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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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Practicing a Farewell to Camus
I have a perhaps odd fiction-reading habit. When I love an author, I hold off reading every last thing the author published. This is especially true for living, lauded authors. The louder the praise, the longer I wait to read the latest book, I supposed because the hoopla can warp the reading experience. This approach works well with living writers. Since I read far more fiction by dead writers than living ones, though, a slightly different approach kicks in. I read everything except, and the exceptions vary quite a bit.Read More
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A Poet’s Credo
This from Lisa Jarnot‘s biography of Robert Duncan, via Seth Lerer’s review at SFGate: A poet does not serve institutions … for he has one allegiance, to his vision of the good of humanity, and he has one responsibility, to the truth of the human spirit. A compelling statement that puts Duncan in the company of writers like Camus and Hikmet. It explains why his poetry—erudite, archetypal, eccentric—feels nevertheless so grounded.Read More
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Postcolonial Camus
Readers of this blog know that Albert Camus is one of my moral and intellectual heroes. That’s why I’m recommending a powerful and illuminating essay by Michael Azar, written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Camus’s death. Azar views Camus and his work through the lens of France’s eight-year war against Algerian nationalists—a war that placed Camus in a difficult but principled position: Perhaps the most difficult challenge for Camus came from those who saw the anti-colonial struggle as some kind of continuation of la Résistance, the French Resistance movement during the German occupation.Read More
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After the First Man
Albert Camus (photo: Cecil Beaton) There’s nothing better than an unfinished book by a great writer to teach us about the struggle for clarity and coherence that lies at the heart of the creative process. Albert Camus‘s novel The First Man is a case in point.Read More
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In Praise of Hesitation
One reason I’m glad that President Obama, unlike George W. Bush, is hesitating to play Alexander in Afghanistan…. We have preferred the power that apes greatness, first Alexander and then the Roman conquerors whom the authors of our schoolbooks, through some incomparable vulgarity, teach us to admire. We, too, have conquered, moved boundaries, mastered heaven and earth. Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up by ruling over a desert.Read More
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Adios, Hayden Carruth
I have been asked more than once recently what book I would want with me if I were stranded on a desert island. (People who ask this forget the key word “desert,” which—if we took it seriously—would dictate something far too slender.) The complete works of William Blake was one of my answers. But today I have to revise that choice. It would have to be the complete works of Hayden Carruth, who died last night at age 87. I discovered Carruth’s poetry through his prose.Read More
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Poetry for a World Worth Living In
I’ve been reading Albert Camus—the daily Camus, author of many pointed, intellectually rich and often prescient editorials and articles for the underground French newspaper Combat, 165 of which have recently been published by Princeton University Press. You may be wondering what this has to do with poetry: bear with me. Camus has long been a personal hero of mine—a man devoted to the idea that politics must be based on morality, and to the conviction that human moral values can be discovered and enacted without reliance on a Church.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. 
