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Christmas Can Now Officially Begin
I’m not religious (except in the sense that Robert Lowell suggested in “My Heavenly Shiner”: “We were kind of religious, we thought in images”), yet Christmas for me remains a well of nostalgic emotion. It’s not about the dull hours I spent in our Lutheran church listening to the dry rote of the pastor’s sermons and the strangely passionless choir (joy was all right as a concept, it seemed, but something one should avoid expressing); it’s about the memories of music and lights and people we love, those we can embrace and those we can’t.Read More
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Big Poetry Giveaway 2011
In celebration of National Poetry Month … well, let me set that aside. Much of my income derives from creating promotional campaigns, so I’m more or less immune to this annual public relations event. My participation in this particular event is meant to honor the generous initiative cooked up by Kelly Russell Agodon more than it is to promote poetry in general. (Is there such as thing as “poetry in general”?) It also gives me an excuse to share some of my favorite poetry—and some of my own, which is not the same thing—with two lucky Perpetual Birders.Read More
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Guillevic’s Geometries
Guillevic The great French poet Guillevic has been a personal favorite of mine ever since I came across Denise Levertov‘s translation of his Selected Poems in 1970 or ’71. I’ve read Englished volume of his, I think, and only one failed to capture my imagination, the sequence published by Unicorn Press under the title Euclidians; as translated by Teo Savory, the poems struck me as a bit loose-jointed, somehow overly relaxed. Besides, I’m terrible at math, and each poem either addresses or is written in the voice of a particular geometrical figure—so the collection felt like an exercise.Read More
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A Noiseless Patient Poet
Far be it from me to diss Marjorie Perloff, an often illuminating poetry critic. But when Jerome Rothenberg offered up this extract from her introduction to some German translations of Rae Armantrout‘s poems, a strange feeling crept over me: the sensation that she was slipping, I mean. Perloff, typically precise to a fault, here becomes a slightly vague promoter of a poet she’s a fan of. To wit: [U]nlike Williams (or Levertov), Armantrout was never a poet of concrete particulars: from the first, her minimalist lyrics were breaking the Williams mold.Read More
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Reading Into and the Avant-Garde
Jacket Magazine has published a peculiarly passive-aggressive 4,000-plus word response by Jeffrey Side to a 193 word statement by Seamus Heaney, quoted from Heaney’s interview with Dennis O’Driscoll as published in Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. (The interview is no longer available online, alas.) Here is the Heaney excerpt; his initial “it” refers to the term “avant-garde”: It’s an old-fashioned term by now. In literature, nobody can cause bother any more. John Ashbery was a kind of avant-garde poet certainly and now he’s become a mainstream voice.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 8
I’ll never forget the evening I first encountered Robert Bly. He’d come to read at the University of Northern Colorado, where I was an undergrad English major with poetic pretensions. I’d heard of him but never read his poems. The event took place in one of those featureless industrial classrooms with accordion partitions, and the audience was large enough to fill the second room, so Bly ended up reading into a long narrow space awash in humming fluorescence.Read More
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Poetic Cleansing
I want to recommend the experience of reading and comparing two essays, a brief one by D. A. Powell and a longish one by Ron Silliman. The two pieces have similar titles — respectively, “Unburying Amy Lowell” and “Unerasing Early Levertov“* — but they couldn’t be more different in their aims and impacts. Powell offers a genuinely appreciative reappraisal of Amy Lowell as a poet; Silliman focuses on Levertov’s career, focusing on her strong but derivative early work to explain how she ended up in what, for him, is paradigm-shifting anthology (Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry).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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A Note on Paul Blackburn (and Swiss cheese)
For some reason certain links from my response to Ted Burke’s recent blog entry on Paul Blackburn vanished when I posted it, creating what you might call a Swiss-cheese post. So I’m posting it here in all its glory—i.e., with links intact. You can find the Blackburn poem I’m referring to, in its correct format, here. As Burke notes in his post, he didn’t reproduce Blackburn’s original spatial presentation…. *** I wonder if anyone reading this poem would seek out more of Blackburn’s work. For me it’s too studied, a fairly pedestrian attempt at allegory.Read More
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A Welcome New Selection of Cid Corman’s Poetry
Longhouse Publishers is about to release an important new selection of poems by the prolific Cid Corman, who passed away in 2004. The Next One Thousand Years, Selected Poems of Cid Corman is edited Ce Rosenow and Bob Arnold, have done a beautiful job of gathering poems that represent the prolific Corman at his best—and at his best, Corman produced powerful, sleek, transparent poems that make us feel we’re witnessing fresh realizations as they come into being.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. 
