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Adios, John Ashbery
John Ashbery reading the full text of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”—among the many of his poems that I’d wager people will still read with pleasure in 100 years.Read More
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Ted Kooser: A Sampler
It’s been my privilege to be a steady if not close friend of Ted Kooser for many years, ever since he first accepted some of my work for publication in his sorely missed journal The New Salt Creek Reader. I’ve eagerly snapped up each of his books and think of him now as more of a companion than a writer. I think that’s because he makes me, a thousands more like me, feel that he’s speaking to me—not to a bust of Shakespeare or a 3-D printing/sculpture of Ashbery, but to me as a fellow human being.Read More
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Walt Whitman Spins in His Grave
First book awards are apt to be contentious. The major ones—Yale Younger Poets, the APR/Honickman, Cave Canem, the Walt Whitman—produce winners that are as often ignored as praised. In poetry, everything is arguable. But the 2013 Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award winner is especially distressing. Judge John Ashbery chose Chris Hosea‘s Put Your Hands In, which has been issued by Louisiana State University Press. I have to confess that I haven’t read the book and will not, based on the odious excerpts from it published in the Spring-Summer 2014 issue of American Poets.Read More
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Sucking Up (My Morning Vitriol)
“The Contradiction” (by David Spear) Why am I not surprised that Michael Robbins, in “reviewing” Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and My Life in the Nineties, begins with a truth (that Language poetry is boring), then accurately characterizes Hejinian’s approach: “writing as a paradoxically polished automatism.” Robbins is obviously a bright guy. Of course, calling Hejinian’s approach paradoxical doesn’t explain or justify it; in fact, it unmasks it as an exercise in cynicism: polish gives the lie to the writing’s ersatz automatism.Read More
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Mainstreams in Retrospect
A few weeks back Andrew Shields posted some thoughts on the notion of “mainstreams.” I commented on it and want to clarify and expand on that comment a bit, mainly because the use of “mainstream” as a pejorative in the poetry world is so annoying. Every poet wants to be an outlier, a rebel, radically individual or at least a member of a radically individual crowd. Hence the spectacle of tenured professors denouncing “mainstream poetry.” But does mainstream poetry exist? Well—yes and no. I think mainstreams exist only in retrospect.Read More
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Control…
Back from a visit to Taos with an extra day tacked on for prying open the inner fist, only to find why police sirens were whooping in the streets last night. Adios, Bin Laden! On the other hand, there is also Bill Knott’s latest post to keep in mind—an entry reposted from late summer 2008. Lest you think he’s making up this avant-garde-CIA-shill hobnobbery, see here and here. Politics.Read More
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Inner Complications
The inimitable James Stotts on Paul Killebrew’s Flowers: “Ashbery is the model for an overwhelming amount of our bad poetry, when it pretends to be avant-garde.Read More
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Walking the Doggerel
Today’s Poem-A-Day poem from The Academy of American Poets is Charles Bernstein’s “All the Whiskey in Heaven”. Bernstein is famous for co-founding both the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E back in the ’70s and The Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo in 1995, but for me he’ll always be the Woody Allen of poetry (I’m a big Woody Allen fan, in spite of everything); Bernstein’s funny even when he’s being serious—or especially when—and people find brilliancies in his work that are really just the sparkle of his highly polished shtick.Read More
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It’s Academic
Over at his Cosmopoetica blog, Chris quotes Stephen Dunn on John Ashbery: “Poets who defy making sense and do it deliberately and often brilliantly (as Ashbery can) are making a kind of sense, and may be extending the range of what poetry can do, though they ensure that poetry’s audience will be small and chiefly academic: i.e., composed of people inclined to equate a puzzle with that which is meaningful.” This spurred me to respond in the blog’s comment stream, but I since my reply ended up to be rather lengthy and maybe useful to Perpetual Birders, I’m repeating it…Read More
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Who Speaks to You?
I’m rereading Thomas McGrath’s magnificent Letter to an Imaginary Friend, in which he several times mentions Don Gordon. Don Gordon? A poet, it turns out, one of the many I’d never heard of until some other reader (usually another poet—in this case McGrath) brings them to my attention. Now I’ve discovered Don Gordon’s Collected Poems and am waiting for a check or two to clear so I can buy it.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. 
