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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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From Intimate Stranger
Breyten Breytenbach has become one of my favorite writers of both poetry and fiction (especially his surreal mythographies in All One Horse), and now I’ve been bowled over by his book-length essay on writing, Intimate Stranger. Here are some excerpts, offered with the caveat that they can only suggest the sparkling, shadowy rush and meander of thought and feeling that makes Intimate Stranger so compelling. Poetry is the breath of awareness and the breathing thereof.Read More
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The Deeper Layers of Integration
The U. S. publisher (Archipelago Books) of Breyten Bretenbach’s All One Horse calls it a collection of “lyrical and satirical dream-fables,” which is an accurate a description. These pieces recall Michaux in their strangeness, and yet they don’t feel as hermetic; if you looked at your everyday life just slightly askew, you might glimpse some of these characters brooding away in their alternate universe of anxious but beautiful obsessions. Since Breytenbach is a poet, an adventurous and challenging poet, he has some things to say here about the art that deserve meditation.Read More
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A Brief Meditation on the “Masterpiece”
Around Christmas my daughter and I fell to arguing about the idea of a “masterpiece.” Having taught “masterpiece” courses, I felt obliged to defend the idea, although the longer we talked the more uncertain I felt about the notion. Then last night I was finishing up the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach’s Judas Eye and Self-Portrait/Deathwatch, an extraordinary selection of prison poetry and subsequent prose pieces.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. 
