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Poetry Month 2016: Gerald Stern
Thinking About Shelley Arm over arm I swam out into the rain, across from the cedars and the rickety conveyor. I had the quarry all to myself again, even the path down to the muddy bank. Every poet in the world was dead but mt. Yeats was dead, Victor Hugo was dead, Cavity was dead—with every kick I shot a jet of water into the air—you could see me coming a mile away, my shoulders rolling the way my father’s did.Read More
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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
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Contrarian
I have a knee-jerk reaction to contrarians. I automatically like them. It takes me a while to step back and decide how valuable their views are because I enjoy their spirit of opposition. I’ve been following a contrarian named Thomas Brady for some time now. His blog is Scarriet. I like the punning sneer at the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and I like some of Brady’s critiques of the current situation of poetry. But I’ve come realize that his views aren’t finally very valuable, despite his contrarian credentials. The problem is this: Brady is a fundamentalist.Read More
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Scrape and Replace
Wisdom from Gregory Corso (GC) and Allen Ginsberg (AG). Corso and Ginsberg have just discovered that their Naropa students (in 1975) aren’t familiar with Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”, which occasions the following exchange: AG: “The Ode to the West Wind” — when I was going to high school that was standard. GC: Standard AG: Everybody would get that in the ’40’s. They didn’t teach that in high school? What are they teaching? Student: Your stuff. AG: In high school? Student: Sure, in high school, that’s what they’re teaching. AG: That’s a degeneration.Read More
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Something of a Ramble…
Seed Magazine has this illuminating conversation between linguist/anti-war activist Noam Chomsky and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. Their overarching topic is “deceit,” but the subtopics they touch on (“groupthink,” “maintaining credibility,” and “denial”) are powerful contributing factors to the human ability—exacerbated by bureaucracies and media—to deceive ourselves and others. In the discussion of “groupthink,” Trivers makes an observation that may explain why political poetry is so difficult to write well.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. 
