Artists Who Are Poets/Poets Who Are Artists Featuring Richard Fox

Please join us for what promises to be an amazing evening of poetry featuring local poet & legend Richard Fox. The event will be hosted by poet Paul Szlosek (filling in for the series’ regular host Sam Lalos) with Richard reading precisely at 5:30 PM followed by the open mic (two poems or five minutes for each reader with the sign-up starting at 5 pm.) So come and enjoy Richard’s incredibly thought-provoking poetry and listen to other local poets at Tidepool Bookshop.

Richard Fox is a local poet and legend born and bred in Worcester MA. He attended the progressive Webster University in the early 1970s. These diverse cultures shaped his worldview and love of words. John Hodgen, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize, writes of him: “Rich Fox calls himself a small poet at large, but there is nothing small about his poems . . . They are large-themed and large-hearted, framed by a world at war with itself and a world all the more lovely when it is almost taken from us, when we see how filled to overflowing it is with light and joy and longing and loss. These are well crafted, poignant, clever, and ultimately wise poems which leave the reader wanting to believe one can throw one’s arms around this hard-won world, and, better yet, that the world will hold us in its arms as well.” Richard’s poems feature rock ’n roll and youthful transgressions, but his focus is cancer from the patient’s point of view. He is the author of eight poetry collections, the latest, Poems for my Zady & Miscellany (2023). Winner of the 2017 Frank O’Hara Prize, Richard seconds Stanley Kunitz’s motion that people in Worcester are “provoked to poetry”.