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A Place for the Genuine
If someone had told me in 1972, when I was 21 and about to graduate from the University of Northern Colorado, that one day a poem I had recently published would appear in an anthology alongside works by Thomas Merton, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Gary Snyder, Diane Di Prima, Robert Kelly, Edward Dorn, Diane Wakoski, and—wait for it—Stephen King … well, I would have told that someone to take a hike. I barely believed in myself at the time, much less in myself as a poet, although I would be headed that fall to study writing at the University of British…Read More
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Contra Manifestos
I use Google Reader to stream posts from the too-many blogs I follow, which is good because some bloggers post something maybe a little too piquant or politically incorrect and then delete their entries—but Google Reader displays them anyway. The post is gone when you click through, but the original is there in Reader. Bill Knott, who I admire a lot, does the post/delete routine fairly frequently. Now that he has a “Bad” prose blog and a “Good” prose blog (dealing with negative rants and positive comments respectively), he may be posting and then deciding the post belongs on the…Read More
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Resonances and Hiddenness
“Life shakes like a drum and would discover resonances of what it loves in its own beat, the old man wetting and heating the head of the drum until it answerd the tone he sought that sought him.” —Robert Duncan, “Reflections,” Bending the Bow I’m re-reading all of Duncan’s poetry in my library to prepare for reading The H.D. Book, which just arrived in the mail. But I couldn’t resist reading Michael Boughn‘s and Victor Coleman‘s Introduction, where I found this choice passage: “What is hidden is constantly brought into the light of the language of the poet, a frail…Read More
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Who Speaks to You?
I’m rereading Thomas McGrath’s magnificent Letter to an Imaginary Friend, in which he several times mentions Don Gordon. Don Gordon? A poet, it turns out, one of the many I’d never heard of until some other reader (usually another poet—in this case McGrath) brings them to my attention. Now I’ve discovered Don Gordon’s Collected Poems and am waiting for a check or two to clear so I can buy it. In the meantime, I’ve been searching for (old) news of Don Gordon—born 1902, died 1989—and in the process came across a fine essay by a friend of this blog, Lyle…Read More
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Göransson and Blatny and Tics, Oh My!
Back on March 22 Johannes Göransson posted a poem by Ivan Blatny*, a Czech poet who defected to the West when the communists took over in 1948. Blatny lived from then on in England, until his death in 1990. Göransson posted the Blatny poem by way of recommending The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny, issued in 2007 by Ugly Duckling Presse; he declared the poem an example of the poet’s “greatness.” I read the poem and couldn’t fathom by what standard it could be called “great,” and said so. Here’s the poem: MISSPELLED So restoration is not…Read More
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Further Adventures of Captain Ron
I have to thank Ron Silliman for his latest blog post, which for the first time has illuminated the chief reasons why his views on poetry get my hackles up. But let me start with what he gets right. It’s in the first paragraph: “The history of poetry […] is not a procession of its ‘best works.’” Yes! In fact, history itself is not a procession at all, but a backward look in which, as Silliman notes, “the rough edges of any given tendency” are “smoothed out.” One might hope that he would stand on this firm foundation to talk…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. 
