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Adventures in Reading 2022
PART ONE: DISTRACTION AND ENCHANTMENT 2022 was unkind to my habit of reading lots of books. Partly my paid work was to blame: growing pains (which I am too old for) of the professional kind. Then there was the several weeks I wasted on Thomas Mann‘s Doctor Faustus, which I had to abandon. What drudgery! What a distraction! I’d read and admired a number of Mann’s short stories, but Doctor Faustus struck me as all posturing, a ponderous performance with no point in sight, almost every moment of it arriving via second- or third-hand reports about Mann’s fictional, Schoenbergian composer, Adrian Leverkühn.Read More
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A Man with a Slant Rhyme: Contemplating Ted Kooser
Among my early memories are verses from Mother Goose. The perfect rhymes stick with me, sometimes within lines (“Hay-foot, straw-foot”) and sometimes nailed down at the ends of lines (“Hickory, dickory, dock, / The mouse ran up the clock”). Sometimes the rhymes did not quite align: “This little piggy went to market, / This little piggy stayed home, / This little piggy had roast beef, / This little piggy had none.” I was told that I said to my mother, “‘home” and ‘none’ don’t rhyme.” “But look,” she said. “‘This little piggy’ repeats.Read More
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My Pandemic Year in Books
So Many Books, So Little Time I could have sworn that I’d read far fewer books this year than in past years, but it seems not to be so. It must be one of the few benign side effects of the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic has been hard on my writing, poems—at least poems of my kind—seeming fairly pointless amid the waves of infection and death and the tide of fascism rising out of the GOP (the Goosestepping Old Party).Read More
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On Carol Bass’s Ripple Effect
Order directly from the publisher or from Amazon. I am blown away. Flummoxed. Exalted! There is a new brilliantaceous star atop my publishing tree this Christmas, thanks to editor, artist, and poet Carol Bass.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Jared Carter
For Starr Atkinson, Who Designed Books Oldest of words, of sounds: star. Everything of that name perishes. The sun will reclaim each planet, the galaxy collapse, light itself siphon down into a last darkness. From you I learned how images balance in the white space of each page, how pages unfold like leaves, how light and dark interpenetrate, how what we do will not be noticed.Read More
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Adios, Jim Harrison
I just this morning finished Jim Harrison’s latest collection of poems, Dead Man’s Float—as luminous and robust as all of Jim Harrison’s writing, so I’m taking his loss, which I found out about a few hours later, quite personally.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
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Ted Kooser: A Sampler
It’s been my privilege to be a steady if not close friend of Ted Kooser for many years, ever since he first accepted some of my work for publication in his sorely missed journal The New Salt Creek Reader. I’ve eagerly snapped up each of his books and think of him now as more of a companion than a writer. I think that’s because he makes me, a thousands more like me, feel that he’s speaking to me—not to a bust of Shakespeare or a 3-D printing/sculpture of Ashbery, but to me as a fellow human being.Read More
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Jonathan Greene Travels Back in Time
Jonathan Greene Don’t miss the simply marvelous poem by Jonathan Greene in Ted Kooser‘s American Life in Poetry column today.Read More
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American Life in Poetry: “Ablution,” by Amy Fleury
American Life in Poetry: Column 468 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE Here’s another lovely poem to honor the caregivers among us. Amy Fleury lives and teaches in Louisiana. Ablution Because one must be naked to get clean,my dad shrugs out of his pajama shirt,steps from his boxers and into the tubas I brace him, whose long illnesshas made him shed modesty too.Seated on the plastic bench, he holdsthe soap like a caught fish in his lap,waiting for me to test the water’s heaton my wrist before turning the nozzletoward his pale skin.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. 
