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On the Fear of Influence
CULTIVATED GROUND When young, one is fearful of being influenced by other writers. With maturity that fear dissipates and one detects the sound of foreign voices on one’s home ground and is often delighted to be helped with a few thrusts of the spade. It is more important that the earth be properly cultivated than that every potato be planted with a jerk of the arm uniquely one’s own.Read More
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Encountering a Poet Workshops—Mark Your Calendar!
Mark your calendar! Workshops on the work of Naomi Shihab Nye, Robert Bly, Pablo Neruda, and E. E. Cummings. Presenters will be Lynn Kincanon, Joseph Hutchison (Moi), Evan Oakley, and Marj Hahne. Kudos to the Loveland Public Library and Loveland Poet Laureate Program for such an exciting series! Registration is required at lovlib.org/events.Read More
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Podcast featuring Lynn Kincanon and Moi
Just click the “Play” button below.Read More
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Exciting News about Under Sleep’s New Moon
Thanks to the judges at the Colorado Authors League for choosing Under Sleep’s New Moon for the 2022 Book Award for poetry. Very exciting! And more than a little surprising, given the puzzlement some folks have registered upon reading the title. More than one person has asked me a simple question: “What does it mean?”—my somewhat mysterious title. I get it.Read More
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Adios, Robert Bly
It’s startling to think of Robert Bly moving on, leaving us here without his energy, his restlessness, his exemplary dedication to opening a path toward a different way of imagining the purpose of poetry. Dana Gioia famously asked, “Can poetry matter?” Bly showed that it could matter … that poetry provided a way into the reaches of spiritual life that had been hidden away from us by America’s utilitarian values.Read More
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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
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Adventures in Reading 2018
Old Reading Room at BookBar (Photo: Tricia M.) Let me admit up front that I’ve included half a dozen books here that were read as part of my work with the Professional Creative Writing program at University College. But they all turned out to be worthwhile reading experiences. Even those I couldn’t quite connect with—Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West, Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw, and Adonis’s powerful Concerto al-Quds, which is also recondite and nakedly anguished by turns—continue to haunt me. This is usually an early indicator of re-readings in the offing.Read More
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Adios, Donald Hall
We shall have to wait for the better-written obituaries, but this one will have to do for now, despite its peculiarities. This non sequitur, for example: “An opponent of the Vietnam war, he was ruthlessly self-critical.” Or: “He met Daniel Ellsberg and would suspect well before others that the leaker of the Vietnam war documents known as the Pentagon Papers was his college friend.” Well, we are in the realm of journalistic deadlines, and even major new outlets have experienced cuts on the editorial side.Read More
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My Year in Books (2016)
As I did at the end of 2015, I’m laying out my past year’s book reading in the spirit of sharing the often haphazard journey of mind and heart that is my chief solitary pleasure. (There are other pleasures, of course, not solitary at all, but they don’t involve this particular addiction.) Again, the books listed below are ordered according to when I read them. I won’t comment on all of these titles because all of them are well worth reading.Read More
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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
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. 
