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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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Tiny Houses Spacious as Mansions
As with my previous Peter Handke post, I’m sharing enough of this remarkable collection by Samuel Menashe to give a sense of his work without giving away too much. I first encountered Menashe several years ago, when I volunteered to record books for the Colorado Talking Book Library. My first assignment was unenviable: a rather standard textbook focused on reading and interpreting poetry.Read More
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Happy New Year!
What better way to start the year than with this series of aphoristic poems by David Giannini? They appear in the first of what I hope will be many issues of Talisman Magazine online, where you’ll also find a clutch of unpublished late poems by the inimitable Samuel Menashe; a group of strange and resonant poems by Lale Müldür, translated from the Turkish by Lisa Bourbeau; and an excerpt from the never published but nevertheless legendary novel Junior Birdman (“The Holy Grail has but one drop left in it: the spirit of childhood”), by William J.Read More
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Adios, Samuel Menashe
Samuel Menashe, 1925-2011Photo: Librado Romero/New York Times I was saddened to read about the death of Samuel Menashe, whose wonderful poetry I found by the oddest of accidents. I had volunteered to read for an organization called Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (recently renamed Learning Ally). The first couple of sessions were devoted to poetry textbooks—a dry but necessary task. For my third session, I was handed Samuel Menashe’s New and Selected Poems. Menashe wrote brief, highly concentrated poems that send subtle vibrations out in various directions at once. They are like pebbles dropped into still water.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. 
