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Adventures in Reading 2023
PART ONE: GOING LONG After Doctor Faustus defeated me last year, I developed a low-level psychic hum, an unease around a readerly question: could I still go long? I mean Don Quixote long; the three-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain long; The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine long (982 pages, English only, translated from the German by Hal Draper).Read More
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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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My Year in Books (2017)
This year’s list is longer than usual, in part because I created two literature courses for the Professional Creative Writing program I direct at D.U.’s University College, a process that entailed lots of reading.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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Isms and the Liberation from True Knowledge
After observing that “someone who longs for particulars and seizes them in his writing is thinking in the best possible way,” Adam Zagajewski, a page or so later in Slight Exaggeration (as beamed into English by Clare Cavanagh), writes: We rarely consider how much we’ve lost by way of the systematization of intellectual life over the last century. In an age of ideology, systems, endless -isms, have taken hold everywhere, even, or rather especially, in universities.Read More
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Stendhal to Zagajewski to Me … to You
From Adam Zagajewski‘s memoir (self-investigation?), Slight Exaggeration, in Clare Cavanagh‘s beautiful translation: Stendhal in Souvenirs d’égotisme: “Le génie poétique est mort, mais le génie du soupçon est venu au monde” (The genius of poetry has left us, the spirit of suspicion takes its place—in my loose translation). Is it true? Yes, as to the spirit of suspicion, and it’s also true that poetry and suspicion must always do battle, a vicious war in which prisoners are slain without mercy, flouting Geneva conventions.Read More
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An Anti-Review of Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems by Tadeusz Różewicz
Among my usual Google alerts from The Quarterly Conversation was a review of Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems by Tadeusz Różewicz. I’ve always found Quarterly Conversation reviews to be intelligent and insightful, and (full disclosure) Różewicz is one of my favorite poets—so I clicked right through to it. Unfortunately, this piece, by one Patrick Kurp, is an exception—that is, it is exceptionally skewed, snotty, and crackpottish.Read More
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Friday Notebook 08.12.2011
A number of quotes from David Abram‘s extraordinary The Spell of the Sensuous flowed into my notebook this past week. Here are a few of them: We see the sorcerer being called upon to cure an ailing tribesman of his sleeplessness, or perhaps simply to locate some missing goods; we witness him entering into trance and sending his awareness into other dimensions in search of insight and aid. yet we should not be so ready to interpret these dimensions as “supernatural,” nor to view them as realms entirely “internal” to the personal psyche of the practitioner.Read More
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Dewdrop Light
Adam Zagajewski is a marvelous poet. I say this although I’m able to read him only in translation. (I can read Dante only in translation, and his genius is likewise recognizable.) Literary types who complain (endlessly and in print) about the terrible limitations of language, including those who argue against translation as some kind of cheat, will encounter some arguments in Zagajewski’s intellectual memoir Another Beauty that I imagine they’ll find difficult to refute, assuming they bother to attempt a refutation. We’ve reached a point, in the U.S.Read More
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Don’t You Love Farce? (Pace, Stephen Sondheim…)
The powerful Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, in is book-length meditation Another Beauty, offers these observations: Linguistic definitions of poetry, and of literature generally, predominate in our age. This means that in defining literature–incidentally, why do we need to define literature, anyway? who bothers to define rain?–the first move is sticking out your tongue. This approach links thinkers as diverse as the structuralists, on the one hand, and Joseph Brodsky, on the other, a great poet closer to metaphysics than to science. It’s a tricky problem, and an immensely important question.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
