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The Mysterious Presence
I just finished Anton Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art, a rich and sometimes difficult, occasionally jargon-ridden book focused on visual art and, secondarily, on music. But it has a lot to say that applies to poetry, especially in his discussions of the creative process. Here are a couple of excerpts: In any kind of creative work a point is reached where our power of free choice comes to an end. The work assumes a life of its own, which offers its creator only the alternative of accepting or rejecting it.Read More
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The Interpreted World
Israel Rosenfield, in his review of Oliver Sacks‘s The Mind’s Eye: The creation of a coherent environment out of chaotic stimuli is one of the brain’s primary activities. There are no colors in nature, only electromagnetic radiation of varying wavelengths (the visible spectrum is between 390 and 750 nanometers). If we are aware of our “real” visual worlds we would see constantly changing images of dirty gray, making it difficult for us to recognize forms.Read More
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Against the Binary
I’ve been reading, off and on, Joseph Harrington’s Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics, and it’s made me realize just how trapped we’ve become (me, too) in the structure of the debates over poetry that began with the rise of Modernism. Harrington quotes Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom in particular to show that promoters of Modernism sought to exclude “public interest” from poetry and focus instead on “form and style.” Writers like William Rose Benét and all-but-forgotten regional writers like Gene Stratton-Porter bemoaned Modernism’s elitist spurning of the common reader.Read More
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Reginald Shepherd and the Surrealist Project
Over the past two weeks Reginald Shepherd has put up a provocative four-part series of posts on the subject of “Avant-Garde and Modern.” I won’t summarize his argument, since each part is available here—part one, part two, part three, part four— and the whole series deserves a careful reading. However, there is a key element of Reginald’s premise that I need to dispute. He comes by honestly, because the touchstone for his posts is the work of a German art theorist named Peter Bürger.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. 
