if the poems I had in me were anything like that published poem, then I clearly had something to say that the world needed to hear.
As I was sitting in The Rainy Night House Café all those years ago, I remembered something else that June had said to me. A poem, she explained, is a vehicle for communication. It is you saying, or at least trying to say, something to someone in such a way that this someone will be changed. There were a lot things I wanted to change when I was a senior in college, about myself, about the world, and though I doubt I thought it this way consciously at the time, when June Jordan told me that what I had to say as a poet was important, poetry became the way in which I knew I would say what I wanted those changes to be. Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of the poem that so moved June. The original was lost a long time ago, and the contributor’s copy I received as payment for publication — I think the journal was called Poem and that it came out of Huntsville, Alabama — has disappeared, and I don’t know what happened to it. I wish I did. I used to read that poem when I needed to remind myself that I had believed June when she said I had something important to say, even though I had no idea at the time what that “something” might be.
To be perfectly honest, I still don’t know if what I have to say is important to anyone but me, but I suppose that really doesn’t matter. I have no idea how long it took me, but I finally wrote I am a poet in my journal, and I felt the click I knew I would feel, and I have been writing poetry ever since, with June Jordan’s definition of a poem’s purpose as my bottom-line. Because when I write my poems, I feel myself talking to you, whoever you are, about sexuality and gender, masculinity and violence, religion and sex, love and history – not in that order and not always in those combinations – and when I make my translations, I do so because I think the writers I am translating also have something to say that it is worth your while to hear. A truly chutzpadik (audacious, ballsy) thing for me to say, I know. And I know I could be wrong. And I’m okay with that.
