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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2018
Old Reading Room at BookBar (Photo: Tricia M.) Let me admit up front that I’ve included half a dozen books here that were read as part of my work with the Professional Creative Writing program at University College. But they all turned out to be worthwhile reading experiences. Even those I couldn’t quite connect with—Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West, Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw, and Adonis’s powerful Concerto al-Quds, which is also recondite and nakedly anguished by turns—continue to haunt me. This is usually an early indicator of re-readings in the offing.Read More
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Adonis and the Literary Elite
I’m always grateful for news about the great Syrian poet Adonis, though this article by Charles McGrath is just perfunctory enough to be annoying. The author compares Adonis—a poet who has dragged Arabic poetry into modernity and taken an intellectual stand against the violent and regressive forces in contemporary Arab culture—to the likes of Paul Muldoon and Jorie Graham, who—so far as I know—have never (unlike Adonis) taken political stands that landed them in prison or produced poems that both radically critique the culture from which they spring and offer a positive alternative vision.Read More
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Another Year on the List
The great Syrian poet Adonis appeared on my own Nobel list three years go, and now that the committee gave the award this year to Mario Vargas Llosa—a wonderful writer—it’s clear that Adonis will spend at least another year on that list. Gerard Russell made a strong case for Adonis a couple of days ago, but there was a string of poets (see below) who won in the 1980s and ’90s, and let’s be honest: it’s a prose world…. Nobel Prizewinning Poets Rudyard Kipling (1907)Rabindranath Tagore (1913)William Butler Yeats (1923)Gabriela Mistral (1945)Hermann Hesse (1946)T. S.Read More
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Reginald Shepherd and the Surrealist Project
Over the past two weeks Reginald Shepherd has put up a provocative four-part series of posts on the subject of “Avant-Garde and Modern.” I won’t summarize his argument, since each part is available here—part one, part two, part three, part four— and the whole series deserves a careful reading. However, there is a key element of Reginald’s premise that I need to dispute. He comes by honestly, because the touchstone for his posts is the work of a German art theorist named Peter Bürger.Read More
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Pick Up the Phone!
Just finished reading Adrienne Rich’s excellent new collection, Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (if you know of a better book title from the past year, I’d like to hear about it). Here’s an insightful review that gets to the heart of what makes this book, and Rich’s work overall, continually powerful and refreshing. Her sympathies reach far beyond feminism or politics in the narrow sense, and in the process produce a kind of poetry that seems to move beyond the subjective/objective, interior/exterior dichotomy by bearing witness to our historical/existential moment.Read More
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No Bull Prizes
On his very entertaining blog, the wonderful poet Bill Knott posted his top 10 poet choices for the Nobel Prize. It’s a fun exercise! Here are my ten, in descending order of age (on the theory that we should honor them before they’re dead): Nicanor ParraAndrea ZanzottoCarolyn KizerW. S.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. 
