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Rejecting the Personal
The tireless Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover are mounting an experimental seminar they’re calling “The 95 Cent Skool.” (Details here.) Part of their description asserts the following: Our concerns in these six days begin with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. “Social poetics” is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision.Read More
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Wishing You a Joyful 2010!
It’s instructive at the end of any year to consider how far we have or haven’t come. But a single year is too brief to get a good sense of larger trends. Each of us knows how our own year went, and the media provides their own assessments, distorted by the currents of political partisanship and an overriding interest in ratings.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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Bacterio-Textual Flagellation
In Chapter 104 of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville puts these words into Ishmael’s mouth—but surely the sentiment is his own: In the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with the outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs.Read More
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Poetry and the Poet’s Character
Reginald Shepherd, in a typically thoughtful and eloquent post, successfully critiques the notion that poets associated with Donald M. Allen’s seminal anthology, The New American Poets, wrote with political and/or social change as a goal. Unfortunately, as he reaches his conclusion, he uses his valuable analysis to make a puzzling claim: “If we were to judge works of art by their creators’ political positions, much would be ruled out of bounds.” On the surface this sounds admirably dispassionate; but the implications of his statement are troubling.Read More
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A Conversation in Progress II
This continues my conversation with Reginald Shepherd regarding his recent post on Harriet. Of course, there they are mixed in with all sorts of commentary from other readers, so I’m culling the latest installments of our conversation for presentation here. ++++ Dear Joseph, Thanks for your thoughtful and eloquent comment. I think that we do in fact disagree, but I will try to clarify my position.Read More
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The Guardian’s Great Poets Series
Britain’s The Guardian offers up a series it calls “Great Poets of the 20th Century,” a link-rich glimpse into the English public intellectual class’s image of itself. American readers may be surprised that the editors claim America’s own Sylvia Plath for England (anticipating, I suppose, the outcry that would have greeted their inclusion of Ted Hughes without her) and mysteriously elevate Sassoon over Owen. Still, it seems well worth reading.Read More
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On the Letters of Ted Hughes V
Finishing The Letters of Ted Hughes—which I managed to do while recovering from a nasty bout with the flu—left me with a strange mixture of exaltation and biting sadness: something, I mean, beyond the sadness that books like this (biographies, letters, etc.) inevitably inspire because they end in the grave.Read More
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The Poetic-Critical Complex
This is an expansion of my response to a comment from Reginald Shepherd regarding one of my posts below: I’ve never developed a settled opinion on the relationship between poetic complexity and poetic durability. Do Shakespeare’s sonnets trump Michael Drayton’s because they are more complex? (They are more complex both conceptually and rhetorically.) And if so, are we to value Conrad Aiken above William Carlos Williams, for example, or Louis Zukofsky above Philip Levine? These are ultimately questions involving The Canon and the people in charge of it. I do not mean you and me, of course.Read More
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On The Letters of Ted Hughes
I’ve been reading The Letters of Ted Hughes, which I’m finding impossible to put down. Like all letters written by people of genius, Hughes’s letters are a magical mix of erudition, crank notions, unguarded humor, soap opera, and authentic emotion. Hughes—who for my money stands as the greatest British poet of the last century—has more valuable things to say about the practice of poetry than anyone I’ve read. Herewith an example: “Up to the invention of Caxton’s press, and for most people long after, all reading was done aloud. Most people were incapable of reading silently.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. 
