Name Jan Richman Role Poet | Awards Walt Whitman Award | |
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Books Because the Brain Can Be Talked into Anything, Thrill-Bent | ||
Jan Richman is an American poet.
Contents
Life
She graduated from the NYU Graduate Creative Writing Program.
In 2001, Jan Richman and Beth Lisick presented a benefit "Poetry & Pizza," by 9x9 Industries. She worked at SF Gate, the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle. She read at Edinburgh Castle, and Writers With Drinks Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, Comet, Other Magazine, The Bloomsbury Review, Luna,
In 2001, she co-edited the literary journal 6,500.
Richman taught at the City College of San Francisco, and lives in Oakland, California.
Controversy
From 2001 until 2004, she taught at the Academy of Art University, where there was a controversy about a student composition. Alan Kaufman took up the cause of the student's expulsion and Richman's firing by organizing protests against the academy's response. Kaufman was later dismissed from his job at the academy because of his role in leading protests about the controversy. In support of Kaufman's protest against the student's expulsion, authors Stephen King and Salman Rushdie (at the time, Rushdie was President of the PEN American Center) wrote letters of protest concerning the academy's handling of the matter.
The incident inspired a play Harmless, by Brett Neveu.
Awards
Works
Books
Non-fiction
Anthologies
Ploughshares
Reviews
The rowdy, restless intelligence of Jan Richman's work is not just for show: these poems have a sense of purpose. They establish an identity--sexual, personal, social, historical--for which survival means defiance, resisting all sorts of expectations, cants, conventions, rote or cautionary voices. Richman's wit is ready to question anything, including the poses of identity itself. This ardent, sardonic skepticism, directed toward inner as well as outer voices, is reflected by the titles of the book's two sections: "Part I, Reasons" and "Part II, Excuses."
Poet Richman's debut novel unfolds as a series of vignettes in which characters 'appear and disappear, to gather and scatter accordingly.' Because of the book's nonlinear structure, the parts add up to far more than the sum, which may be the point. While much of the story is set in 2001, when the narrator, also named Jan Richman, is 39, many episodes occur 10, 20, or 30 years in the past. As a writer for BadMouth Magazine, 'NYC's Premier Cultural Crap Detector,' Jan's new assignment is to report on roller coasters around the country set for demolition. Her final stop is in California, where she grew up, and where her estranged and widowed father, who suffers from Tourette's, is preparing to marry a much younger woman. The setting and narrator's age are both withheld for longer than seems necessary, which may frustrate readers as much as the many abrupt changes in setting. Yet the author's observational adroitness, skill with words, and clever use of cultural references mitigate those issues, particularly for anyone who came of age at a similar time as the narrator. Richman's (Because the Brain Can Be Talked Into Anything) fine language falters during the book's surprising sexual encounters, lurching between the funkiness of Tom Robbins in Still Life with Woodpecker and plain old purple prose.