Steve Richmond / Mr. Viced Honest (3 Viewers)

I think Richmond has much to say, and says it well. But obviously, it doesn't work for everyone. I'm trying to figure out why it falls flat for so many. Are they put off by the bio -- a rich kid, never had to work really, falling into the easy trap of drugs, all that? Are they just annoyed at who the guy is? Or is it in the words themselves, a connection is not being made for some reason? I don't know...
 
Rekrab said:
Are they put off by the bio -- a rich kid, never had to work really...
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No.

...falling into the easy trap of drugs, all that?
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That didn't help. Too many drugs make you boring. And if you tend toward being boring without them, they bury you.

Or is it in the words themselves...
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Why yes! The words themselves are overwhelmingly lazy navel gazing bullshit. Since you asked. ;)

When I look at Bukowski's most lazy work, I can usually find at least one line that goes POW, a Bukowski line that no one else could write. Richmond, on the other hand, has written hundreds (thousands?) of poems anyone on earth could have written.

Is that due to drugs? Delusion? Who cares? It is what it is, and what it is leaves me flat. Maybe if I had read him in the 60's or 70's I would have a soft spot for him and accept the mountain of mediocrity he's produced in the past 30 years. But I didn't, so I can't.
 
I agree Bukowski is a much harder working writer, aims much higher, hits the mark over and over and over again. Richmond does toss off poems, sluffs them off. He doesn't work at it. I guess where we differ is that I don't find it boring and you do. It's easy, and it works for me but not for you. Not sure why that is. Not that it matters.

And you might be onto something about having first read him in the 60s. He fits into my worldview. But he was interesting to me from day one, so it's not just nostalgia.
 
mjp: I gave this more thought as I labored under a broiling sun and I think the reason Richmond's poetry works for me is that he never holds back; he always says what's on his mind. That is -- surprisingly -- incredibly uncommon among poets. There are armies of talented poets who work hard at creating technically well-crafted poetry but they never reveal anything of significance about their inner self/mind. Richmond always "spills the beans" as he put it. There is a transparency to his work. His work is very narrow compared to Bukowski...he only has a few areas he writes about, but -- it seems to me -- he is very honest in what he does write. Now you still may feel like it is a bunch of dull bullshit, and I wouldn't argue that. But you gotta admit he is hardly ever coy and pretty much tells you what he thinks/feels, even if it's embarrassing. Aside from this, I detect a lyricism that is very odd and unamerican...maybe he read the French poets in college -- but that's neither here nor there.
 
Richmond's stuff is more of a miss than a hit with me.

However, with that being said, he's undeniably different from the majority of poets out there. That is true.
There's no witty one-liners, punchlines, zingers, or clever metaphorical fluff, littered anywhere in his writing. Random and aimless. For that, he gets a gold star, in my book.
Just a stark and laconic voice, devoid of comedy and pretense, writing in a painfully 'matter of fact' way.
I personally don't find his entire oeuvre lyrically accessible, or engaging at all, but I don't think he wrote much of it to be.
Much of his stuff, seems like, were just simple ruminations about anything around him, whether it was about a ladybug crawling up his arm, or the mattress in the corner of his room. His poems read more or less like thoughts than they did anything else, quickly tossed out, with no apology.

I've tried, tirelessly to get into his writing, but I just...can't.
Anyway, I have a little collection of his signed stuff I'm thinking about selling here in the near future, if anyone is interested.
 
Dan Nielson told me this years ago in a letter: "Good poetry is an insane person trying to act sane, bad poetry is a sane person trying to act insane." I don't know if this was something he'd heard before but I had never heard it put quite that way and I've always liked it. I was reading your great manuscripts section and came upon the poem "My Lucky Friend" and I thought this is the difference between Bukowski and Richmond right here. Richmond would never simply allow himself to stop and enjoy a taco and a coffee, because it simply isn't "mad" enough. But Bukowski can even make such a simple thing like stopping for a taco and a coffee seem interesting and meaningful, which in this poem shows that Bukowski was well aware of how exaggerrated Richmond's "madness" was. Bukowski is much more of a human being than Richmond, he wants to be a human being, while Richmond doesn't seem to care about anything but appearing CRAZY, which often times is just dull. Richmond just doesn't speak to/from the heart. While he is definitely "different", he is still fairly superficial in my mind.
 
