-
Friday Notebook 11.04.11
There is little in my notebook this week beyond a few stray quotes drawn from my reading and a raw reaction to one of Conrad DiDiodato’s most intriguing blog posts, which needs fleshing out. Let me post my notes on Conrad first: I reread Frank Samperi’s trilogy a few months ago, and it produced a kind of seething in my mind which I recognize in Conrad. His post suffers from a conflation of Language poetry (in the person of Silliman) and the Occupy Movement.Read More
-
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
-
A Sickness of the Mind
Not long after reading this blog-pastiche of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as performed by the Marx Brothers (give up all hope ye who enter the comment stream), I ran across the following passage in Barbara Reynolds’s wonderful book Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man. Reynolds notes that Dante, in the Convivio, identifies a “sickness of the mind” that she characterizes as “a boastfulness that leads people to believe that they know everything and to affirm as certain things that are not.” She quotes Aquinas: [T]here are many who by their natural dispositions are so presumptuous as to believe…Read More
-
Cunning v. Clever
I just finished Willis Barnstone‘s intriguing memoir of his friendship with Jorge Luis Borges, With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires. Barnstone is what I would call a transparent writer: his style is plain, direct, reserved, more interested in accuracy than fancy effects, but always open to Big Questions: Why do I exist? What do my dreams mean? Is there a real difference between dreams and waking experience? How do our creations originate and why? It’s no surprise that he was drawn to Borges, nor is it surprising that he treats Borges with great honesty and respect.Read More
-
An Ordinary Reader Contra Jargon
I was going to post this as a response in the comment stream, but though it might be worth its own post. It’s a response to Seth’s comment on my earlier post below. Hello, Seth— Maybe I’m just oversensitive to theoretical language, so much so that I find the odor of it everywhere. You do, in fact, deliver a fairly jargon-free discussion of 7 lines from Joshua Beckman‘s Shake, but let me examine just one key sentence of it in the hope that I can clarify why I smell jargon there.Read More
-
Dissenting from My Dissent
Well, I tried to dissent from the debate, but now Seth Abramson has yet another lengthy and thought-provoking entry on his blog, to which I want to steer this blog’s readers, in part because I generally agree with his analysis. I have two dissents, though.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. 
