Don Riggs
Don Riggs was born Donald Albert Riggs at 1:39 a.m. December 3, 1952 in Baldwin, New York. His family moved in the area outside Washington, D.C., a year later, where his parents both worked for the Federal Government, as Don did for a number of years (on summer break from college).
He recited "The Night Before Christmas" in his Unitarian Universalist church's Christmas Eve service in 1961, his first performance as a poetry reader (although there was no open mic following "Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"). He published two examples of very historically inaccurate and prosodically awful verse in The Pine Cone, the newspaper of Pine Crest Elementary school. His sixth grade compilation "My Favorite Poems" (1964) includes a section titled "My Own Verse." Chief among his models at this point were Edward Lear ("Far and few, far and few / Are the lands where the Jumblies live") and Laura Elizabeth Richards ("Eletelephony").
High school was when and where he started to explore modern and contemporary poetry. John Gussman loaned him his copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind, which in many instances baffled him, but in others has inspired him to the present day ("The pennycandy store beyond the el"). Rev. Howard Oliver delivered a three-Sunday series of sermons based on the poetry of Robert Frost, in his junior year (1968-9), which made "Mending Wall" one of his enduring favorites.
College was where he was introduced to Dylan Thomas, and Don spent many hours wandering through the fields outside Carlisle, Pennsylvania composing aloud, without paper, poems such as the "Elegy of the Death of the Sun at Six." He did not take poetry workshops or take an active part in the Belles Lettres Society, therefore neatly sidestepping any influences of what was popular at the time.
Graduate school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill was where he was first immersed in various aspects of contemporary poetry, such as the two workshops he took with James Seay, who taught him to write with a sense of place and voice, both founded in the Southern poetry of James Dickey and local poets like Lou Lipsitz. Jerome P. Seaton, with whom Don co-translated Francois Cheng's L'ecriture poetique chinoise into Chinese Poetic Writing (Indiana, 1982), was a major influence in the area of poetic translation, which was the topic of his Ph.D. dissertation, where he developed a theory of translation of poetry and applied it to Ezra Pound's and Paul Blackburn's translations of the Troubadours of the High Middle Ages.
During graduate school and beyond, Don wrote a great deal of love poetry to his girlfriend, fiancee, and then wife, Petra Wirth, with whom he explored the poetry of Robert Bly and medieval folk songs, such as the Cantigas de Amigo, on which Petra wrote her dissertation, concerning the survival of a possible primordial matriarchy in that literature.
In 1995, Don returned to graduate school to partake of Temple University's M.A. in English / Creative Writing. There he studied with Rachel Blau du Plessis, Susan Stewart, Toby Olson, and Lawrence Venuti on different aspects of poetry, and with others on more theoretical tangents and fiction. At the end of this period (1997), Don and Petra divorced, and he remained in Philadelphia, where he adjuncted at a number of schools, along with another Temple creative writing graduate, Alex Kudera, whose novel Fight for Your Long Day, a cult classic among adjuncts, describes Don's experience very well in that regard. He has taught full-time non-tenure track at Drexel University since the fall of 1999, where he has garnered the Barbara G. Hornum Teaching Excellence Award and the Pennoni Honors College Award for Teaching Excellence.
Don has written about his writing life and process in detail over the years in a characteristic style that combines prose and poems. Many of these writings are published in his “Making Things out of Words” column for the online magazine Press 1. These writings document the influence of both ordinary and extraordinary events, memories, mythologies, dreams, and more, upon his work.
Bilateral Asymmetry was published by Texture Press in 2014. It combines both poems and drawings. Reviewing the volume for Cleaver, Shinelle L. Espaillat writes:
Often, Riggs twists knowledge in unusual directions and reshapes our understanding. The titular section plays with ideas about dominance and weakness, logic and creativity, showing how strength naturally leads to self-doubt: “My dominant side is more insecure / since it always has to be capable.” We have been taught to accept that strength can be a façade, and that it often hides weakness, but the idea that having to be strong necessarily creates weakness changes the value of dominance. Riggs goes on to question our acceptance in nature’s inherent balance, positing instead that while symmetry, and therefore perfection, is the starting point, every ex-utero experience pushes toward asymmetry and imperfection.
Don’s work plays a big part, also, in the Texture Press craft-book, Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (by Lynn Levin and Valerie Fox). Don contributes both poems and illustrations.
Don coedited, with Judith Kerman, Uncommonplaces: Poems of the Fantastic (Mayapple, 2000).
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Links to Writings and Videos:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25167559?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents review of book on second wave New York poets
http://pbq.drexel.edu/don-riggs-jupiter-transits-my-anus/ poem in Painted Bride Quarterly
http://pbq.drexel.edu/don-riggs-the-flies-of-mid-autumn/ another poem in PBQ
http://www.leafscape.org/press1/v4n1/makingthings.html column in Press1
http://www.amazon.com/Bilateral-Asymmetry-Don-Riggs/dp/0692212728 amazon.com on Bilateral Asymmetry
http://www.cleavermagazine.com/bilateral-asymmetry-by-don-riggs-reviewed-by-shinelle-l-espaillat/ review of B.A. by Shinelle L. Espaillat
https://books.google.com/books?id=g8eTg0ZmiAwC&pg=PA105&lpg=PA105&dq=Many+City+Poets+Don+Riggs&source=bl&ots=pCnGVJ_mg8&sig=cN0-qZBXia4P_xGURmVtFf1-JVk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=b_mNVYOOLdLbgwTQ5IC4Cw&ved=0CF4Q6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=Many%20City%20Poets%20Don%20Riggs&f=false review of Uncommonplaces: Poems of the Fantastic ed. Judith Kerman and Don Riggs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev9lR4bekSE DUTV promo for Dr. Don and Insomniac Theater
https://vimeo.com/68101676 in title role in "Landlordosaurus Rex"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7rnxsNs854 Riggs reading from Bilateral Asymmetry