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An Anti-Review of Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems by Tadeusz Różewicz
Among my usual Google alerts from The Quarterly Conversation was a review of Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems by Tadeusz Różewicz. I’ve always found Quarterly Conversation reviews to be intelligent and insightful, and (full disclosure) Różewicz is one of my favorite poets—so I clicked right through to it. Unfortunately, this piece, by one Patrick Kurp, is an exception—that is, it is exceptionally skewed, snotty, and crackpottish.Read More
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I’ve been meaning…
… for some time to review Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina but haven’t known what to say, or what intelligent I might say (to be more precise), other than noting that Svalina doesn’t sound like other American poets, except maybe flashes here and there of Russell Edson, the somewhat flat voice masking a manic zaniness, as if Steven Wright had thrown over stand-up comedy for poetry, and in fact there are some Edsonesque turns here, and some moments when I can imagine Svalina rubbing his brow the way Wright does in that puzzled and faintly pained way, as if it hurts…Read More
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Dangerous Considerations
The October 2007 issue of Poetry carries an observant, insightful bit of prose by the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski entitled a “Dangerous Considerations: A Notebook.” He touches on Christmas in Krakow, Gottfried Benn, political disputes occasioned by Zbigniew Herbert’s death, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann (whose Magic Mountain Musil described as a “shark’s stomach”), Ted Hughes’s translations of Yehuda Amichai, a festschrift honoring the poetry of Stanislaw Baranczak, the essays of Gershom Scholem, Saint-John Perse (nom de plume of Aléxis Léger, who in the 1930s served as director of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs), E. M.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. 
