James Richardson is the author of numerous poetry collections, including By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, and During, winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as the best book in progress. Among his honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Emily Dickinson Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and teaches at Princeton University.

Solo

by James Richardson

I was just trying to think where I was
on June 25, 1961:
Garden City, New York, certainly,
and almost certainly miserable
on Sunday, the worst day of the week,
when just nineteen miles away in Manhattan,
forty minutes by rail and ten by subway,
Bill Evans’s great, quiet solo in “Detour Ahead”
was walking out on unbelievably thin ice,

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