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More on Exile
Apropos of Roberto Bolaño’s speech on the subject of exile, which I mentioned in an earlier post, I recommend a visit to Jerome Rothenberg’s recent post presenting a selection of luminous “detached sentences” on the same subject by Ian Hamilton Finlay. Why, I wonder, did Finlay want to avoid calling these aphorisms? Maybe it’s just too pigeonholing a term.Read More
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Pursuit of the Inexplicable (A Happy New Year Review)
Andrei Codrescu‘s The Poetry Lesson is a wonder worth beginning your new year with. The scene is an unnamed university in New Orleans, though we can be forgiven for thinking it must be Louisiana State University, where Codrescu taught for 25 years and from which he retired in 2009. More specifically, the scene is the first session of the last Introduction to Writing Poetry class the narrator, who is retiring, will ever teach. Melancholy and mercurial hope are built in.Read More
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A Noiseless Patient Poet
Far be it from me to diss Marjorie Perloff, an often illuminating poetry critic. But when Jerome Rothenberg offered up this extract from her introduction to some German translations of Rae Armantrout‘s poems, a strange feeling crept over me: the sensation that she was slipping, I mean. Perloff, typically precise to a fault, here becomes a slightly vague promoter of a poet she’s a fan of. To wit: [U]nlike Williams (or Levertov), Armantrout was never a poet of concrete particulars: from the first, her minimalist lyrics were breaking the Williams mold.Read More
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A Declaration…
Jerome Rothenberg has just posted on his blog part of an energizing “Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values” being promulgated by the People’s Poetry Language Initiative.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. 
