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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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My Pandemic Year in Books
So Many Books, So Little Time I could have sworn that I’d read far fewer books this year than in past years, but it seems not to be so. It must be one of the few benign side effects of the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic has been hard on my writing, poems—at least poems of my kind—seeming fairly pointless amid the waves of infection and death and the tide of fascism rising out of the GOP (the Goosestepping Old Party).Read More
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On Carol Bass’s Ripple Effect
Order directly from the publisher or from Amazon. I am blown away. Flummoxed. Exalted! There is a new brilliantaceous star atop my publishing tree this Christmas, thanks to editor, artist, and poet Carol Bass.Read More
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Cid Corman Reads William Carlos Williams
Cid Corman was a fine poet in his own write, but he was also a great and essentially selfless promoter of other poets, not just through his editorship of Origin magazine (founded in 1951), but through his many translations and his quirky, insightful essay on poets and poetry. What’s more, in 1949 Corman co-founded America’s first poetry radio program, This Is Poetry, at WMEX (1510 kc.) in Boston.Read More
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Adding Jarmusch’s Paterson to My Watch List
Two fine NPR pieces—an interview with director Jim Jarmusch, whose new film was inspired by William Carlos Williams‘ poetic sequence Paterson, and a review of the movie—have led me to add this film to my watch list. Poets, Jarmusch says in the interview, “deal with changing your consciousness. … [They] are … kind of magical people.Read More
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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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Immodestly Noted
Order on Amazon Succinct The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems edited by Jonathan Greene and Robert West Broadstone Books 418 Ann Street Frankfort, Kentucky 40601-1929 My contributor’s copies came in the mail yesterday, and oh my—what are the odds that an off-the-main-map poet like me would find himself among such company? Somewhere between Anonymous and Zukofsky, within hailing distance of Archilochus, Arnold, Brandi, Bunting, Heaney, Kinnell, Niedecker, Rosenow, Villon, three Williamses (Jonathan, Miller, and William Carlos), and yes, Willie Yeats. This gave me a strange sense of elation, enhanced by the beauty of the physical book itself.Read More
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Hummingbird News
Ruby throated hummingbirdAudobon.com I feel compelled to point you to this wonderful poem by Coleman Barks.Read More
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Bob Arnold’s Beautiful Days
Bob Arnold is one of my favorite poets, at least in part because his poems (like those of Cid Corman) provide no fodder for PhD candidates. He writes to capture moments of heightened consciousness as they arise, and it’s pretty clear we need more of those. You won’t find them on the Sunday talk shows or in the dusty pages of Foreign Affairs. They arrive almost always in poetry. In Arnold’s poetry, they arrive without fanfare, without symbolic sub- or super-structures.Read More
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WaPo Intern Pokes Poetry, Concludes It Is No Longer Living
On her aptly titled ComPost blog, Harvard grad and erstwhile pundit/humorist Alexandra Petri uses Richard Blanco as a footstool (much as Marlowe‘s Tamburlaine did the Emperor of the Turks) and from that elevation declaims her negative opinion of American poetry.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. 