I thought the purpose of this forum was to compare/contrast Buk with pretty much everything...Besides, without Buk, we would not be talking about Richmond at all...
 
I think Mather makes a very valid point. Which compliments Bukowski and gives an interesting way to look at poetry and poets. Good job on that.
 
When I read Buk's poetry I don't compare it with anyone's else poetry.
I just enjoy reading it, that's all.
I don't see a valid or invalid point here. I can only speak for myself of course.
 
Not comparing Buk's poetry to Richmond's, but Richmond's to Buk's. Why else are we here?
 
I am not comparing Richmond to Bukowski, per se, but to good poetry, for what it's worth.

Rekrab said:
...he always says what's on his mind. That is -- surprisingly -- incredibly uncommon among poets. There are armies of talented poets...but they never reveal anything of significance about their inner self/mind.
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Well, nail on the head, brother. You find his inner self to be compelling, and I find it to be pathetic.

But again, I'm sure pretty much everything I've read from him is influenced by heroin, and no good art ever came from heroin. None. Go ahead and list all your great heroin writers here - I know you all will - they are all shit.

Saying a writer on heroin is great or has insight is like saying a retarded person's writing is great or has insight. It might very well be different, and have insight into their own addled worlds, but I don't care about their worlds.

It's easy for a retarded person or junkie to be in a different world. I prefer some imagination. Since we're talking about Serafini in the other thread, there's a good example. Just as fucking mental as something a junkie or an idiot savant might come up with, but without the cheap and easy path to it.

And before you come down on my for using "retard" or "idiot savant," some of my best friends are retards! So screw you! Hi Ananda!
 
Poe was into opium, but maybe not while he was writing. I could see how a heroin addict would be motivated to create in order to get money for more heroin yet writing is not such a sure thing.
 
mjp said:
Saying a writer on heroin is great or has insight is like saying a retarded person's writing is great or has insight. It might very well be different, and have insight into their own addled worlds, but I don't care about their worlds.

It's easy for a retarded person or junkie to be in a different world. I prefer some imagination. Since we're talking about Serafini in the other thread, there's a good example. Just as fucking mental as something a junkie or an idiot savant might come up with, but without the cheap and easy path to it.
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We can all agree that heroin is a strong mind altering substance. With that, lets also remember that alcohol is also a very strong mind altering substance. For some, it is as strong if not stronger than the grips of heroin --where the effects of both can destroy lives, motivate one to create great art, both, or my personal favorite...neither.
 
Bill, I particularly enjoyed your poem jesus can't wear sandals anymore because they don't hide the trackmarks.

harrowing.
 
mjp said:
Go ahead and list all your great heroin writers here - I know you all will - they are all shit.
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One John Lennon had a heroin phase. Early-mid '69; best as I can tell. Well documented in Cold Turkey from the Live Peace in Toronto album from 9/13/69. Granted, not his most prolific or famous period, but I wouldn't describe his songwriting during this period as shit.

Apparently, he dealt with it again in the early-mid 70s. Not much music going on after Elephant's Memory in '72, so maybe that would have been shit. But I would never use the name John Lennon and shit in the same...millenium.

Well, I just did, didn't I? Well, I wouldn't do it again!
 
I think both alcoholics and heroin addicts can write good stuff...and bad stuff, and so can sober persons. Being addicted to a substance does'nt necessarily enter into it, unless one is so drunk or stoned all the time that you can't function properly...
 
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Primary Disorder said:
...heroin is a strong mind altering substance...alcohol is also a very strong mind altering substance...as strong if not stronger than the grips of heroin...
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Oh bullshit. If you're comparing heroin to alcohol you've obviously never known a junkie. You can work at a desk right next to a full blown alcoholic. Your garden variety junkie is a useless pile of drooling, semi-human meat. Or mostly bone - very little meat.

I don't find anything junkies say, and nothing they write, interesting. They don't even even make any sense, except when they are asking you for money. Which, if you know them personally, will happen every day. On the days that they don't ask you for money it's because they stole something of yours and sold it to get your money.

