Mephisto's Flea Song 

by Richard Frost

Mephisto's Flea Song

by Richard Frost

Paperback
Publication Date: Fall 2014
205 Pages
ISBN13: 978-1-934851-55-5 
USD $15.00 + Shipping

About the Author, Richard Frost

Richard Frost was born in 1929 in Redwood City, California. He was educated in the Redwood City public schools and at San José State University. In 1956, while teaching at San José State and finishing an MA, he met the poet William Stafford and they began a lifelong friendship. The next year Frost, with his wife and son and daughter, moved to Towson, Maryland, where he taught for two years at Towson State University. In 1959 he accepted a position in English at the State University College in Oneonta, New York. In 1969, after a divorce, Frost married Carol Kydd. They bought an old farmhouse and 170 acres in the Otsdawa valley, near Oneonta. Not long after their two sons were taking their first steps, Carol resumed her career as poet and began to publish widely under her married name. Along with writing and teaching, Richard Frost is a working jazz drummer. In 1974 he founded a traditional jazz band, The Catskill Stompers. Frost’s essay “Jazz and Poetry” is featured in the Antioch Review’s summer 1999 double issue on jazz. Richard Frost published two poetry collections, The Circus Villains and Getting Drunk with the Birds, with Ohio University Press. His long poem Jazz for Kirby, illustrated by Donald Justice, was published as a pamphlet by State Street Press in 1990, and in 1994 The Devil’s Millhopper Press published his chapbook The Family Way. In 1996 Sarabande Books published his poetry collection Neighbor Blood, which was runner-up for the Poets’ Prize. Frost’s poems have appeared in such journals at The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Harper’s Magazine, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, North American Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and TriQuarterly. He has had a fellowship at Bread Loaf, a CAPS fellowship, several Yaddo residency fellowships, and a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship. In 1982 he won the Poetry Society of America Gustav Davidson Memorial Award. Along with his poetry he is currently working on a memoir sequence, It Seemed to Me, three sections of which appeared in the journal Many Mountains Moving.

Reviews

“Richard Frost makes it easy for us to enter his poems, but what happens next is typically unexpected, sometimes demanding, sometimes delightful, but consistently offering his readers the gift of appreciative surprise.” — Billy Collins  

Praise for Previous Work

“In this collection [Neighbor Blood] Richard Frost has achieved a steady colloquial tone often touched with terror at the natural and suburban world, but one that is admirable in the ease of its style and its narrative power.” — Derek Walcott  

“Richard Frost has a rich range and a good ear. He is a lively storyteller, sardonic and compassionate as he invites the reader back into his childgood—vivid, exacting and loving as he testifies to the grown-up world he inhabits.” — Maxine Kumin  

Links

Poets Carol, Richard Frost to Open Hartwick Visiting Writers Series