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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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Old Year, New Year … World of Dew
This from a fine, poetry-rich article by Stefany Anne Golberg over at The Smart Set: Some people focus on the passing Old Year rather than the New — English people, for instance, who are nostalgic by nature, as opposed to, say, American people, who do not enjoy the past as much because they have got so little of it, and erase what they do have as soon as they can.Read More
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Friday Notebook 10.21.11
Merwin, Wright (Charles), Rengetsu, Issa, and … Hutchison? Thanks to Don Wentworth for letting my Earth-Boat into his harbor…. * * * I’ve been on a vacation from verse, it seems—stymied in my own work, disappointed in the four or five collections I’ve been eking away at for weeks (no need to name names; it may be just my mood, but is recent American poetry not withering from being over-fertilized by cleverness?). Anyway, I recently finished Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur.Read More
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Seeing Through the TV Screen to Japan Circa 1810*
(after Issa) hazy moon in steamfrom the cracked nuclear plant—ghost-light passing through ____________________________________* 1810 is a guess: the date of Issa’s poem is unknown.Read More
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Three Recent Publications
You can find three recent poems of mine online, thanks to editors Edward Byrne at Valparaiso Poetry Review and Robert S. King at FutureCycle Poetry. And Linh Dinh recently found room for three short homages to Kobayashi Issa on The Lower Half.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. 
