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Join Me & Other Denver Area Authors
Click here for complete details (you’ll need to scroll down after you land).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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Don’t Miss My U.S. Book Launch Reading with Kyle Laws on Friday, May 25th
In late April I launched my new collection, Eyes of the Cuervo | Ojos del Crow, at the boutique seaside hotel Melody and I have enjoyed every year for more than two decades. (See the YouTube video below.) Eyes/Ojos is a bilingual, illustrated edition translated into Spanish by Patricia Herminia with drawings by Sabina Espinet. It is limited to 250 copies which have been numbered and signed by moi. Now, on May 25th, comes the official U.S. launch of Eyes/Ojos, in the Mad Blood Presents reading series hosted in Evergreen, Colorado.Read More
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Step into The Magic Rectangle
I suggest that you devote some of that holiday cash the Jolly Old Elf put in your stocking and snag a copy of my friend Sandy McRae’s extraordinary new book of prose poems from one of our premier indie publishers, Folded Word. You’ll thank yourself when fangs of ice are hanging from your gutters because you’ll be inside, warming yourself at the fire of Sandy’s crackling wit. Note the caveat below, however: the first edition is already running low! So take my advice and don’t wait until the glittering ball drops in Times Square….Read More
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James Wright: A Life in Poetry
I just finished Jonathan Blunk‘s powerfully moving biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry. It is everything a great biography should be: a delicate balance between passing time and the abiding genius that seems to irrupt from a region outside of time. Given his family background, Wright was a person who should never have fallen in love with language, but thanks to some sensitive and insightful early teachers, he did, and so we have the opportunity when we read him to fall in love with it in poem after poem.Read More
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A Beautiful Way to Start the New Year
My good friend Gary Schroeder, who co-coordinates the First Saturday Poetry Series at BookBar and who writes marvelous poetry, has a new book, After Rain, coming from Folded Word, a fine indie publisher based in New Hampshire. Gary’s poems are rendered in gorgeous calligraphy by JS Graustein, the moving force behind Folded Word who is also a photographer and writer of fine lyrical prose. And, as you can see from the cover below, I wrote the foreword.Read More
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All I’ve Done For You, or The Return of Joanne Greenberg
The problem with being a writer who writes consistently beautiful prose over many years is that fashions in fiction come and go—or, more to the point, fashions in publishing, which, as an enterprise, has less and less interest in beautiful prose; the publishers’ interest tends more toward pleasing whatever demographic the marketing department has identified as the sweet spot.Read More
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Rediscovering a Major Colorado Poet
I just finished reading an extraordinary collection of poems by the long-overlooked Colorado poet Belle Turnbull. Certainly no better poems have been written about the lives of people wooed into the mountains by a vision of wealth—from gold, silver, molybdenum, and other elemental substances—and a primal sense of personal liberty. Edited by David J. Rothman, an excellent poet in his own right, and Vonnegut aficionado Jeffrey Villines, this book belongs in the library of every poet and certainly every reader who cares about poetry of the American West.Read More
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Belle Turnbull at the Colorado Creative Industries Summit
I came to this year’s Colorado Creative Industries Summit in Breckenridge with two tasks in mind. One was to represent the new Professional Creative Writing master’s degree program which I’m directing at the University of Denver’s University College. My second task was to welcome attendees of the annual Governor’s Creative Leadership Awards luncheon with a poem. Rather than regale the crowd with a poem of mine, I offered one by a woman who, for my money, is among the three or four best poets Colorado has produced so far.Read More
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Walt Whitman, Novelist
Readers who picked up The New York Times on March 13, 1852, might have seen a small advertisement on Page 3 for a serial tale set to begin the next day in a rival newspaper. “A RICH REVELATION,” the ad began, teasing a rollicking story touching on “the Manners and Morals of Boarding Houses, some Scenes from Church History, Operations in Wall-st.,” and “graphic Sketches of Men and Women” (presented, fear not, with “explanations necessary to properly understand what it is all about”). It was a less than tantalizing brew, perhaps.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2018, has published 17 books, including a translation of flash fictions by Mexican author Miguel Lupián, and co-edited two anthologies. He lives in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. He teaches at the University of Denver's University College, where he currently directs two programs: Arts & Culture and Global Affairs. 
