Larry K. Richman's "The Joys of House Wrecking"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

“The work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull.” -Roger Scruton

Larry Richman (1934-2023) was born in Philadelphia and grew up on a small Bucks County chicken farm north of the city. He attended local schools and then Colorado College, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with a BA in English in 1957. From Duke University, he received an MA in 1959 and a PhD in 1970.

Larry went on to teach English at the Beaufort and Florence Centers of the University of South Carolina, Washington & Lee University, Agnes Scott College, Virginia Intermont College, and Virginia Highlands Community College, from which he retired as professor emeritus of English in 1998. He also served briefly as adjunct faculty for Vermont College.

Larry was one of the founding editors of a nationally distributed poetry quarterly, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. He and his wife, Ann, were editor-publishers of the Sow’s Ear Press, which published 30 collections by poets from the upper South between 1994 and 2003. He was also one of the founders and the associate editor and advertising director of The Plow, an Appalachian alternative newsmagazine published by the nonprofit Appalachian Information. The magazine ran for four years in the late 1970s, producing a total of 72 issues.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:08.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, May 2, 2025.
0:13.6	Today's poem is by Larry Richmond, Larry K. Richmond.
0:16.8	There's a Larry D. Richmond out there who has a very different public career,
0:23.3	mostly doing translational work for the Church of Latter-day Saints. This is Larry K. Richmond,
0:29.4	the poet. And it's called The Joys of House Wrecking. And it's an oddly satisfying and engrossing poem that seems to have anticipated, at least in an ironic way,
0:42.1	the weird trend and social phenomenon now of destruction rooms where you pay money and people
0:49.2	let you go in and just smash stuff, which doesn't seem to be very healthy, though I know there are different opinions
0:57.1	on that. It also reminds me of this wonderful quotation from the great conservative philosopher,
1:02.9	historian, and social critic Roger Scruton, who says of conservatism that it starts from a sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.
1:16.9	This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets, peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation
1:28.7	of others while having no means single-handedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of
1:35.0	destruction is quick, easy, and exhilarating, the work of creation, slow, laborious, and dull.
1:43.0	And one of the other aspects that he gets at in that statement is that the work of creating good things,
1:51.4	difficult, slow, boring, is also a communal work.
1:55.1	It's hard to create the greatest good things by yourself, whereas it's very easy for a single person sometimes to destroy
2:04.4	even the greatest good things. And I think this poem puts its finger on that in a somewhat
2:12.2	playful, but also a serious and concerned way. Here is the joys of house wrecking.
2:21.2	Builders are a sorry lot.
2:23.5	They start low, they follow rules.
2:26.7	Wreckers stop at the top.
2:29.1	Unroofing under the sun, releasing prisoner nails to the society of grass below, flying frisbee shingles
	...

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