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Ce Rosenow in the River Road Reading Series
My cousin Ce Rosenow—the fine Eugene, OR poet, editor, and scholar of haiku and its related forms—reading in the River Road Reading Series. She famously co-edited, with another fine poet, Bob Arnold, a superbly curated selection of Cid Corman‘s work, The Next One Thousand Years.Read More
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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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Cid Corman Reads William Carlos Williams
Cid Corman was a fine poet in his own write, but he was also a great and essentially selfless promoter of other poets, not just through his editorship of Origin magazine (founded in 1951), but through his many translations and his quirky, insightful essay on poets and poetry. What’s more, in 1949 Corman co-founded America’s first poetry radio program, This Is Poetry, at WMEX (1510 kc.) in Boston.Read More
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Bob Arnold’s Beautiful Days
Bob Arnold is one of my favorite poets, at least in part because his poems (like those of Cid Corman) provide no fodder for PhD candidates. He writes to capture moments of heightened consciousness as they arise, and it’s pretty clear we need more of those. You won’t find them on the Sunday talk shows or in the dusty pages of Foreign Affairs. They arrive almost always in poetry. In Arnold’s poetry, they arrive without fanfare, without symbolic sub- or super-structures.Read More
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Cid at PIP
Cid Corman profiled on The PIP (Project of Innovative Poetry) Blog. Thanks to Ed Baker for the heads up! • enuresisby Cid Corman Terror is not – Ed –sitting in one’s piss.I know – I’ve sat there – I’ve slept there and didmost of my childhood.That was warmth – in fact – and comfort – in spiteof the unconcealedunconcealable smell.Read More
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Tom Montag: A Re-Alert
I occasionally mention Tom Montag. Well, here he is again, out-Williams-ing Williams, out-Cormaning Corman, leaving Creeley in the dust.Read More
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Legitimization Factories
Lyle Daggett has a recent post at A Burning Patience with a tantalizing excerpt from an interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes. She discusses English departments, but what she says applies to cultural support institutions like the Pew Center or the Poetry Foundation as well. Of English departments, she says, “We are working in this legitimization factory.” Think about that…. And how does legitimization come about? What are the forces that create and distributes legitimization from the “factory”? Lorna Dee puts it this way: “I’m saying look at the conditions of power.Read More
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On Baker’s Stone Girl E-Pic
I’ve been struggling—let me admit it—to find a way to write about Ed Baker’s Stone Girl E-Pic. It’s a 515-page poetic adventure, the reading of which is like watching sparks thrown off by a fire: the fire’s below the rim of the firepit, so you can’t see it directly, but the climbing sparks, the waves of light and heat under a skyful of stars—this is the sensation Stone Girl produces.Read More
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An Interview with Ce Rosenow
I reviewed Ce’s book Pacific awhile back, and earlier wrote about her work as co-editor (with Bob Arnold) of Cid Corman’s The Next One Thousand Years.Read More
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Reichhold’s Bashō: The World as Given
A couple of days ago I completed an odyssey that began for me around this time last year: I finished reading Bashō: The Complete Haiku. Translator Jane Reichhold has done a wonderful job with the 1012 haiku collected here, as well as with her introduction describing the nature and impact of Bashō’s work, her more biographical introductions to the seven “chapters” of Bashō’s life and practice, and her illuminating notes, which offer commentary, literal translations, Romanized versions, and the original Japanese texts.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. 
