PLAINS LANGUAGE: UP-AND-COMING MIDWESTERN AUTHORS

St. Louis poet knew he had to change his tune

By John Mark Eberhart
The Kansas City Star

ST. LOUIS — Richard Newman was a rock 'n' roller with no future.

OK, that's redundant, but in Newman's case, the wheels really were coming off his band's wagon. As guitarist/songwriter for the Neverminds, he had some success with the group.

"We actually played in Kansas City quite a bit, at the Hurricane, and the Bottleneck in Lawrence."

But the group wasn't getting along, and Newman had other gripes.

"I saw my band breaking up, and I was getting tired of sleeping on cat-infested floors in strange people's homes around the country. I decided to focus on poems again.

"Being a poet ... you're going to succeed or fail because of you, as opposed to relying on three other guys in the band to show up for the gig or rehearsals, or on whether the booking agents are going to keep their promises to you. At least with poetry, it's just you and the damned page."

So as the problems mounted, Newman, who was in his late 20s then and is 39 now, packed up the gear and picked up the pen. Writing had been his first love anyway.

But you don't become a respected poet overnight, and you have to eat. For years Newman has had to fit his verse writing around obligations such as teaching college and serving as editor for River Styx, a St. Louis literary journal.

Since 2001 his own poetry writing has produced three "chapbooks" — collections that range from 16 to a little more than 40 pages. This year Newman did achieve his full-length poetry debut, Borrowed Towns.

Now the real fight begins: getting the book noticed. In America, even good poetry collections sell modestly.

"Everybody wants to get their first book out. But if you get it out, the battle's just started. The bookstores don't want to carry it because it's poetry." And many small poetry presses can't offer discounts or the option of returning unsold copies.

A few months ago Newman tried to get a bookseller to stock the book to coincide with a reading he was doing in St. Louis. He finally had to buy his own copies and put them in the store. But it was summer, and he had no income from teaching.

"So my check bounced — and then I had to borrow money from my girlfriend in order to buy my own book! I was laughing about it — after I got over the humiliation."

Newman's wry take on the human condition runs through Borrowed Towns. There are humorous poems here but also verses that evoke the burned-out hopes of bottomland dwellers of Missouri, Illinois and southern Indiana, where Newman grew up.

Many of his peers write free verse; Newman prefers structure. Many of his poems are sonnets (the same 14-line pattern Shakespeare employed). But he has fun with the form. Several poems in Borrowed Towns are pieces Newman cherry-picked from one of his chapbooks, Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets!

Yet they are not slight. In "River Thing," Newman creates an elemental creature made up of "moldering leaves" who watches a lonely woman — and plans to flood her life, taking "her, the house, its very foundation, with me down the river."

You never know whether Newman is going to creep you out, provoke a thought or make you laugh, and, indeed, one of his key goals was to surprise. When he begins a poem, he rarely knows his final line. If he is startled by it, readers will be, too.

So in a genre in which even the most popular collections sell just a few thousand copies, how does one measure success?

"It's the small connections you make. Years ago I read (one) of my poems on public radio. A couple days after that, I did a reading, and a woman came up to me and said, `I'm so glad you got a chance to read that poem because I was driving in my car and I heard the first part and then I had to get out because I had a meeting.' She talked about how moving she thought it was, and how it made her laugh out loud. To me, to make somebody laugh, or to make that kind of connection — that's success."