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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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Vanessa Sells Out
Let me see: what could I lay before you to concretize the acedia that characterizes Conceptual writing? Well, how about this: Yes, as trumpeted by both conceptualist “author” Vanessa Place and her dopey-eyed peeps at Harriet, Place’s … well, what it is? a “book”? a “work of art”? … let’s just say “latest release” (such as one might enjoy some onanistic evening while pondering the idea of a canvas Duchamp had sense enough never to paint: “Nude Barthes Descending Staircase”)…; to reprise mid-sentence, Vanessa Place, lawyer and con-woman, managed to “sell out” (are we surprised?) this work (is it fair to…Read More
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Half an Hour is All I Ask
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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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Equinoctial
I’m queueing this to post at 9:21 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time—the official 2011 vernal equinox. Enjoy! Another Equinox Spring snow: why mention it? Spring wind: same old, same old. Tulips poking out blunt red tongues.Gossiping birds on the wet porch rail. Of course, sappiness floods my veins— “force that through the green fuse” and all. I love getting caught up in the tale’s plot;but the denouement darkens its theme: The planet giveth and taketh away.So I hail the season sotto voce, minding the Master’s voice:“ Easy, you know, does it, son….” I like this one, though it’s self-indulgent.Read More
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Mastery
Several remarkable items in this morning’s online reading… This interview in Guernica Magazine with the inimitable Arundhati Roy Conrad DiDiodato’s trenchant meditation on certain observations by Donald Hall and their relevance to Canadian poetry and the avant-garde at large Jonathan Mayhew’s comments on writing about María Zambrano (more on this below) A tantalizing report on some scientific progress regarding the Voynich manuscript Among all these wonderful irruptions of insight, the one that made me jump up and ruffle my hair (as Nabokov said certain readers of Invitation to a Beheading would do) was Jonathan Mayhew’s: “I actually like learning more…Read More
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There there, Ron; there there….
In his blog post today, Ron Silliman offers up some wonderful insights about writing, only to go off the rails when he boards his favorite train of thought, which concerns (of course) his tribe (small, evolved, super-intelligent, “outsiders” all) vs. the imagined Other Tribe (vast, beetle-browed, witless, “insiders” all).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. 
