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Adios, Richard Wilbur
I’m not sure what kind of knuckle-dragger one would have to be not to enjoy Richard Wilbur’s polished verse, whether or not one thinks its virtues amount to “a little too regular a beauty” [Randall Jarrell, quoted in today’s Guardian obituary]. I too prefer the rough magic of Lowell, Berryman, and Plath—but, as Robert Creeley famously wrote, “Love is dead in us / if we forget / the virtues of an amulet / and quick surprise.” These are the chief virtues of Wilbur’s poetry.Read More
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Christmas Can Now Officially Begin
I’m not religious (except in the sense that Robert Lowell suggested in “My Heavenly Shiner”: “We were kind of religious, we thought in images”), yet Christmas for me remains a well of nostalgic emotion. It’s not about the dull hours I spent in our Lutheran church listening to the dry rote of the pastor’s sermons and the strangely passionless choir (joy was all right as a concept, it seemed, but something one should avoid expressing); it’s about the memories of music and lights and people we love, those we can embrace and those we can’t.Read More
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Lowell’s Dolphin
Robert Lowell DOLPHINby Robert Lowell My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing and scraping of my will….I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself— to ask compassion … this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting— my eyes have seen…Read More
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Göransson and Blatny and Tics, Oh My!
Back on March 22 Johannes Göransson posted a poem by Ivan Blatny*, a Czech poet who defected to the West when the communists took over in 1948. Blatny lived from then on in England, until his death in 1990. Göransson posted the Blatny poem by way of recommending The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny, issued in 2007 by Ugly Duckling Presse; he declared the poem an example of the poet’s “greatness.” I read the poem and couldn’t fathom by what standard it could be called “great,” and said so.Read More
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Hanging On
This illness is hanging on. Just a cold, sinus and lung. But the slowness of recovery is a hint, I imagine. Lowell: Age is the bilgewe cannot shake from the mop. —”Ulysses and Circe,” in Day by Day * A sense of conflict in the distance, over a hill,but inside: civil war….Early morning battlefield mist in the chest.A muddy taste in the mouth. * And this from W. S.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. 
