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A Fresh Look at Sylvia Plath’s Last Year
Do not miss this moving, illustrated tribute to the haunted genius of Fitzroy Road by Summer Pierre.Read More
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Adios, Donald Hall
We shall have to wait for the better-written obituaries, but this one will have to do for now, despite its peculiarities. This non sequitur, for example: “An opponent of the Vietnam war, he was ruthlessly self-critical.” Or: “He met Daniel Ellsberg and would suspect well before others that the leaker of the Vietnam war documents known as the Pentagon Papers was his college friend.” Well, we are in the realm of journalistic deadlines, and even major new outlets have experienced cuts on the editorial side.Read More
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Adios, Nicanor Parra
This is old news by now … that the great Nicanor Parra passed away on January 23rd. There have been obits and memoirs by journalists and translators, but the best reflection you’re likely to find is by the Chilean native, writer and translator, Soledad Marambio, which you can read here.Read More
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Adios, Richard Wilbur
I’m not sure what kind of knuckle-dragger one would have to be not to enjoy Richard Wilbur’s polished verse, whether or not one thinks its virtues amount to “a little too regular a beauty” [Randall Jarrell, quoted in today’s Guardian obituary]. I too prefer the rough magic of Lowell, Berryman, and Plath—but, as Robert Creeley famously wrote, “Love is dead in us / if we forget / the virtues of an amulet / and quick surprise.” These are the chief virtues of Wilbur’s poetry.Read More
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Adios, Bob (Robert Wendell) King
We lost one of the Colorado’s finest poets this past Friday. Bob King passed away after a long struggle with cancer. I can’t say enough about Bob’s fine writing, his generosity and humanity, his feeling for the sacred in nature, and his fundamental honesty.Read More
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The Work of the Poet
From a fine remembrance of Derek Walcott by Bert Almon: He repeatedly said that forms actually free the imagination. He had advice for writers when metre falters: “If the metre peters out, stop. Solve the problem, it’s a gift of discovery. Start a new sentence.” As for rhyme, he stated that “every line of verse wants to rhyme. Every line expects to be coupled.” But he also said that “Rhyme is a precipice,” because you might not find the right rhyme.Read More
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A Tribute Taking Place on Many Levels
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Adios, Yves Bonnefoy
Yesterday I happened to finish Ben Lerner‘s crafty and subtle monograph, The Hatred of Poetry, and a few hours later, while Lerner’s essay was still effervescing in my brain, discovered that Yves Bonnefoy had died a day before (Friday, July 1), in Paris. The first reports I saw (Radio France and the BBC) were sketchy and perfunctory. A more in-depth obituary appears in Le Monde, though I had to suffer through a Google translation to read it.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
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. 
