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“Smashing Windows” with D. A. Powell
My interview with D. A. Powell just went live at Cerise Press.Read More
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The More Things Change…
Every New Year, this mood of melancholy doggedness… the And here, in a similar register, what strikes me as the best Occupy Writers poem so far, by D. A.Read More
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D. A. Powell Responds to Occupy Wall Street
THE GREAT UNRESTby D. A. Powell When I lie down I think, ‘How long before I get up?’ The night drags on, and I toss and turn until dawn. (Job 7:4) You’d think, bedraggled as I am by the illness of my age,I’d be able to lounge a little. That I’d shut out the noise, as others do,and I would sigh and sleep. Let me eat Tootsie Pops, I’d think. Let me lay in the moonlightand grow the opposite of babyfat. Lie, I mean. Let me lie. I have had to wrestle with grammarall my life.Read More
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What Is the Sound of One Reviewer Clapping?
The folks at Michigan Quarterly Review know the answer. I’ve got a stack of books myself that bloody well deserve a sentence, so maybe I’ll try my hand at this. Let’s see….Read More
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Bowled Over
There are many strong poems in the Fall 2009 issue of Poetry Northwest (New Series, Issue 8)—excellent new work by Talvikki Ansel, Christian Wiman, and D.A. Powell—with only one really dreadful clinker (William Logan‘s “Blues,” a cringe-worthy black-face performance). But one poem in particular drew me back and back through its lines: “One Love,” by Kenneth Fields. It so bowled me over that I jumped online and ordered two of his books.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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Poetic Cleansing
I want to recommend the experience of reading and comparing two essays, a brief one by D. A. Powell and a longish one by Ron Silliman. The two pieces have similar titles — respectively, “Unburying Amy Lowell” and “Unerasing Early Levertov“* — but they couldn’t be more different in their aims and impacts. Powell offers a genuinely appreciative reappraisal of Amy Lowell as a poet; Silliman focuses on Levertov’s career, focusing on her strong but derivative early work to explain how she ended up in what, for him, is paradigm-shifting anthology (Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry).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. 
