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Adventures in Reading 2018
Old Reading Room at BookBar (Photo: Tricia M.) Let me admit up front that I’ve included half a dozen books here that were read as part of my work with the Professional Creative Writing program at University College. But they all turned out to be worthwhile reading experiences. Even those I couldn’t quite connect with—Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West, Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw, and Adonis’s powerful Concerto al-Quds, which is also recondite and nakedly anguished by turns—continue to haunt me. This is usually an early indicator of re-readings in the offing.Read More
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Spring, Poetry, David Mason … and the Danger of Having a Poet Laureate
Don’t miss this wonderful interview….Read More
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Louise Glück on Poetry, Life, and the Life of the Poet
I remember reading Blake’s “Little Black Boy,” and I remember reading the song from Cymbeline, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” And I must have been five years old, four years old—little … but I heard those poems. I often didn’t know …—with Blake’s poem, I knew obviously nothing of the historical background of the poem, but the cry from the heart to my ear, that I could hear. And other wonderful observations from one of our finest living poets….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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Zagajewski’s Symphony
Adam Zagajewski’s extraordinary Slight Exaggeration, translated by Clare Cavanagh, has proven to be one of those books that require slow reading, pondering, backtracking, breaking out the dictionary on occasion, or the encyclopedia. Late in the book I realized that it seems to be structured symphonically. Themes are announced, interwoven, diminished for a time, then they resurface, converge, augment one another, reach a crescendo. The effect is inspiring. In any case, here are some final selections. Read some others here and here. Better yet: Buy the book.Read More
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Poetry and Possibility: A Conversation with Tracy K. Smith
“A poem isn’t just an expression of all these things that you’re feeling. But it’s a set of choices that you’re making in language. So every description, every question, every statement, every turn, is a choice that opens up or closes off certain possibilities.” —Tracy K. Smith, U.S.Read More
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Delicious Advice for Aspiring Poets
From the inimitable Wisława Szymborska, Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet who produced a column for a newspaper called Literary Life. She answered letters from everyday people who wanted to write poetry—a sort of “Dear Wisława” relationship that she handled with intelligence, humor, and care. Here are a few selections from her column, translated by Clare Cavanagh and courtesy of The Poetry Foundation.Read More
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Putting the House in Order
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Cult of the Fragment
The final chapter of A. Alvarez‘s thoughtful short book, The Writer’s Voice, is titled “The Cult of Personality and the Myth of the Artist,” and in it he argues that we have become more interested in the lives of artists than in their work because we have a lost any stable idea of what a “good work” is. In fact, the chief feature of postmodernism—the dominant “ism” of our moment—is its resistance to the very idea of value, which is considered an elitist cultural construct.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. 
