News and Biography

Welcome to Blue Vision Poems.

The big news - Dressing Bones In New Skins is now published. You can pick up a copy at the DuneWorks Webstore.

Here's the blurb from the back cover:

Dressing Bones In New Skins is a poetic prayer for renewal - for the land, for the heart, and for the spirit. Todd speaks with a voice that ranges from Old Testament prophet to a lover's tender whisper. The poems are intimate and universal, rooted in place and soaring with mysticism. They are maps to help others explore the Territory, poems shaped from trying to understand our place in the Greater Place.

Some have asked why the copyright is 2003. That's when I originally copyrighted the manuscript. I submitted it for three years, then sat on the manuscript for two more years. Finally got around to samizdat (self-published). The poems in Dressing Bones In New Skins were mostly written 2000-2003, with a few older.

Willy Tyce showed up a while back and interviewed me and the interview is posted with the poetry links on the Poems page.

The Listen page is inactive. I hope to update it soon.

I appreciate very much those of you who emailed me. It's good to hear from you. It doesn't feel like the work is flying off into cyberether, unseen. Poetry is dialogue. After you read the poems, write me (rwtodd at bluevisionpoems.com) and let me know what you think.

With regards,
RWT

Biography

O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.
I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart
    shot full of pain over love.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much
    as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire
    doubled to a river moon of water.

Carl Sandburg, in Cornhuskers

Richard Todd is a lifelong inhabitant of the High Plains. He was raised in western Nebraska, and now lives in Amarillo, Texas, where he is learning the southern dialects of the plains.

Todd was invited poet at the University of Nebraska Center for Great Plains Studies Symposium The Bison: Past, Present and Future of the Great Plains (2000); the New Mexico Highlands University Symposium Redefining The American West (2001); and was Guest Professor of Creative Writing at West Texas A&M University (2003). He conceived and organizes Final Friday Open Mic, Amarillo's live performance stage; conceived and organized Resonance: A Poetry Performance Series, at the Buddy Holly Center, Lubbock, Texas (2004); collaborated with artist Lahib Jaddo in an installation of poetry and paintings titled "The Resonance Of Kindred Spirits", Buddy Holly Center, Lubbock, Texas (2004); and was highlighted on the High Plains Public Radio program High Plains In Words (produced by Stacy Yates) that featured a reading of Todd's We Bury Our Dead On Bison Plains (2005).

In addition to writing poetry, Todd works as an environmental scientist, is science advisor for Wildcat Bluff Nature Center near Amarillo, and volunteers as an interpretive naturalist at Palo Duro Canyon State Park.

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