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A World Outside
Seth Abramson has bravely taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Ron Silliman re: defining “School of Quietude,” though his lawyerly training has produced a rhetorical mishmash, I think, in this second of his two-part response. I bring this up because I’d hate for the folderol in Part Two to distract from the brilliant essay with which he ends Part I (click here and scroll down until you find the title “On Rhetoric, Hybrid Poetics, and the Intersection of Immanent and Transcendent Meaning”).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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Neophobia
An especially piquant post today from Bill Knott re: Ron Silliman’s neophobia. Neophobia is a word brandished by Captain Ron (see here and here) to scare us all into liking the poetry he likes—or even better, to submit to his characterization of the tribes available for poets to choose their “heritage” from. As a Scotch/Irish/English/German mutt, I have little instinct for “heritage” of any kind, and feel a special antipathy to being told that I need to choose a tribe, much less being told what tribe I belong to.Read More
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What Poetry Can Be
I wonder if there’s room on a post-avantist’s reading list for this. Are the sample poems SoQ? If so, what would a Silliman or a Goldsmith or a Spahr do with such an irruption of brutality in their lives? More broadly, what would Wallace Stevens or any of the other “High Modernists” have done with it? (Is Williams a “High Modernist”? If so, there’s at least one who could do it.) I don’t put these forward as rhetorical questions: I genuinely wonder if the avant-garde and their acknowledged masters haven’t narrowed rather than expanded what poetry can be.Read More
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Guilty
Ron Silliman tops his best in his latest blog post, in which he turns the smarmy politicking at Oxford into another intellectually dishonest brief against his fantasy nemesis, the School of Quietude. It’s fun, I admit, watching Captain Ron attempting to turn his horror over the political nature of the Padel-Walcott affair to his own poe(li)tical advantage. On the other hand, it’s sad to see him turning into PoBiz’s own Ann Coulter.Read More
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But the List, and My List!
On his blog about 10 days back, Javier Huerta floated this idea: List “20 poetry books (if there are twenty) that made you fall in love with poetry, the books that made you think: I want to do this, I need to do this.Read More
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Hybridization…
Here’s an excellent post by Mark Wallace on the concept of “hybrid poetry“.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 8
I’ll never forget the evening I first encountered Robert Bly. He’d come to read at the University of Northern Colorado, where I was an undergrad English major with poetic pretensions. I’d heard of him but never read his poems. The event took place in one of those featureless industrial classrooms with accordion partitions, and the audience was large enough to fill the second room, so Bly ended up reading into a long narrow space awash in humming fluorescence.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 6
A couple of readers have wondered what happened by my posting of so-called School of Quietude poems. Well, here’s another batch, all drawn from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, by William Stafford. This little selection was hard to arrive at because Stafford wrote so many poems, even the weakest of which carry fragments of brilliance.Read More
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Against the Binary
I’ve been reading, off and on, Joseph Harrington’s Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, and it’s made me realize just how trapped we’ve become (me, too) in the structure of the debates over poetry that began with the rise of Modernism. Harrington quotes Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom in particular to show that promoters of Modernism sought to exclude “public interest” from poetry and focus instead on “form and style.” Writers like William Rose Benét and all-but-forgotten regional writers like Gene Stratton-Porter bemoaned Modernism’s elitist spurning of the common reader.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. 
