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Adventures in Reading 2023
PART ONE: GOING LONG After Doctor Faustus defeated me last year, I developed a low-level psychic hum, an unease around a readerly question: could I still go long? I mean Don Quixote long; the three-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain long; The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine long (982 pages, English only, translated from the German by Hal Draper).Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2021
It was another pandemic year, in some ways more challenging than the first. There was a sense of fraying in the fabric of social life, work life, personal focus (my poetry journal full of fragments that I’m not postmodern enough to throw down on pages and pretend that they cohere as poems), the persistent floating anxiety. Among the various costumes that relief arrived in were books, of course.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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Zagajewski’s Symphony
Adam Zagajewski’s extraordinary Slight Exaggeration, translated by Clare Cavanagh, has proven to be one of those books that require slow reading, pondering, backtracking, breaking out the dictionary on occasion, or the encyclopedia. Late in the book I realized that it seems to be structured symphonically. Themes are announced, interwoven, diminished for a time, then they resurface, converge, augment one another, reach a crescendo. The effect is inspiring. In any case, here are some final selections. Read some others here and here. Better yet: Buy the book.Read More
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Isms and the Liberation from True Knowledge
After observing that “someone who longs for particulars and seizes them in his writing is thinking in the best possible way,” Adam Zagajewski, a page or so later in Slight Exaggeration (as beamed into English by Clare Cavanagh), writes: We rarely consider how much we’ve lost by way of the systematization of intellectual life over the last century. In an age of ideology, systems, endless -isms, have taken hold everywhere, even, or rather especially, in universities.Read More
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Stendhal to Zagajewski to Me … to You
From Adam Zagajewski‘s memoir (self-investigation?), Slight Exaggeration, in Clare Cavanagh‘s beautiful translation: Stendhal in Souvenirs d’égotisme: “Le génie poétique est mort, mais le génie du soupçon est venu au monde” (The genius of poetry has left us, the spirit of suspicion takes its place—in my loose translation). Is it true? Yes, as to the spirit of suspicion, and it’s also true that poetry and suspicion must always do battle, a vicious war in which prisoners are slain without mercy, flouting Geneva conventions.Read More
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Delicious Advice for Aspiring Poets
From the inimitable Wisława Szymborska, Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet who produced a column for a newspaper called Literary Life. She answered letters from everyday people who wanted to write poetry—a sort of “Dear Wisława” relationship that she handled with intelligence, humor, and care. Here are a few selections from her column, translated by Clare Cavanagh and courtesy of The Poetry Foundation.Read More
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Friday Notebook 08.12.2011
A number of quotes from David Abram‘s extraordinary The Spell of the Sensuous flowed into my notebook this past week. Here are a few of them: We see the sorcerer being called upon to cure an ailing tribesman of his sleeplessness, or perhaps simply to locate some missing goods; we witness him entering into trance and sending his awareness into other dimensions in search of insight and aid. yet we should not be so ready to interpret these dimensions as “supernatural,” nor to view them as realms entirely “internal” to the personal psyche of the practitioner.Read More
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Lvov to Telos to Me to You
A new collection by the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, entitled Eternal Enemies, has just appeared from Farrar, Straus and Giroux—and it will knock your socks off.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. 
