Richard Meadows : poet-Photographer located in POrt Townsend, Washington

My poetry began in confusion and wonder and expanded from a growing awareness of the natural world around me as a teenager. Nature has been one of my main subjects since that time. Early on I found in the voices of Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, and e.e. cummings kindred spirits whose voices felt like they came up through the earth to embody their poems. Poets of body, Nature, and soul like Whitman and Oliver have been an endless source of inspiration for me. Contemporary poets of influence have been Gregory Orr, Rena Priest, Ted Kooser, Tyree Daye, and Jane Hirschfield. Human nature and nature have been driving forces in my poems as I observe people, my inner self, relationships between beings, and the music that vibrates through all of it. My current WIP is titled String Theories, which consists of all of the above, emphasizing jazz music I’ve grown to love in the last seven years. The vision for this work is that it will inspire readers to choose joy in the realms of music and nature as an antidote to the challenges of everyday life. One of the poems, “Sometimes” was published in Tidepools Magazine in their spring edition 2023. In the spring of 2024, I became very enamored with the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney and as I have roots in Ireland I am looking forward to traveling there again to immerse myself in its landscapes and its people as a way of growing deeper into my craft. When I first visited Ireland in 2023 I felt the land of my grandmother and had a visceral experience of what it feels like to feel the land of your blood and this is going to be part of my writing as I go forward. All of the poets named above will be part of the lineage of nature poets that I consider myself to be in line with and that will show in my poetry going forward.