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My Year in Books (2016)
As I did at the end of 2015, I’m laying out my past year’s book reading in the spirit of sharing the often haphazard journey of mind and heart that is my chief solitary pleasure. (There are other pleasures, of course, not solitary at all, but they don’t involve this particular addiction.) Again, the books listed below are ordered according to when I read them. I won’t comment on all of these titles because all of them are well worth reading.Read More
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Sympathetic Magic: An Interview
Robert King, a fine poet and the indefatigable curator of the Colorado Poets Center (and editor of its quarterly publication, The Colorado Poet), has an interview with me in the current issue (#20). Looking it over, I see that it ends too abruptly, maybe even cryptically—ironically so, since I was holding forth on the subject of “clarity” at the end! Bob King: You’ve written and published a lot—eight chapbooks and Thread of the Real is your sixth full-length book, I think. It’s the first since The Rain at Midnight in 2000.Read More
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True Water
why does he write poems: it’s the only way he can meanwhat he says: you mean, say what he means: yes,but it’s harder for him to mean something than say something: his sayings are facile, light-headed, anddiscontinuous: he keeps saying in order to hope he willsay something he means: poems help him mean what he says: poems connect the threads between the tuft of his headand the true water: that’s important to him, like rootsto a turf: without it, the separation would be awful… —from “Hibernaculum,” by A. R.Read More
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Friday Notebook 04.29.2011
A thin week on the notebook front with two classes in progress and writing/design work right and left. Our personal economy seems to be resurrecting slowly, in fits and starts, which in turn puts my muse into a sulk. “You never have time for me.” “But baby, you’re never off my mind…” Etc. From A. R. Ammons (Collected Poems 1951-1971): nothing useful is of lasting value:dry wind only is still talking among the oldest stones.Read More
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Friday Notebook 04.22.2011
“Recently I have been contemplating and speaking about the relationship between truth and fact.” —Kwame Dawes at Harriet Mr. Dawes’s post got me to thinking about truth and fact, mainly because I think he misses the point. Facts and truths, it seems to me, are in no way opposed to one another. Facts, I think, are like notes, and truth is like music: it’s the relationship between different notes that make music, and it’s the relationship between different facts that make truths. Music is a species of truth, poetry is another species of it, fiction another, and so on.Read More
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Ammons’s “Poetics”
Self-portrait watercolor paintingby A. R. Ammons, dated 1977.Image courtesy Joyner LibraryDigital Collections, East Carolina University.(Read the Terrain.org interview here.) POETICSby A. R.Read More
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Big Poetry Giveaway 2011
In celebration of National Poetry Month … well, let me set that aside. Much of my income derives from creating promotional campaigns, so I’m more or less immune to this annual public relations event. My participation in this particular event is meant to honor the generous initiative cooked up by Kelly Russell Agodon more than it is to promote poetry in general. (Is there such as thing as “poetry in general”?) It also gives me an excuse to share some of my favorite poetry—and some of my own, which is not the same thing—with two lucky Perpetual Birders.Read More
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In Praise of Intention
Imagine you’re strolling past the bus station in downtown Eugene, Oregon. (Never been to Eugene? Doesn’t matter.) You glimpse something on the ground in a shadowed area near a public trash receptacle and veer toward it for a look. An oblong something, larger than a cell phone, but not readily identifiable. You bend and pick it up. A device of some kind, with a mostly black plastic shell; there are several half-worn-off letters on the shell: GLATSKI.Read More
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The Painting of You and Addressing 30: A Timeline
Opening any new book begins an adventure. It may turn out to be an adventure of the Disneyland type—mechanical rides, overpriced nutrition-free snacks, sweaty adolescents in cartoon character costumes (you know: the whole Post-Modern funhouse)—or one of those voyages “buoy’d on the dense marine“: Leaves of Grass, Neruda’s Fin de Mundo, Ammons’s Sphere. Of course, most books fall in between these extremes. But I confess to a preference for those that offer the sensation of “waves breaking just over the hill,” a salt fragrance of depths and distances.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
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. 
