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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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Stillness
Irina Moga has a fine review of Conrad DiDiodato‘s Bridget bird and other poems here. I was struck especially by her observation that there is a “somewhat deceiving stillness in Mr.Read More
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One Reading of Linda Hogan’s Indios
One characteristic of great writing is that it offers layers of richness that invite contemplation and inspire not only self-examination but an impulse to reach beyond the text. In the case of Linda Hogan‘s compelling new book, Indios, the text takes the form of a harrowing and luminous poetic monologue. It is a psychological, cultural, and spiritual tour de force, written in verse that is musical and direct, tactful (in the sense of “adroit and sensitive”), and free of the empty cleverness one finds in so much American poetry these days.Read More
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The Revealing Agent
The poet and the novelist who express a mood certainly do not create it out of nothing; they would not be understood by us if we did not observe within ourselves, up to a certain point, what they say about others. As they speak, shades of emotion and thought appear to us which might long since have been brought out in us but which remained invisible; just like the photographic image which has not yet been plunged into the bath where it will be revealed. The poet is this revealing agent.Read More
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The Integrity of the Curve
“You will find that every great conflict has been followed by an era of materialism in which the ideals for which the conflict ostensibly was waged were submerged. […] By intensity of hatred nations create in themselves the characters they imagine in their enemies.Read More
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Creating the Possible
“There is something Chinese about Ausonius,” Helen Waddell writes of the late-late Roman poet (c. 310-c. 395 CE) in The Wandering Scholars, and then compares him to Po Chü-i. She quotes from one of Ausonius’s poems, “Fields of the Sorrowful Lovers”: They wander in deep woods, in mournful light, Amid long reeds and drowsy-headed poppies, And lakes where no water laps, and voiceless streams, Along whose banks in the dim light grow old Flowers that were once bewailèd names of Kings.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. 
