Full-Length Books and Chapbooks

You’ll find all of my in-print books among the scrolling book covers on the Home page.

Online Poems

I’ve only in the past couple of years began submitting poems to online publications. What’s daunting about it is the fact that they never go away. A bad poem in a little magazine can vanish without a trace—thankfully! But one’s online failures continue to wander the ether like so many hungry ghosts. All of which is to say that these are links to poems I won’t cringe to think of you reading.

Magazine Poems

I’ve been lucky enough to publish in a lot of literary magazines, some well known (Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Hudson Review, Ohio Review, Denver Quarterly and so on), and some once known and respected but now almost entirely forgotten (such as Ark River Review, Lamp in the Spine, Tendril, The Chowder Review, and The Devil’s Millhopper), and some little known but deserving of attention (like Hubbub, Puerto Del Sol, Divide, and The Bitter Oleander). There are well over a hundred, and I want to thank the editors of each one, whether named here or not.

Anthologized Poems

Here is a list of poems and the anthologies they appear in. One in particular took me by surprise: I had picked it up from a table of remainders and, in scanning the table of contents, discovered my name and my poem, “The One-Armed Boy.” The initial surprise sprang from the fact that I’d never heard of the anthology and had never given permission for the editor (Ruth Gordon—not the actress) to use it; but the second surprise shook me a little when I found my poem on page 4, and saw the author credit: “Joseph Hutchison (1902-1988).” Now, I was born in 1950. Did I have some kind of time-shifteddoppelgänger who took his first gasp 48 years before my own and gave up his last when I was 38? Is there any meaning in the fact that our lives-on-paper converged in a poem about a child born with a missing appendage? We think of Borges as a fabulist, but I’ve begun to wonder….

• “Artichoke” in The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets, Ted Kooser ed. (University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
• “Thread of the Real” in The Book of George (The BoG Collective, 2004).
• “George W. Bush’s First Press Conference,” “Listeners,” “George W. Bush Threatening War with Iraq,” and “Risking a Whisper” in Poets Against the War: International Day of Protest, February 12, 2003—Evergreen, Colorado: A Commemorative Anthology ( Mad Blood, 2003).
• “Self-Assessment” in The Tar River Poetry 20th Anniversary Anthology (1998).
• “Pneumonia” and “Internal Combustion” in the anthology The XY Files: Poems on the Male Experience, ed. Nancy Fay (Sherman Asher Publishing, 1997).
• “The One-Armed Boy” in the anthology Pierced by a Ray of Sun: Poems About the Times We Feel Alone, ed. Ruth Gordon (Harper-Collins, 1995).
• “A Box of Snapshots Unearthed in the Basement” in the anthology American Dream (Pig Iron Press, 1995).
• “Joni Mitchell” in the anthology Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry, ed. Jim Elledge (Indiana University Press, 1994).
• “Driving Home,” “Elegy for Michael, a Friend, Killed in His Car,” and “Internal Combustion” in the anthology Drive, They Said (Milkweed Editions, 1994).
• “Walking Off a Night of Drinking in Early Spring” in Luna: Myth and Mystery (Johnson Books, 1991), edited by Kathleen Cain.
• “Grace” and “Crossing the River” in the anthology The Decade Dance (Sandhills Press, 1991).
• “Catacombs” in the anthology Movieworks (Little Theatre Press, 1990).
• “Vander Meer’s Duplicity,” “Vander Meer Larger Than Life,” and “Vander Meer at Bottom” in Tracks in the Snow: Essays by Colorado Poets (Mesilla Press, 1989).
• “Thunderhead” and “Walking Off a Night of Drinking in Early Spring” in Crossing the River: Poets of the Western United States (The Permanent Press, 1987).
• “Internal Combustion” and “From the Family Album” in Wingbone: Poetry From Colorado (Sudden Jungle Press, 1986).
• “St. Patrick’s Day Blues” and “Wandering Music” in City Kite on a Wire: An Anthology of Denver Poets (Mesilla Press, 1986).
• “The One-Armed Boy” in The Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, 1985 (Monitor Books, 1986).
• “This Year” in American Classic (SCOP Publications, 1985) and in The Ohio Review Ten-Year Retrospective Anthology(1983).
• “The Plaza,” a translation of “La Plaza” by Vicente Aleixandre, in The Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, 1983 (Monitor Books, 1984).
• “Aren’t You Kind of Old for This?,” a parody of Raymond Carver, in The Brand-X Anthology of Fiction (Applewood Books, 1983).
• “This Year” in The Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, 1980 (Monitor Books, 1981).
• “Dawn at the Rainbow Hill Ranch” and “Artichoke” in The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry (Windflower Press, 1979).

Short Fiction

I wouldn’t be rash enough to make extravagant claims for my stories. All were written as personal experiments, essentially without larger ambitions, although all but one of them has found a place in one publication or another. The single unpublished story has received kind responses from many editors, but all have found it too long to publish—although one did write, “I wish this were 15 pages longer, which would make it a novella, and we sometimes publish those.” Hmmm. Rather than length, I prefer the definition of my old fiction mentor, Robert Harlow, who said that a novella is “time flowing through a conduit.” This in contrast to a short story, which “stops time so the story can happen,” and a novel, which is “about the times.” I’m not exactly sure what he meant, but I’m sure he was right.

Journalism

Feel free to view and or download any or all of the writings below. Most were written for money (a pittance), the rest to scratch a particular itch and for copies of the publication. Some are clearly out of date, but I’ve included them because they still express some of my abiding concerns.