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The Impersonal Zest of Wallace Stevens
In Michael Hofmann‘s amusing and erudite review of Paul Mariani‘s latest biography, a predictably flabby rendition of the life of Wallace Stevens, Hofmann manages to dismantle Mariani while building up Stevens. By the end, we want to go back and read Stevens–if not from beginning to end, at least at the beginning and at the end.Read More
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Goodtimes and Hill and Trommer—OH MY
Green Chili for the Soul.Read More
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February First Saturday Reading @ BookBar
Emily Pérez & Jodie Hollander Note new time: Poetry Happy Hour mingling from 4:30 – 5:30 p.m. Reading from 5:30 – 6:30 p.m. Emily Pérez is the author of the chapbook Backyard Migration Route. She holds degrees from Stanford and the University of Houston, where she was poetry editor for Gulf Coast and taught with Writers in the Schools. Her poems have appeared in journals including Crab Orchard Review, Calyx, Borderlands, and DIAGRAM, and her full length book, House of Sugar, House of Stone, is forthcoming from the Center for Literary Publishing. She is a high school English teacher and dean and lives in Denver with her husband and sons.Read More
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Bonnefoy on the Beginning of the Poem
This from an interview with the great Yves Bonnefoy in the Paris Review (“The Art of Poetry No. 69“). The interviewer was Shusha Guppy. Interviewer: How does a poem come to you? Is it something that is given, that comes from outside? Bonnefoy: Nothing has ever been given to me. I do not know a situation in which a poem has been dictated by an “inspiration,” that it has been preceded by the feeling or the thought it’s going to express. What is usual for me is the desire to find myself once again within a specifically poetic idiom.Read More
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Folktale Blues
I don’t know what it is about that portion of Europe that in the 16th and 17th centuries was part of the Ottoman Empire, but the poets who spring from that soil often write in the manner of folktales. (Think of Vasko Popa and his famous pebble.) It’s a mode that largely vanished with the Renaissance in the rest of Europe, which embraced the Enlightenment and its Realism with fierce devotion and consigned the Fantastic to children’s literature.Read More
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Letting It All In
Presa Press has just released a book by one of my longtime favorite small press reviewers, a fellow poet by the name of Eric Greinke. Poets in Review gathers reviews from two decades of this activity, decades separated by 32 years of … well, not reviewing. Greinke doesn’t explain the long hiatus, merely noting in his introduction that his first decade of reviewing reviewing began in 1972, and during that period he was paid $50 per 500-word review by The Grand Rapids Sunday Press.Read More
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Repeal Gravity!
Neil deGrasse Tyson on “cherry-picking” science to support one’s political druthers.Read More
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Gould | Smith | Krimmel at BookBar September 5th
Mark Your Calendar Now! Read More
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Lovelandia
I want to thank the good people of the Loveland Public Library, Columbine Poets, and the Loveland Museum/Gallery for producing a rather large crowd for this past Friday’s reading and the workshop next morning. Since Gov. Hickenlooper whacked me with his gubernatorial wand and transmogrified me from an ink-stained wretch into a laureate, I’ve done more such events than I did in the ten years previous, and I have to say that this audience was one of the most engaged I’ve ever come across.Read More
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The Three Voices
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. 
