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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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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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A Walk with Leto and The Mathematician
Back in March I quoted a passage from Juan José Saer’s nightmarish novel The Witness, and since much of the poetry I chose to read in Mexico had an Argentine flavor, I decided to read another Saer novel, The Sixty-Five Years of Washington. I have to say that the book knocked my socks off, combining as it does a Rabelaisian gusto with a Beckettish humor and something of the obsessiveness we find in Robbe-Grillet.Read More
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Friday Notebook 03.25.2011
Writers not writing in English I know only through translation. Of course, I know myself only through translation—that is, through my writing. * The Spring light’sflashes as we drive pasttransfigures the shutwindows so that eventhe gray wall of the hospital’scancer wing strikes usas beautiful. * The shipwrecked sailor on learning the primitive islanders’ language: “Learning their language was all the more difficult because of its rudimentary nature. It might have seemed to a casual observer that the language was invented according to the caprice of each individual speaker.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. 