And PS, come on man, don't give me that "Lennon was a junkie" bullshit. He was hardly a junkie. Using heroin doesn't make you a junkie. I doubt Lennon was sucking cocks behind the 7-11 for a hit of crack. Not saying that Richmond did either, but if you told me had, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

None of this has anything to do with human compassion. If Richmond was rolling around on the sidewalk in Pasadena I would stop and help him. I'm all for getting people off things that are ruining their lives (and ruining my life when I have to deal with them). But we're talking about writing, and junkie writing is boring. Yawn, yawn, yawn. Mumble. Nod. "Ooooohhhh, look at the SUNLIGHT maaaaaan!" "My cat is an Egyptian Pharaoh, maaaaaan!" "My toes! They are sticking out of my SOCKS! But the WORLD keeps on turning - or at least that's what they would have us believe, maaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!!!"

Who cares about that?
 
mjp, I love the fact that when someone provides some semblence of what happened back in the day that might even suggest that you just might be wrong, you go on the defensive like a pit-bull. I have no fucking clue whether sir John was a junkie (you spelled it junkie, but I spell it junky, que sera, sera), but hell, he did junk for a while. Never shot it, though. That's well established. But you said, and I quote, "and no good art ever came from heroin. None. Go ahead and list all your great heroin writers here - I know you all will - they are all shit."

So, no mention of "junky" there, was there?

You recently told me you love a good argument. Well, you got one.

Further, it is my understanding that most users of junk get "normal" from use, not "out there" like an acid-head. Sure, the first couple of minutes might be "hey I just might spontaneously ejaculate," but after that, it's a grounding device. Then, hell when it's over.

Then again, don't get me wrong: I will never espouse the use of that shit. And when you wrote:

"I don't find anything junkies say, and nothing they write, interesting. They don't even even make any sense, except when they are asking you for money. Which, if you know them personally, will happen every day. On the days that they don't ask you for money it's because they stole something of yours and sold it to get your money."

You were spot on. Lennon (and Clapton, et al., of course), had the $$$ to not annoy the general public. And they weren't junkies, per se. But your original premise was herion users, not junkies. Perhaps a slight distinction. Mea culpa if so.
 
Eric Clapton was at his best when he was using, which of course doesn't prove anything since he may have been even better during that period without the smack.

Purple Stickpin said:
Further, it is my understanding that most users of junk get "normal" from use, not "out there" like an acid-head. Sure, the first couple of minutes might be "hey I just might spontaneously ejaculate," but after that, it's a grounding device. Then, hell when it's over.
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You haven't known too many junkies I take it. "Normal," to a junkie means not feeling like they're dying or wanting to rip their skin off. In the mid-late '70s I knew a lot of junkies and every single one of them ended up dead or in prison, and I assume that the ones I lost track of when they went to prison ended up dead later. I agree with mjp that if a junkie that you're friends with isn't asking for money it's probably because they already stole something from you to get it.

I gotta admit though, it's kind of fun to poke them with sharp objects while they're nodding.
 
Purple Stickpin said:
mjp, I love the fact that when someone [...] even suggest that you just might be wrong, you go on the defensive like a pit-bull.
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I thought that was part of my charm?

We don't know for sure what Lennon wrote while directly under the influence of heroin, or how much of what he may have written under the influence was later re-worked (in order to sound like real music ;)). And, by the strict rules of junkies themselves, if he never stuck it directly into his veins, he was never a junkie.

I guess I meant junkie, junkies...the leeching, drooling, accidentally-burn-down-your-house-when-you-go-to-the-store-to-buy-beer kind.

Johnny Thunders was a unique, albeit vastly limited and simplistic, guitar player/junkie who I admired greatly when I was a youngster. But his style - such as it was - was developed before he discovered the joys of the needle. And all of his songs were written when he was not high. When they are really high junkies do the following; sleep as if they are in a coma. And that's all they do. When they are not asleep they are doing whatever they have to do to get more heroin so they can go back to coma land.

If a writer or musician that you respect resorts to heroin, you can be sure that any talent they had, and any great work they did, came either before or after the heroin. Nothing good comes during it. That's what I meant to say, but the post was already too long.
 
We do love that mjp charm.

Great artist creates. Great artist makes big money. Great artist becomes famous. Great artist can't handle the attention. Great artist hides. Great artist wants to maintain that natural high. Great artist graduates to heroin. Great artist puts shotgun in mouth. Art of dead artist is worth more.

