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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 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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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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On David Giannini’s Mayhap: Selected Brief Poems
No American poet since William Stafford is as quotable as David Giannini. A tendency toward aphoristic piquancy layers and complicates all of his work. It’s not that he rejects simplicity; it’s simply that the world and the mind that perceives it are not simple, and Giannini is committed to complexity as part of his continual reach toward wholeness. Giannini’s new collection (his fourth from Dos Madres Press), Mayhap: Selected Brief Poems, is a fine example his commitment.Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2018
Old Reading Room at BookBar (Photo: Tricia M.) Let me admit up front that I’ve included half a dozen books here that were read as part of my work with the Professional Creative Writing program at University College. But they all turned out to be worthwhile reading experiences. Even those I couldn’t quite connect with—Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West, Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw, and Adonis’s powerful Concerto al-Quds, which is also recondite and nakedly anguished by turns—continue to haunt me. This is usually an early indicator of re-readings in the offing.Read More
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My Year in Books (2016)
As I did at the end of 2015, I’m laying out my past year’s book reading in the spirit of sharing the often haphazard journey of mind and heart that is my chief solitary pleasure. (There are other pleasures, of course, not solitary at all, but they don’t involve this particular addiction.) Again, the books listed below are ordered according to when I read them. I won’t comment on all of these titles because all of them are well worth reading.Read More
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My Year in Books (2015)
I, too, dislike “best books” lists except when they bring me news of books I want to read but somehow overlooked, which is surprisingly seldom. Over 60-plus years of reading, beginning, as I recall, with Little Golden Books, I’ve developed enough self-awareness to guess correctly about 70 percent of time which books will bring me that mixture of pleasure and revelation that is my particular addiction.Read More
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Lois Hayna: Coping Without a Miracle
Not long after I put up the just previous post about Lois Hayna’s Lifetime Achievement Award, an email arrived from David Giannini with this gently prodding subject line, “One Poem Proving Her Talent,” and this Lois Hayna poem in the body of the message: EYE OF THE BEHOLDER Our last glimpse was all green—the trees, the gray-green slats of the gate,lively with foliage billowing through.My last glance back, I sawthe green-gold flash of the serpentslithering down into dewy grass. I wouldn’t go back through that gateif He suddenly forgave.Read More
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Putin’s “Evil” and a Map-in-Flux
Just stumbled on this wonderful aphorism by the Italian writer Amedeo Ansaldi at James Geary’s aphorism blog: We always choose our enemies among those whom we would have liked to become. They are our lost image.Read More
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(UPDATED) Second verse . . .
. . . same as the first.* Nothing against Don Share, of course. But “[a]fter an extensive national search” … really? Still, what could we expect from an organization whose “incoming president” could—with a straight face, I’m sure—remark, “Don Share represents significant change as well as continuity.” Just as Poetry Magazine represents good poetry as well as bad, I suppose. Still, maybe along about January I’ll re-up to see if Mr. Share’s editing “bears the handprint of necessity” (to steal the luminous phrase that Laurence Lieberman, I believe, once used in a review to describe W. S.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. 
