-
Adventures in Reading 2021
It was another pandemic year, in some ways more challenging than the first. There was a sense of fraying in the fabric of social life, work life, personal focus (my poetry journal full of fragments that I’m not postmodern enough to throw down on pages and pretend that they cohere as poems), the persistent floating anxiety. Among the various costumes that relief arrived in were books, of course.Read More
-
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
-
My Year in Books (2015)
I, too, dislike “best books” lists except when they bring me news of books I want to read but somehow overlooked, which is surprisingly seldom. Over 60-plus years of reading, beginning, as I recall, with Little Golden Books, I’ve developed enough self-awareness to guess correctly about 70 percent of time which books will bring me that mixture of pleasure and revelation that is my particular addiction.Read More
-
Me and Julio (Redux)
Just a few more passages from Diary of Andrés Fava, which—like any book by Cortázar—is a strange and wonderful reading experience. The first passage demonstrates qualities I love about this writer: a profound, clear-eyed sympathy for even “unimportant” creatures combined with a classical devotion to the truth of any situation. Any writer, in prose or verse, would do well to study the way he shapes these seven sentences…. I was arriving in Chacarita to catch the subway when I saw a little white dog die.Read More
-
Me and Julio Down by the Playa
Julio Cortázar Per my annual habit of reading Spanish masters in México, I’m indulging in another Archipelago Books offering of Julio Cortázar, his early-but-posthumously-published Diary of Andrés Fava. The translation by Anne McLean is smooth, witty, obscure where it needs to be, and altogether delightful.Read More
-
American Society: What Poets See
I’m happy to say that I have three poems in a new anthology from FutureCycle Press called American Society: What Poets See. It’s cleverly put together: Poets appear alphabetically with all their poems together; but a secondary table of contents groups poems by theme, and using it yields the heady experience of hopscotching through the collection. (I can’t wield that word without a nod to the great Julio Cortázar, whose Hopscotch broke this structural ground in 1963.) Here are the groups the editors, David Chorlton and Robert S.Read More
-
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
-
The Voice of Cortázar
I discovered this on Matthew Stewart’s excellent blog Rogue Strands and was bowled over by it: the great Julio Cortázar reading his prose poem “El Aplastamiento de las Gotas.” Enjoy! Here’s Paul Blackburn‘s wonderful translation, from Cronopios and Famas: FLATTENING THE DROPS I don’t know, look, it’s terrible how it rains. It rains all the time, thick and grey outside, against the balcony here with big, hard, clabbering drops that go plaf and smash themselves like slaps, slop, one after the other, it’s tedious.Read More
-
A Note on Paul Blackburn (and Swiss cheese)
For some reason certain links from my response to Ted Burke’s recent blog entry on Paul Blackburn vanished when I posted it, creating what you might call a Swiss-cheese post. So I’m posting it here in all its glory—i.e., with links intact. You can find the Blackburn poem I’m referring to, in its correct format, here. As Burke notes in his post, he didn’t reproduce Blackburn’s original spatial presentation…. *** I wonder if anyone reading this poem would seek out more of Blackburn’s work. For me it’s too studied, a fairly pedestrian attempt at allegory.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. 
