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Adventures in Reading 2021
It was another pandemic year, in some ways more challenging than the first. There was a sense of fraying in the fabric of social life, work life, personal focus (my poetry journal full of fragments that I’m not postmodern enough to throw down on pages and pretend that they cohere as poems), the persistent floating anxiety. Among the various costumes that relief arrived in were books, of course.Read More
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Chinese Fire
My good friend Joe Nigg, wrote an extraordinary 2016 book, The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast. It includes a chapter on “Poetic Fire,” which itself includes a poem of mine—rooted in the phoenix image—called “Revenant.” Now, between Joe’s inclusion of “Revenant” and the book’s appearance in print, I revised the poem, making several minor and a few substantial changes. In particular, the arc of the second version became … well, darker … and it was that second, darker version that subsequently appeared in my collection The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015.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. 
