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My new direct-to-ebook poetry collection, Take Five: Poems in 5/4 time, is now available on Kindle , published by Patrice Fitzgerald of eFitzgerald Publishing.
I'm asking...please buy this book. It's only $2.99 -- how can you go wrong? Patrice is asking...please hold off, and buy it on Friday, March 1, its official pub date. That way, maybe we can get a little bit of a publishing splash.
This is a collection of poems in my own verse form, the "five-four," which has been given the imprimatur of legitimacy in Lewis Turco's newest edition of The Book of Forms, and of which I am the leading -- very nearly the only - practitioner.
Here’s what a few people have said about it:
Tad Richards invented this verse form, the “five-four,” and I included a couple of examples and a description of it in the fourth edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, but as I read this collection I kept running across poems I wish I could have included as well. Tad is a fine poet, and this is a fine bunch of poems. I can’t imagine a reader who wouldn’t enjoy it.
–Lewis Turco, author of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics
Richards’ Take Five is a snappy sequence of poems in syllabics ranging from a naked girl with white mittens in a winter window to the racetrack tout sheet with its single tip (“ten million / to one says earth doesn’t / get wiped out by / a supernova”)…from the poet’s muse, who will “yawn and / criticize my technique / remind me of / other lovers who / did it better,” to the unforgettable redhead in “Choosing” who offers either a delectable ham sandwich or a blow job—not saying “whether the / beer in her right hand / comes with each.”
These are sassy, funny, thought-provoking poems full of Richards’ distinctive musical stylings. He’s clearly been listening to yet another entrancing woman in these poems: “She said jazz / is how life should be / flexible rhythm but / you count it off…”.
–David Clewell, Poet Laureate of Missouri
These 5/4 poems with their shaved-bare grammatical economy and rapid fire narrative pivots come to life with dream-like fluidity in their vivid and mercurial moments thanks to the masterfully crafted vision of Tad Richards.
Each poem a discovery filled with discoveries, like Terry Gilliam’s hallucinatory Python animations they step through boundaries, break apart and reform without ever dropping the thread, landing on a spot of momentum and surprised wonder – the storyteller’s haiku, a tribute to the beautiful possibilities to be opened in form.
–Dennis Doherty, Director of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz, author of The Bad Man and Fugitive
And here’s one of the poems David Clewell mentions:
YOU’RE AT THE TRACK
You’re at the track
leaving the pari
mutuel
window when this short guy
tugs at your sleeve
hands you a tout sheet
you tip him
a buck and open it
zilch on the nags
instead there’s a quote
ten million
to one says earth doesn’t
get wiped out by
a supernova
price is right
could be you’ll lay a deuce
go for the chalk
but you check the past
performance
earth’s up to 200
mil already
it’s bucking the odds
you lay off
the next race and go home
checking the sky
And for a little more incentive, here’s the introduction to the book:
Introduction
A couple of years ago, I was looking through some old poems, and came across one called “All You Can Eat.” Something about it puzzled me, and I went back to look at it again. It seemed to be in some kind of form… but what?
Now, I like form. I like free verse too, but form can be a good thing for the reader. For one thing, it lets you know that you're really reading a poem. Free verse has its good points too. It's not stuffy -- it gives you that wonderful open feeling you get from Walt Whitman, or that plain-spoken immediacy you get from William Carlos Williams.
But form can be a really good thing for a poet, too. It lets you know you're really writing a poem. It makes you do that work that you really need to be doing. It reminds you that you're making something, not just slopping emotions all over the page. And if you're making something, it has to be at least as well made as a chair or a quilt or a duck decoy.
"All You Can Eat" certainly didn't rhyme, and it didn't have a regular meter. Maybe it was in syllabics – a regular pattern based on the number of syllables in a line. It sort of looked as though it was... but it wasn't. It didn't count out right. I couldn’t figure out what the form was… and I’d written it, dammit!
Finally, I got it. There was a consistent syllabic pattern, but it wasn’t from stanza to stanza. The pattern repeated every four lines, but the stanzas were five lines long. So every stanza seemed to wriggle free from its formal constraint, but the whole poem did not. The poem was five stanzas long, so the last one exactly duplicated the first.
I was intrigued. I liked the idea of a will-o'-the-wisp of form dancing over a poem: now you see it, now you don’t. I decided to try another… and then another, and another. It became like a sonnet sequence for me – what could you accomplish, what could you discover, writing a number of poems in the same tight form. Five stanzas of five lines each, a total of 111 to 114 syllables (each poem had lines of 3, 4, 5 and 6 syllables, but the order could vary). A sonnet generally has one sharp turn in it, like a twelve bar blues verse: between the octet and sestet, or at the final couplet. These five-fours tended to have two turns, at inexact intervals.
So I kept writing them. Lewis Turco thought they made a significant enough new form to be included in the Fourth Edition of his classic The Book of Forms. And here are a bunch of them, all in one place. I don’t have any other name for them than five-fours, which inspired the title of the collection.
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