Ben and Frances Richey

Awhile back, I attended a reading hosted by the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence program, featuring Frances Richey. She introduced herself as a yoga teacher and poet, a nice coupling of professions. When she revealed that she worked in the corporate world for two decades, I was taken back. When she revealed that she wrote a book of poems for her son on duty at Iraq, and after reading a selection, I almost doubled over – in front of me that night was a mother with a passionate heart, and a poet who definitely knew how to write.

Richey had first started to write poetry when she began volunteering at a hospital in New York City. At the time, she was a single mother raising a son, Ben. She gave us a highlight of their lives together – their differing political viewpoints, their differing social viewpoints, all the way up to when he graduated from the military academy West Point, and was sent on duty to Iraq. His absence introduced a void in her life that Richey decided to fill with yoga teaching and poetry. Her latest collection, The Warrior, is dedicated to her son, and is filled with pages of powerful stories all pertaining to her experiences with Ben and on occasion, her family.

Richey has won several prestigious awards for her poetry, and much of her work has been showcased in popular publications. She composed poetry for her experiences as a hospital volunteer, something she shared with the audience that night as well. A highlight that I would like to touch upon, is how mother and child eventually learned to overcome all of their differences – it was a very heartwarming ending to the story. Her son is still serving, having done two tours of Iraq already, and Richey continues to write and hope for his safety.

Once we make a decision, it’s often too late to change. For Frances Richey, however, she was able to repair her relationship with her son, Ben. I chanced to meet her at the Macaulay Honors event, hosted on the Veterans Day. Though I did not know much about her background, prior to the event, her poems reflected her internal struggle with her son. In a divided family with separate views on politics, Richey struggled to compromise with Ben. After He was deployed to serve at Iraq, Richey began to realize how selfish she was. In her published book, The Warrior, Richey attempted to reconstruct her fractured relationship with her son.

Though I could not recognize her appearance in the basement, I could sense her misery and her disconnection to his son from her subdued voice. She was one of the first few people, I have encountered in life, who was optimistic about her future yet regretful of what she had done. After she recited few of her poems, what gripped my attention was her style of poetry. It was one of those that didn’t rhyme. “The way you did when you were twelve and I was afraid to open the door I’d forgotten to lock. You went in ahead of me.” In her poem “To My Son In Iraq” Richey expressed the bravery of his son to fight the war and how she lacked the confidence. For most of her poems, thought they mainly were addressed to her concerns for Ben, the theme was universal. For families, with someone serving the country, they put their views aside and supported the soldiers.

Though Richey repaired her relationship with her son after he came back from war, I felt that she had given up part of who she was. In my perspective, she accepted defeat. Richey noted that she never argued about their difference in political view after he was home. This was one aspect that continued to puzzle me. I had come to the conclusion that her defeat was what essential all mothers would do. They sacrificed themselves for the children.

Deep in the bowels of the Macaulay Honors College Building on November 11, 2008 we were privy to a small and intimate reading of Frances Richey poems by none other than Mrs. Richey herself.

She smiled somewhat nervously at the audience and adjusted her purple cardigan set. She beamed at them with her eyes smiling through her square lenses. There was not much to set her apart from an average benevolent looking middle age woman as I observed her from the second row. That was until she started to talk about her son directly and through her poems.

She described her place in history as a Vietnam War dissenter and acknowledged that, “I am very liberal.”  She then paused as she described her son as part of the military, a green beret, “you know one of those guys”. Although her son is currently no longer in the military it is almost as if she never fully reconciled that fact. Her son went against her ideals of peace. In her attempt to express her sadness and emotion at the disintegration of their communication and relationship she wrote these poems. She wrote a series of poems that were written into and collected into the book “The Warrior”.

              She firmly asserted that this book was not “a political book”. In the “Aztec Empire” she compares the gore of war to the crude sacrifices of the now extinct Aztec Culture. She read, “Before he was a warrior, he was a boy/Before he drank blood, he drank milk” with a barely discernable tremor in her voice. Her ambivalence to the war in Iraq is reflective of her son’s participation in it. He may be a warrior but he was also once an obedient son. Before her son killed people, she gave him life. She could not condemn her own son even at the expense of compromising her own “liberal” beliefs. The love of a mother to a son is stronger and more resilient even when it comes to compromising views on a war.

Mrs. Richey and her son had their disagreements as he grew up and that even though he was born in a pacifist household he chose to go to a West Point, A military school. Richey is her own individual because of her son.

