Description
Poetry. "I had the privilege of interviewing Richard Hague not so many years ago about poetry and teaching and this, among the many things we discussed, will always remain with me: as far back as his college years he knew that his job 'was not to become a poet that sounded the same at 60 as he had at 20 and whose subject matters remained the same at 60 as they were at 20. Given the variety of life, and given the variety of things that are interesting and things that poetry can be made from, why the hell would you want to limit yourself to one sort of specialized niche that is all yours? Poetry is vast. It's large. You follow Whitman's 'I am large, I contain multitudes.' And so, too, are these poems massive and multifarious in how and what they approach, but seen always through Dick Hague's exacting eye for the specific and strange. His whole universe of poetry is 'a kind of resonance and harmony' where '[e]ven language folds into itself / in odd places' and we, his readers, are grateful that it is so."–Pauletta Hansel
Author Bio
Richard Hague, a native of Steubenville, Ohio in the Appalachian Ohio River Valley, taught at Purcell Marian High School in Cincinnati for 45 years. While there he engaged in other enterprises and adventures, including adjuncting at Edgecliff College and at Xavier University, his alma mater, commercial urban gardening, hosting writers workshops, and teaching for a few summers at the Institute for Professional Development and Graduate School of Education at Northeastern University in Boston. His high school career ended when he refused to sign an anti-gay and anti-worker's rights Archdiocese of Cincinnati contract in May 2014. Not long after, he was named Writer-in- Residence at Thomas More University in northern Kentucky, where he continued as Artist-in-Residence until 2022. He now teaches and writes with The Originary Arts Initiative. He is author, co-editor, or editor of 20 collections, most recently RIPARIAN: POETRY, SHORT PROSE AND PHOTOGRAPHY INSPIRED BY THE OHIO RIVER (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Earnest Occupations: Teaching, Writing, Gardening & Other Local Work (Bottom Dog Press, 2018), STUDIED DAYS: POEMS EARLY & LATE IN APPALACHIA (Dos Madres Press, 2017), WHERE DRUNK MEN GO: A LONG POEM (Dos Madres Press, 2015) and DURING THE RECENT EXTINCTIONS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1984-2012 (Dos Madres Press, 2012), for which he was given the Weatherford Award in Poetry Writing Award. He continues to live in Cincinnati.
Author City: CINCINNATI, OH USA