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James Wright: A Life in Poetry
I just finished Jonathan Blunk‘s powerfully moving biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry. It is everything a great biography should be: a delicate balance between passing time and the abiding genius that seems to irrupt from a region outside of time. Given his family background, Wright was a person who should never have fallen in love with language, but thanks to some sensitive and insightful early teachers, he did, and so we have the opportunity when we read him to fall in love with it in poem after poem.Read More
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Sympathetic Magic: An Interview
Robert King, a fine poet and the indefatigable curator of the Colorado Poets Center (and editor of its quarterly publication, The Colorado Poet), has an interview with me in the current issue (#20). Looking it over, I see that it ends too abruptly, maybe even cryptically—ironically so, since I was holding forth on the subject of “clarity” at the end! Bob King: You’ve written and published a lot—eight chapbooks and Thread of the Real is your sixth full-length book, I think. It’s the first since The Rain at Midnight in 2000.Read More
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Contrarian
I have a knee-jerk reaction to contrarians. I automatically like them. It takes me a while to step back and decide how valuable their views are because I enjoy their spirit of opposition. I’ve been following a contrarian named Thomas Brady for some time now. His blog is Scarriet. I like the punning sneer at the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and I like some of Brady’s critiques of the current situation of poetry. But I’ve come realize that his views aren’t finally very valuable, despite his contrarian credentials. The problem is this: Brady is a fundamentalist.Read More
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Creating the Possible
“There is something Chinese about Ausonius,” Helen Waddell writes of the late-late Roman poet (c. 310-c. 395 CE) in The Wandering Scholars, and then compares him to Po Chü-i. She quotes from one of Ausonius’s poems, “Fields of the Sorrowful Lovers”: They wander in deep woods, in mournful light, Amid long reeds and drowsy-headed poppies, And lakes where no water laps, and voiceless streams, Along whose banks in the dim light grow old Flowers that were once bewailèd names of Kings.Read More
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The Freedom to Blaspheme
I imagine we have increasing instances of this to look forward to on the way to the Romney-Palin ticket in 2012: Christian activists are due to stage a protest outside the Welsh Assembly tomorrow over Patrick Jones’s poetry collection Darkness Is Where the Stars Are, which they describe as “ugly, indecent and blasphemous”.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. 