Frances Richey’s plight is none other than that of a mother trying to reconcile her differences with her son through her art. Her art is poetry. Her form is free, as it fits no other mould. Her writing took a departure form industrial sales where she first started career wise to the refuge of free verse.  The grief of a mother estranged from a son who seemed determined to undermine her ideals in every way, cannot be labeled so simply. Her ability to successfully share her fears and forge a connection with not only with her son but everyone in general is inspirational.

Frances Richey seemed more like a peer than a superior, stylishly wearing a vivid purple knit cardigan with a matching shirt and a belt around her waist.  Even her ornate earrings seemed unexpected to me to be worn by a middle-aged woman.  Regardless, I immediately knew that she had flair and I hoped her personality matched her creative style that initially drew me in.  She created a humble and compassionate atmosphere by greeting students arriving late with a “Thank you for coming, I’m glad you made it.” Instead of feeling irritated or set back, she happily volunteered to fill them in on the material they had missed.

            She has worked in sales and marketing before, so it is little surprise she could capture the attention of her audience.  She was chatty but articulate about serious matters. Her recent book “The Warrior,” is a collection of poems she wrote when her son decided to serve his country by joining the green berets.  It was a way for her to tell him about things that she couldn’t talk to him in person about.           

            I half-expected her poetry to be boring and cheesy, like I often disappointedly find poetry to be, but her talent for detail and imagery to combine with a subject that creates conflict and emotion was a welcome surprise.  For example, when she writes about her son’s graduation from West Point, she describes swallows overhead as “black butterflies,” whose “bloody throats arrived out of nowhere.”  I had been a little worried that her poems would be about something irrelevant to my life, like her lost love or something like that.  Instead, there was a motif of war, soldiers, and motherhood combined. I appreciated her more realistic poetry in comparison to the naïve or idealistic.

 I noticed an interesting reoccurring theme of vertigo throughout her poetry and I found it a dramatic tool to emphasize the hardship she faced with her son being away.

            By the time Ben grew up, Fran decided to start writing after attending a poetry workshop at a hospice where she was volunteering.  All of the death in the hospice taught her a lot, especially about how quickly life could end.  Her twenty years of employment in the business sector made her hospice work and yoga teaching seem ironic, but peaceful and youthful at the same time. She genuinely told us, “I’m interested in you,” and I believed her. With her sense of energy, her trendy clothes, and her ability to tell her life stories as if we were her best friends, it was as if Frances channeled her charisma from the teenagers in the audience themselves.

Frances Richey with son, Ben

Frances Richey is an author who writes poetry.  Her first book of poems was published for her father. The second book she promised to write to and for her son, Ben, who is in the army and who served two tours of duty in Iraq. He is an army captain and a Green Beret. Richey worked in business for two decades, and raised a child by herself, as a single mother. She started writing when she volunteered with people who had less than six months to live. This inspired her to write because these people told her to do what she wants to do, and not waste time, because in a single moment everything could disappear as if it was never there.

“Poetry is really music and sound. These are poems that my son can understand. That’s what’s really important to me.” When her son left to war, instead of joining “Mom against war” organizations, she wrote poems. She was trying to be closer to Ben when their relationship was strained. They disagreed on the war; she felt that they shouldn’t go into Iraq, and he felt that it was his duty to go and that it was the right thing to do. She criticized the administration and she didn’t realize how much it was hurting him because he was about to go into combat. Through her poems she expressed herself and helped her son to understand her feelings, her emotions, and the tough time she was having while he was away from her. She knew he might never come home and they might never heal their relationship. Poetry healed her relationship with her son.

Richey’s new book The Warrior: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War includes poems about her son, her only son who went to serve in Iraq.  She read a few of her poems, and the substance, the emotion, all caught my imagination. The stories she tells are powerful and compelling.  She expresses the love fore her son and the helplessness she feels at being unable to help him while he is in danger. A few lines form her poem The Aztec Empire, “They use blood the way we use money, to keep their world going.” I found her poetry full of imagery and deeply moving.  Richey said that poetry changed her life, I understand why. Even the smallest things, like her son packing, she describes the contents of his suitcase in full detail while commentating on them, “These don’t belong to me,” “I have no place here. This is not my life,” “He can’t bear my worry. Like the rucksack he carries on his back, it seems to suck the life out of him,” “I can’t protect him.” While describing an event that is taking place in the present, she also recalls facts about her son as he was growing up, like the constant nosebleeds he would get when she was packing for business trips, “Tissues fell from him like crumpled doves… He tilted his head back, pinched his nose between thumb and index finger: ‘Don’t worry, I know what to do.’”