Steve Richmond is still alive. He can handle it.
 
bospress.net said:
Nick Cave has a bad junk habit. I would suspect that most of his stuff was written on junk.
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I heared he's been over that for a long time.
But 'Your funeral my trial' and 'Tender Prey' were two magnificent albums, both of which were written and produced under stong influence of H.
(Nick Cave once said in an interview, he needed a whole week just to sing the vocals of 'Slowly goes the night' due to his addiction and he could do this in 20 min now. Still I think he did a more than GREAT job on that song!)

oh, and there's Lou Reed of course.

and wasn't there David Bowie?
 
What about Burroughs? I don't know if he was shooting heroin while he wrote Junky, but I'm pretty sure he shooting heroin or whatever, while he wrote Naked Lunch in Tangier. Of course, for those who don't like Naked Lunch it's just proves that you can't be creative while on drugs, I guess. My faves are Junky and Interzone, and both of them are pretty straight forward to read...
 
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chronic said:
You haven't known too many junkies I take it.
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Thankfully, no. But I knew a few people who've had people who were using work for them, and they were surprised to learn later that they were using. Maybe an exception to the rule. What you posted does certainly ring true.

mjp said:
I thought that was part of my charm?
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Of course it is. It might actually be all of it. ;)

But ditto to what you posted, as per what I said to chronic above.
 
I know a lot of people that use of which a great share are artists. Believe me, there isn't a rule. Like there never is. It's not like 'oh you use it can't be good' or something. It all depends from person to person.
 
I didn't even know Richmond did heroin, but when there's an entire thread here devoted to what everybody is drinking today, glorifying alcohol, it seems hypocritical to so vehemently bash the use of heroin. I just don't think Richmond was a writer in his heart and I see this when people like him disappear from the scene at a certain point...they throw in the towel because they were never up to it from the beginning...they drew all their strength from Buk...Bukowski never would have given up, because he was a WRITER through and through, up to his last breath, as has been discussed even in his dark decade he still wrote and submitted. I came across a 1997 copy of Atom Mind on my shelf with Buk on the cover and some excerpts from Richmond's "Spinning off Bukowski" which I owned at one time and thought a good book. Some really tender moments in there about Buk, I thought MUCH superior to Winan's book about Buk, but my point is Richmond wrote poetry because of Buk, his best book of prose was good but really only because of the true fact of Buk being in his life and giving him this material...and that's it. Heroin or no heroin, Richmond just is not a writer in his guts. When we are talking about Richmond we are really only talking about Buk.

As far as other books written on heroin, like Junky, I figure if a heroin user really wants to be a writer he/she/it can find a few hours of clarity in the day to write...really, Junky was only interesting as a sort of reportage of the underworld, nothing brilliant about it, and to read it now seems almost like an after school special.

I don't think anybody mentioned Jim Carroll, what the hell happened to him?
 
Marx Renoffski said:
It's not like 'oh you use it can't be good' or something. It all depends from person to person.
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Right.

Because some of them are not junkies.

Tell you what, for anyone who is still confused about this, here's a special online-only deal: I will introduce you to a real junkie! Bring him around to your place.

Don't bother locking your valuables in a safe before they come, they'll figure out how take the whole safe while you're in the bathroom. They'll steal the neighbor kid's wagon and roll the safe out of your place. Then they'll wheel it through 14 miles of city streets until they get it downtown, where they'll get three more junkies to help them drag it up 10 flights of stairs and chuck it out a window to pop it open. If that doesn't work and it stays locked, they will put it into a shopping cart (they already sold the neighbor kid's wagon) and push it to the recycling center and sell it as scrap metal.

During all that you will notice that they have very little time to regale you with interesting stories, or write great poems or timeless music.
 
It's crystal meth around here, not heroin...I see them climbing the fences at 4:15 a.m. or walking down the middle of the street, jack-o-lantern-toothed white guys rubbing their abs...don't know if any of them write poetry...doubt it.
 
mjp said:
During all that you will notice that they have very little time to regale you with interesting stories, or write great poems or timeless music.
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Thats a shame, because if they did write a story about that sort of activity and more just like it --not only would I find it interesting, Id find it hilarious and likely would spend money on a published compilation of related material.
 
Someone did write a story like that, it's called the "Basketball diaries", which is funny I think...but I must have the "globally warned ignore the asshole alert" on my name again...
 
I recommend reading the true story of Christiane F, "Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo" and/or watching the movie. I'm sure there are translated versions of the book - the movie features her idol David Bowie with a live appearance.

For everyone who doesn't already know there's no poetry in heroin addiction, the book and the movie show clearly being a junkie = shit.
 

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