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Tiny Houses Spacious as Mansions
As with my previous Peter Handke post, I’m sharing enough of this remarkable collection by Samuel Menashe to give a sense of his work without giving away too much. I first encountered Menashe several years ago, when I volunteered to record books for the Colorado Talking Book Library. My first assignment was unenviable: a rather standard textbook focused on reading and interpreting poetry.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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By Intuition
Strictly speaking, there were [among Sufi poets] no such distinctions as “mystical poetry” and “non-mystical poetry”. Verse was a vehicle for the expression of transcendental experience, and this was not considered “non-rational”. It was the norm.Read More
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Mixing Metaphors
It’s always fun to find an otherwise erudite writer committing a line like this one: “The public image of ‘Emily Dickinson’ has been built up over the years, alternately embroidered by fantasies and barnacled with lies….” (Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in his review of Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds.)Read More
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The Greatness Debate
This is a reply to Adam Fieled’s excellent post, in which he responds to Amy King’s challenge to define “greatness.” Her post, I have to add, was occasioned by a New York Times essay by David Orr, “The Great(ness) Game”—a laughable piece of pseudo-intellectual drivel. Orr’s essay has succeeded, however, in spurring all sorts of commentary among poetry bloggers. It just happens that Fieled’s and King’s got my head buzzing like a late spring hive. So, by addressing Adam here, I’m also addressing Amy and David Orr and anybody else who’s been pondering the issue of poetic greatness.Read More
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There there, Ron; there there….
In his blog post today, Ron Silliman offers up some wonderful insights about writing, only to go off the rails when he boards his favorite train of thought, which concerns (of course) his tribe (small, evolved, super-intelligent, “outsiders” all) vs. the imagined Other Tribe (vast, beetle-browed, witless, “insiders” all).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. 