Another poem that moved me was Kill School, it was a poem about training to kill, even something as innocent looking as a rabbit, “The trainer showed him how to rock the rabbit like a baby in his arms, faster and faster, until every sinew surrendered and he smashed its head into a tree.” The poetry read to us by Frances Richey was full of imagery, and emotions every one of us can relate to. Even if we don’t have any sons or relatives who is/was in the war, I think we can all relate to the poems.

           Beginning with a career in the corporate world, Richey saw that she lacked fulfillment and satisfaction in her life. This led her to volunteer at a hospice, where her relationships with patients brought her closer to “the reality of her mortality.” Business writing is permeated with “proposals, reports…you’re always making a case and asking for something. However, with poetry, “I could do something I love.”

           Like any concerned and loving mother, Frances Richey and her son, Ben, went through an emotional rollercoaster prior to his deployment to Iraq. Confounded by her son’s decisions to enlist in the army, Richey admits, “I didn’t understand why he was making the choices he was making.” Richey explained that writing was an “attempt to talk to [Ben] and express my feelings, things I couldn’t say to him in person.”

           Richey’s struggle but determination to understand her son’s rationale is illuminated in the poem “His Gun.” Richey “became a student;” observing and comprehending while her son showed her the gear he was gathering before deployment. She describes her urge to learn as “an irresistible pull like gravity or love.” She especially notes the first time she saw Ben with his gun; “the side he hides from me, the dark beauty.”

           Her reading of “Kill School,” about a training camp where soldiers’ physical and mental toughness in the face of death are tested, opened the window to her soul. Richey vivid imagery is felt as Ben describes the “[rabbit's] softness of fur, another pulse against his chest.” He rocked the rabbit like a “baby in his arms, faster and faster, until every sinew surrendered and he smashed its head into a tree.” My stomach dropped as I pictured his momentary fictitious gentle caressing, then the crushing of its bones. Ben tells his mother, “they make a little squeaking sound, they cry.” Richey writes emphasizes the tension between mother and son while “biting off the skin from my lips.”

           After her reading, Richey explained that Ben “took it personal” when they spoke politics, he thought that “I didn’t approve of what he was doing,” thus causing friction in their relationship. However, through her writing Richey asserts, “you can heal relationships through your art.” Her genuine desire to better their relationship is clear rather than seek the approval of readers is evident; “I wrote poems my son can understand and that’s what I really care about.” Accepting that there will forever be unanswered questions, Richey exclaims the best news that her son completed his service and is back home, and that they have rekindled their relationship: mission accomplished.

Frances Richey seems like the typical mother. She is the mother of a Green Beret and feels like most mothers would feel – concerned and distressed because her son’s life constantly faces perilous situations, especially during war time. After her son, Ben, decided to be a soldier and serve in Iraq, she filled the void in her life by writing a collection of poems that portrayed her feelings to his being a soldier in an attempt to reestablish the mother-son relationship.
The reading started off with a poem in which she made a comparison between her son in Iraq and the Aztec Empire exhibit of the Guggenheim in 2004. She praises her son in that even though Ben was a soldier, he was also very much like a warrior during the Aztec civilization. In each poem she read from her book called “The Warrior”, Richey expressed the consistent emotion of worry that she might never be able to see her son again. According to her, writing poems was her way of coping with the physical absence of her son. My favorite poem was “Waiting”, in which the mother and son had a brief connection despite the physical boundary. When she was praying here at home, he thought he had seen her in Iraq with him. Richey even claims that she “would know even if he died” at the other end of the world. Richey’s brief comparisons and juxtapositions of the different time zones here and in Iraq goes to show that although they are separated physically, they are still connected spiritually.  As her son was being deployed in Iraq, writing was her way of praying.
Richey’s philosophy is “poetry is really rhythm and sound”. What matters to Richey is not what others think but that Ben can understand her feelings and thoughts. To Richey, reading her words aloud was like “getting in touch with [her] own music”. Not only did Richey’s musical collection of poems bridge the distance between her and Ben, but it also reached out to other military moms who is still currently feeling the same way while waiting for a loved one to return.

