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Friday Notebook 03.04.2011
Another week lost to remunerative work—just one fragment huddled on my notebook’s page: The broken bellsounds over the broken fields.Black chopped earth,scattered clouds. Not substantial enough for a Friday Notebook entry, I think. So here’s another unpublished poem drawn from an old notebook. This one comes with a back story. * I remember being tremendously excited about this one. It felt like a breakthrough. I had so much confidence in it that I chose to read it before an audience that included some dauntingly talented poets: Bill Matthews, Jack Collom, Judith Moffett, and Reg Saner among them.Read More
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Mastery
Several remarkable items in this morning’s online reading… This interview in Guernica Magazine with the inimitable Arundhati Roy Conrad DiDiodato’s trenchant meditation on certain observations by Donald Hall and their relevance to Canadian poetry and the avant-garde at large Jonathan Mayhew’s comments on writing about María Zambrano (more on this below) A tantalizing report on some scientific progress regarding the Voynich manuscript Among all these wonderful irruptions of insight, the one that made me jump up and ruffle my hair (as Nabokov said certain readers of Invitation to a Beheading would do) was Jonathan Mayhew’s: “I actually like learning more…Read More
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Pleasure and Intrigue
Today Jonathan Mayhew posted this handy list of four reading categories on his ¡Bemsha SWING! blog. He attributes them to the poet Guillermo Carnero and gives them in Spanish, which I’ll translate here: I like it and it interests me.I like it but I’m not interested.I don’t like it but it interests me.I neither like it nor am I interested. What makes these categories useful, I think, is that they are both comprehensive and subjective.Read More
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On Snobbery
“I am not Jonathan Mayhew.” “A true snob like myself distinguishes himself by a devotion to minor writers that haven’t been discovered by everyone else.” —Jonathan Mayhew One of the things I love about Jonathan Mayhew’s blog is that he speaks without the guile of ten-dollar words. He could have found alternatives for “snob,” for example—but amongst us poor souls with advanced degrees, no other word will do.Read More
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Recognitions
Today Jonathan Mayhew at ¡Bemsha SWING! offers a fond glance backward at 2006 as a year of stimulating comment box disputes, while John Latta brilliantly deconstructs Ron Silliman’s faux scholasticism while examining The Library of America’s edition of Poe’s Essays and Reviews. I admire both of these writers but prefer Tom Montag’s “Lines for November 17,” which captures my own mood of late. Montag, it seems to me, does what poets are supposed to do: he embraces and articulates recognitions that matter.Read More
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On Pronouncements
Jonathan Mayhew, a fine scholar and translator, and an enthusiast (something I am not–not to suggest that I am a scholar and translator!), has a curious post here with a comment stream Perpetual Birders may find interesting.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. 
