A Curmudgeon's Guide to Postmodern Times

Richard Greene is a poet, or has been at least since he retired from a 38-year career in international development. A lawyer by training, he fell into his development career by accident when, after law school, though planning not to practice law but interested in international affairs, he accepted an unsolicited job offer from the U.S. Agency for International Development. After a few years in Washington (or Foggy Bottom, as the location of the U.S. foreign policy establishment is known), he was assigned as legal advisor to the USAID mission in Laos and there discovered that the development business suited his interests and inclinations very well. Greene wrote poetry beginning in the 8th grade and continued through college where he studied with a Professor, Henry Rago, who later became editor of Poetry magazine, the leading U.S. poetry journal. However, he wrote few poems after law school as he became absorbed in international development, but turned back to poetry as he neared retirement. One day he noticed that a couple of the lines in one of his poems stood well on their own. He thinks the lines may have been 'The cannon is callous / in its choice of targets'. After he came up with that first aphorism, he began looking for other extractable scraps of wisdom in his poems and soon thereafter began writing such scraps independently.