Source: www.francisrichey.com

Awkwardly seated on a chair perched atop a stage in a sloppily decorated room, Frances Richey reads from her critically acclaimed poetry collection, The Warrior.  Some attentively listen while others wonder as to why no refreshments were provided.  Yet as she sets down the book to address any questions, it becomes obvious that this poet is content with her work and her ultimate purpose in writing her works is far more personal than to just woo audiences.
Richey’s The Warrior is a poetic interpretation of her emotions regarding her son fighting in the Iraq War.  She claims that it is “[her] attempt to talk to him…about things [she] couldn’t talk to him in person about,” because she believes that “you can…heal your relationships with [art].” The first thing the listener immediately notices is that her poetry doesn’t rhyme or follow any classical meter and sounds more like a narrative.  She reads four poems, addressing her condition a week before her son’s departure, upon first seeing her son’s gun, upon hearing her son describe the training he went through, and while waiting for the days to pass as her son fights in Iraq.  While all these works are impressive and depressingly thought provoking, the best of the bunch is the last one, “Waiting.”  By repeatedly contrasting the times between the United States and Iraq, Richey expertly delivers the tension associated with the passage of time when one is terrified of the destruction the next second may hold.  What’s most riveting, however, is how visual the poems are, making chilling comparisons such as “the drag line of a spider” to emphasize objects one would normally ignore.
Afterwards, Richey goes on to describe her feelings about her son and poetry. She starts off with how her son grew increasingly conservative and it hurt their relationship that she was unable to understand how strongly he felt about certain issues.  She then goes on to describe her first work of poetry, which she states had nothing to do with her son. She also mentions that, having spent decades in the business industry before coming into poetry, such a shift from objective writing to subjective writing was not a smooth transition.  She claims that, in business, she was “always trying to sell something,” which is not the case with her poetry.
It should be noted that the lack of classic rhyming patterns may have worked well for Richey, but it is now commonly and ignorantly believed that only amateur poets strive to make their works rhyme.  If one was to look at Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” the rhyming pattern shows a mastery of the English language that is uncommon amongst experts, let alone amateurs.  It is understandable that rhyme shouldn’t be forced, but completely denying it as a useful tool in good poetry is also unjust.
Frances Richey is a talented poet who represents an underrepresented point of view.  While her presence is quite professional, her work is reassuringly motherly.

francesrichey.com

Intimate. It is the best word available in the English language to describe Frances Richey. It describes everything about her – from her demeanor to her stories, and especially to her presence in a room. Her intimacy was recently put on display at a recent reading at the Macaulay Honor College. She read several selections from her new collection of poems, entitled The Warrior. These poems chronicle the ever-changing emotions that she felt when her son, Ben, was deployed to fight in Iraq.

As told to the audience by Richey before she began reading her poems, this collection of poems was a way to talk to her son Ben – a way to tell him things that she could not tell him face-to-face. The reading took place at the intimate downstairs cabaret room in 35 West 67^th Street. In addition to conveying her purpose for writing these poems, Richey began by thanking the people who had made the event possible – Zoe Sheehan and Roslyn Bernstein. It was an extremely intimate beginning. Not only did Richey reveal two of her close friends, but she also told the personal story of how these poems came to be. She said that she had a lot of emotions rise up in her when her son was deployed to Iraq and that writing poetry was her medium for releasing what she felt inside her.

The result of her efforts was spectacular. During the reading she read several poems from the collection including “The Aztec Empire” and “Letters.” One of her most insightful poems was entitled “Kill School.” It related an experience in which Richey had asked her son about the training that he underwent to become a Green Beret. After he told her about a gruesome training exercise involving a rabbit, she writes that he said, “You said you wanted to know.” This single phrase describes everything that has to do with this collection. Richey wrote it for her son to express to him the emotions that he wanted to know about, but that she could not talk about. These poems allowed a bridge of communication to be built between the two so that finally, they started talking again instead of simply saying things.

After reading several of the poems, Richey went into a detailed discussion on her views of poetry. She believes that “poetry is really music and sound.” Richey revealed that cafés were her favorite places to write because by drowning out the bustle of a busy coffee shop, she is able to focus on the harmony of her poems. Poems do not have to rhyme, she said, but they do need to flow like small symphonies.

Richey spoke a lot about how she became a writer. She had written in college, and when she chose a career in business, it also involved a more concrete, but still descriptive form of writing. Then, her father died and she decided to begin writing poetry again. She took several writing classes and established poets as her mentors. With this reawakening, she quit her job in the business industry and became a full-time writer, with a small job as a yoga instructor on the side. Then, she revealed the real reason that she became a writer when she said, “I want to go out doing something I really love,” and love is a fitting reason for Richey is a woman of emotion and intimacy.