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Adventures in Reading 2023
PART ONE: GOING LONG After Doctor Faustus defeated me last year, I developed a low-level psychic hum, an unease around a readerly question: could I still go long? I mean Don Quixote long; the three-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain long; The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine long (982 pages, English only, translated from the German by Hal Draper).Read More
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Maybe I’ll Try Make-Up, Like Dylan in Rolling Thunder…
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Poetry Month 2016: Ovid
Tristia, Book IV, 10 Who was this I you read, this trifler in tender passions? You want to know, posterity? Then attend:— Sulmo is my homeland, where ice-cold mountain torrents make lush our pastures, and Rome is ninety miles off. Here I was born, in the year both consuls perished at Antony’s hands; heir (for what that’s worth) to an ancient family, no brand-new knight promoted just yesterday for his wealth.Read More
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My Year in Books (2015)
I, too, dislike “best books” lists except when they bring me news of books I want to read but somehow overlooked, which is surprisingly seldom. Over 60-plus years of reading, beginning, as I recall, with Little Golden Books, I’ve developed enough self-awareness to guess correctly about 70 percent of time which books will bring me that mixture of pleasure and revelation that is my particular addiction.Read More
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Christmas Can Now Officially Begin
I’m not religious (except in the sense that Robert Lowell suggested in “My Heavenly Shiner”: “We were kind of religious, we thought in images”), yet Christmas for me remains a well of nostalgic emotion. It’s not about the dull hours I spent in our Lutheran church listening to the dry rote of the pastor’s sermons and the strangely passionless choir (joy was all right as a concept, it seemed, but something one should avoid expressing); it’s about the memories of music and lights and people we love, those we can embrace and those we can’t.Read More
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From a Rocking Boat…
A few weeks back I realized that by the end of 2012 I would be putting up my one-thousandth post on The Perpetual Bird. And here it is—saved for New Year’s Eve! I’ve noodled over it for days with the intention, as always, to offer something interesting, provocative, insightful, and/or unusual.Read More
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Merry Christmas from Me and Bob Dylan!
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Down Along the Cove
There’s a wonderful new batch of poems over at Salamander Cove, including some by my friend Joel Jacobson and a few by the inimitable Bill Knott. Excellent editorial work by Cove creator Annie Wyndham.Read More
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The Story (So Far) of the Year 2010…
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Wring Them Hands*
This bit of hand-wringing is amusing, coming as it does from the folks who last year brought us a celebration of Flarf and Conceptual Writing—two “movements” aiming to elevate plagiarism to an art form.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. 
