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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
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Friday Notebook 07.01.2011
For my birthday, 80 degrees.Light wind. Windy light. * “Develop your legitimate strangeness.” —René Char, “Formal Share,” XXII (trans. Mary Ann Caws) * “To be a poet is to have an appetite for discomfort whose consummation, among the whirlwinds of all things existing and foreseen, stirs up, at the moment of closure, happiness.” —Char, “Formal Share,” XLII * “We belong to no one except the golden point of light from that lamp unknown to us, inaccessible to us, that keeps awake courage and silence.” —Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 5 (trans.Read More
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Char Contra Conceptual Writing*
René Char “The poet is that part of man rebellious to calculated projects.” —René Char, from his preface to Furor and Mystery (1948). _____________________________*Viz., con artists like Kenneth Goldsmith: “I will refer to the kind of writing in which I am involved as conceptual writing. In conceptual writing the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.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. 
