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Ce Rosenow in the River Road Reading Series
My cousin Ce Rosenow—the fine Eugene, OR poet, editor, and scholar of haiku and its related forms—reading in the River Road Reading Series. She famously co-edited, with another fine poet, Bob Arnold, a superbly curated selection of Cid Corman‘s work, The Next One Thousand Years.Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2021
It was another pandemic year, in some ways more challenging than the first. There was a sense of fraying in the fabric of social life, work life, personal focus (my poetry journal full of fragments that I’m not postmodern enough to throw down on pages and pretend that they cohere as poems), the persistent floating anxiety. Among the various costumes that relief arrived in were books, of course.Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2018
Old Reading Room at BookBar (Photo: Tricia M.) Let me admit up front that I’ve included half a dozen books here that were read as part of my work with the Professional Creative Writing program at University College. But they all turned out to be worthwhile reading experiences. Even those I couldn’t quite connect with—Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West, Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw, and Adonis’s powerful Concerto al-Quds, which is also recondite and nakedly anguished by turns—continue to haunt me. This is usually an early indicator of re-readings in the offing.Read More
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Immodestly Noted
Order on Amazon Succinct The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems edited by Jonathan Greene and Robert West Broadstone Books 418 Ann Street Frankfort, Kentucky 40601-1929 My contributor’s copies came in the mail yesterday, and oh my—what are the odds that an off-the-main-map poet like me would find himself among such company? Somewhere between Anonymous and Zukofsky, within hailing distance of Archilochus, Arnold, Brandi, Bunting, Heaney, Kinnell, Niedecker, Rosenow, Villon, three Williamses (Jonathan, Miller, and William Carlos), and yes, Willie Yeats. This gave me a strange sense of elation, enhanced by the beauty of the physical book itself.Read More
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Bob Arnold’s Beautiful Days
Bob Arnold is one of my favorite poets, at least in part because his poems (like those of Cid Corman) provide no fodder for PhD candidates. He writes to capture moments of heightened consciousness as they arise, and it’s pretty clear we need more of those. You won’t find them on the Sunday talk shows or in the dusty pages of Foreign Affairs. They arrive almost always in poetry. In Arnold’s poetry, they arrive without fanfare, without symbolic sub- or super-structures.Read More
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The Best 10 Poetry Books of 2012
I’m talking, of course, about the books that came across my desk—a limiting factor because I almost never receive a “review copy.” (They’re always welcome, though!) I buy all but a handful of the books I read, so my reading is skewed by my own interests right up front. This unprofessional status frees me from the angst suffered by professional critics, according to Stephen Burt and Marjorie Perloff, as they fight to stay atop the wave of new poetry books that maliciously seeks to drown them.Read More
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Thread of the Real Hits Hollywood
Well, not exactly Hollywood. More like independent Vermont (redundant, I know) film. Bob Arnold yesterday posted views of several “favorites”—a silent video showcase of recent titles that happens to include Thread of the Real. What a boost to see my humble book among new collections from the great Hayden Carruth and David Budbill, among many others! I also love the way Bob flips the books over to highlight the publishers—in my case, Conundrum Press, which did such a beautiful job of designing and producing Thread. Thanks, Bob! I always wanted to see one of my books in the movies….Read More
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Dilatory (With Apologies to Bob Arnold)
This post’s title is a word I’ve always wanted to use but not in relation to myself. Oh well. Last year I picked up an extraordinary book, Bob Arnold’s “long Green Mountain poem” Yokel, read it through at one long sitting (unintentionally—my To Do list went unchanged that day), and then hopscotched through it with increasing delight over the next couple of weeks. I meant to write about it, but my To Do list finally took over my life.Read More
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As We Cover the Streets
A still from “As We Cover the Streets”—Janine Pommy Vega weaving together her egg shaker’ssimple rhythm and the complex music of her voice. Thanks to Bob Arnold at Longhouse Birdhouse for linking to this fine, uplifting tribute to Janine Pommy Vega, for whose estate Bob serves as literary executor.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
