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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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Do You Want To Be Illiterate?
Carol Muske-Dukes Yesterday or the day before I posted a comment to a contentious but, from my point of view, on target essay by Carol Muske-Dukes on Huffington Post. In it, she rather neatly flays Ange Mlinko for her essay on Adrienne Rich, in which Mlinko uses the release of Rich’s Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012 to “reevaluate” the poet. My comment on Muske-Dukes’s essay was a bit terse: One only has to read Ange Mlinko’s poetry to understand her antipathy toward Rich. Insubstantial artists always detest substantial ones.Read More
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Another Response to Christian Bök
Over on the Poetry Foundation’s blog, a fellow named Christian Bök—who bills himself as “an experimental writer,” although he also constructs “conceptual artworks” out of Rubik’s cubes and Legos— has posted the sixth (!) in a series of musings about so-called poetic machines, which he rhapsodizes about in terms that would make dear old Kurt Vonnegut spin in his grave. Here’s my comment on his latest…. ________ I’ve been alternately annoyed and amused by Bök’s past postings, but now I see that I’m meant to be only amused.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. 
