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Notley…? I’m Afraid Not.
I’ve tried off and on for years to enjoy Alice Notley‘s poetry. (It comes highly recommended by poets I admire—Rae Armantrout, Andrei Codrescu, Anne Waldman and others. I’ve tried to find it interesting on a basic level and I’ve looked for reasons to think it profound. In fact, I snapped up a copy of her Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005 in the hope that an extensive but judiciously chosen overview of her work would make her (in some quarters) iconic status understandable.Alas.Read More
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Sappho of Lesbos
I didn’t intend to review out-of-print books, but the other day I picked up Sappho of Lesbos: Her Life and Times, by Arthur Weigall, at my favorite used book store (Fahrenheit’s), and from the moment I looked into it I couldn’t put it down. The book came out in 193, and Weigall was already an old man. His style reminds me a bit of what little I’ve read of William Dean Howells—clean, willowy, quietly witty. No great genius in it, but what fun to read! Here’s a taste: In the year 591 B.C.Read More
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No “N” in the Middle
I picked up Alexander Hutchison’s collection Scales Dog because I saw he’d spent time in the seventies living and working on Vancouver Island. From 1972-1974 I was across the Georgia Strait from that island, studying with the incomparable George McWhirter in the University of British Columbia’s MFA program. And my last name, like this poet’s, proudly goes forth into the world with no “n” in the middle.Read More
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Time Concentrating On Itself
I have little to say about Guillevic’s The Sea & Other Poems (translated by Patricia Terry, introduction by Monique Chefdor, foreword by the poet’s daughter Lucie Albertini Guillevic) except: Buy it. Buy it now. This is a desert island book. I feel bound to quote from it, but nothing as brief as I have time for can do justice to Guillevic’s extended sequences in which menhirs, a canal, salt flats, and the sea speak.Read More
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Hello, Hoa
Hecate Lochia, by Hoa Nguyen. Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley ghost through this collection, but Nguyen’s voice is her own. Some of it’s cryptic, some fascinatingly fragmentary, but never coherent in a mainstream sense. The difference may be utterly subjective. Here’s one example of each mode: Washington* Washington (George) is not inthis poem powdered wig powderyand anyway who chops down a fruittree (idiots) My sense ofhistory lies We buy things::::chickenwings::::::butter::::: Yesterday Dave took awaymy office my boss Saturday ______________* In line 7 the sets of colons number as shown here: 4 then 6 then 5. A puzzlement.Read More
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Dharwadker’s Kabir
Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs, translated and with an illuminating 96-page introduction by Vinay Dharwadker (also includes extensive notes to the poems, a glossary, and bibliography). The historical Kabir is thought to have lived from 1398-1448 in the eastern half of northern India. His poems were literally songs, and the poems we have today are the product of a long process of revision by Kabir’s followers.Read More
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Coming Attractions
I started this blog with good intentions (what road am I on? why, isn’t that Dante over there?), among them to post reviews of books as I read them. Now I am faced with two stacks of books built up since The Perpetual Bird launched on October 22, 2006. I’ve reviewed a lot of books but forgotten to tag them as “reviews,” so only four show up under that tag.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: The Violent Foam
Unless one is promiscuous by nature, one needs a decent interval between leaving one lover and finding another.* One needs a similar interval after reading writers as strong as Bolaño and Parra. But I’d brought a stack of books to Mexico with me, and some secret drive to read them all before coming home made me move directly on to Daisy Zamora’s The Violent Foam: New and Selected Poems, published by Curbstone Press in 2002.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: Let the Truth Be Told
I promised in an earlier post to write about the second book I read in Mexico this year, Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations. But every time I try to write about the book I get stuck: Parra’s book is brilliant but, for me at least, unsummarizable. The collection contains five long poems in the form of speeches, which Parra actually delivered on various occasions.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: Distant Star
I started reading Roberto Bolaño’s novel Distant Star at Denver International Airport, where we waited three hours for the first leg of our flight to Cancún. Thunderstorms over Dallas had grounded flights there, where we were supposed to connect, so I started out with an overhanging mood of distress, uncertainty, and not too far below the surface, anger—at the weather, the airline, and the idiocy of my choosing a connecting flight to save a few bucks.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. 
