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Adventures in Reading 2022
PART ONE: DISTRACTION AND ENCHANTMENT 2022 was unkind to my habit of reading lots of books. Partly my paid work was to blame: growing pains (which I am too old for) of the professional kind. Then there was the several weeks I wasted on Thomas Mann‘s Doctor Faustus, which I had to abandon. What drudgery! What a distraction! I’d read and admired a number of Mann’s short stories, but Doctor Faustus struck me as all posturing, a ponderous performance with no point in sight, almost every moment of it arriving via second- or third-hand reports about Mann’s fictional, Schoenbergian composer, Adrian Leverkühn.Read More
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My Year in Books (2017)
This year’s list is longer than usual, in part because I created two literature courses for the Professional Creative Writing program I direct at D.U.’s University College, a process that entailed lots of reading.Read More
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Another Retrospective
Just one of the piquant fragments from this farewell-to-2012 essay by Charles Simic: “Are there more idiots in the world today percentagewise than in some earlier ages?” asks Teofil Pancic, a columnist for Belgrade’s weekly Vreme. His answer is that it only seems so, because today they are more visible, more audible, and, of course, connected by the Internet.Read More
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In Praise of Serendipity (UPDATED)
A couple of weeks ago I was visiting family in Eugene, Oregon, a small city with several excellent used book stores. In my favorite store, Tsunami Books, I picked up Linda Hamalian‘s A Life of Kenneth Rexroth for a mere six bucks. The picture she paints of Rexroth isn’t pretty—a tale of paranoia, sexist behavior, personal violence, egotism; serial infidelity on the one hand and pie-eyed romanticism on the other—but through it all Rexroth’s powerful intellect and creative energy radiate.Read More
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The Astonishing Sinéad Morrissey
I don’t remember how I first head of the young Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey, but I’m grateful to Serendipity for sending her work my way. Her first two collections, There Was a Fire in Vancouver and Between Here and There are lively and adventurous, but her third, The State of the Prisons, places her among the half-dozen finest poets of her generation. That book’s eponymous poem, subtitled “A History of John Howard, Prison Reformer, 1726-1790,” is a masterpiece, but it’s too long to quote here.Read More
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Paris Review Interviews Charles Simic
Also take a minute to listen to this audio of Simic reading “In the Planetarium” from his collection My Noiseless Entourage.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. 
