A pair of MSU professors share the same name and a penchant for poetry.
Both professors are named Richard Thomas. One, known as Dick Thomas to friends and F. Richard Thomas in poetic circles, is a professor of American Thought and Language. The other, known as Richard Thomas to all, is a professor of history.
Aside from their professions on campus, both are established poets. Last week they took the stage for a poetry reading to showcase their respective styles at Lansing's Creole Gallery.
The performance was a joint reading, each poet taking turns with single poems. Following the duo, there was an open mic for area poets to display their skills.
Dick Thomas said the evening was a positive force for poetry and was bolstered by the crowd's diversity and receptive nature.
"It was a marvelous crowd," Thomas said. "It was a very diverse crowd. We both felt upon the stage there was a real intimacy we had with the audience."
Dick Thomas started writing and performing poetry more than 40 years ago. He cites the "standard American poets" such as Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams as influences. Richard Thomas, a 44-year poetry veteran, names Margaret Danner as an inspiration to his start in social protest and civil rights poetry in the early 1960s.
Dick Thomas said the open mic was an especially poignant cap to the evening.
"I was very impressed by it," he said. "I thought this was perhaps one of the best open mics I've been to in Lansing. There were some good interesting readers, voices we've never heard before."
The idea of combining the Thomas duo together in one evening performance came from Ruelaine Stokes, an instructor at the MSU English Language Center and coordinator of the Old Town Poetry Series.
"I dreamed up the idea of having the two Richard Thomases read together," she said. "I thought it would be a great idea - really humanly interesting and delightful."
Stokes said the event was years in the making. "I first heard Richard Thomas in the late '60s or early '70s when he was a young grad student," Stokes said. "I went to a gathering - it might have been an anti-war protest or a civil rights rally - and I remember being so struck by his intelligence and his intensity and what a gift it was to be a young black poet."
Richard Thomas made certain that social protest was not the only source of his poetry. "I wrote about canoeing down the Red Cedar River with my girlfriend in the '60s," he said with a laugh.
After earning a degree in history, Richard Thomas sacrificed poetry to teach about race and status from a historical perspective. He likened his recent return to performing as "going back to family."
The warm reception of the audience made Richard Thomas' transition to performing easier. "It was a very interesting rebirth or cycle back to it," he said. "That's probably much more powered by soul. I think as you get older, you return to your spiritual roots so to speak.
"It was a spiritual affair."
