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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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Poetry Month 2016: Olav H. Hauge
One Word One word —one stone in a cold river. One more stone— I need many stones to make it across. ~ I Have Three Poems I have three poems, he said. Who counts poems? Emily tossed hers into a trunk, I don’t believe she ever counted them. She just spread open a tea-packet That was the right thing to do. A good poem should smell of tea. Or of raw earth and freshly split firewood.Read More
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News that Will Stay News as Long as There’s an England
Great news! We [the Blake Society] are delighted to announce that [on] 21 September 2015 … the sale of Blake’s Cottage was completed by the lawyers and the building is now held in trust for the nation in perpetuity. Our thanks to everyone in the Blake community who have given their work, time and savings to the project. Over half a million pounds was raised, a new charitable trust set up, and for the very first time there is now a home for William Blake. More here.Read More
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Göran Sonnevi’s First Book in English
The Economy Spinning Faster and Faster by Göran Sonnevi My rating: 4 of 5 stars I thought I’d done fairly well with keeping up with one of my favorite poets, Robert Bly—both with his own books and his translations—so I was surprised when I read, in the recently published Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, that Bly had been working on translations of poems by Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi, whose work I became a fan of when I encountered it in 1993, in A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, beautifully translated by…Read More
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Sheer Elation
New from FutureCycle Press Judyth HillGALA Book Launch! Friday, March 29, 20137:00 ~ 8:00 pmInnisfree Poetry Book Store1203 13th St, Boulder, CO 80302 ~ (303) 579-1644at Broadway & Pleasant St For more information: innisfreepoetry@gmail.com Just Released from FutureCycle Press Here’s a taste….Read More
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Sympathetic Magic: An Interview
Robert King, a fine poet and the indefatigable curator of the Colorado Poets Center (and editor of its quarterly publication, The Colorado Poet), has an interview with me in the current issue (#20). Looking it over, I see that it ends too abruptly, maybe even cryptically—ironically so, since I was holding forth on the subject of “clarity” at the end! Bob King: You’ve written and published a lot—eight chapbooks and Thread of the Real is your sixth full-length book, I think. It’s the first since The Rain at Midnight in 2000.Read More
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A Poet’s Credo
This from Lisa Jarnot‘s biography of Robert Duncan, via Seth Lerer’s review at SFGate: A poet does not serve institutions … for he has one allegiance, to his vision of the good of humanity, and he has one responsibility, to the truth of the human spirit. A compelling statement that puts Duncan in the company of writers like Camus and Hikmet. It explains why his poetry—erudite, archetypal, eccentric—feels nevertheless so grounded.Read More
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Tyger! (And I Don’t Mean the Golfer)
I’ve always wondered about “The Tyger.” Blake’s poems were published not as stand-alone verses but as parts of drawings—”illuminated” poems. Each copy of Songs of Experience, for example, was hand-engraved, hand-printed, and hand-colored. I’ve included a page from one of the surviving copies. Note, first of all, that the tiger does not look fierce but almost cuddly. Second, note that it is pictured in a frame—a frame created, of course, by William Blake.Read More
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Perception and Imagination
Sometimes one makes a brilliant response to a blog post somewhere in the ether—a comment that deserves a life outside that comment stream. This is not one of those. Nevertheless, because the issue is so interesting (at least to me), I’m reposting my comment here. This is in response to a thought-provoking post by Chris Ransick, which you’ll need to read for this to make sense. This is a fascinating post, Chris. I would just throw into the mix the idea that perception isn’t everything.Read More
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Resonances and Hiddenness
“Life shakes like a drum and would discover resonances of what it loves in its own beat, the old man wetting and heating the head of the drum until it answerd the tone he sought that sought him.” —Robert Duncan, “Reflections,” Bending the Bow I’m re-reading all of Duncan’s poetry in my library to prepare for reading The H.D. Book, which just arrived in the mail.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. 
