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Adios, Donald Hall
We shall have to wait for the better-written obituaries, but this one will have to do for now, despite its peculiarities. This non sequitur, for example: “An opponent of the Vietnam war, he was ruthlessly self-critical.” Or: “He met Daniel Ellsberg and would suspect well before others that the leaker of the Vietnam war documents known as the Pentagon Papers was his college friend.” Well, we are in the realm of journalistic deadlines, and even major new outlets have experienced cuts on the editorial side.Read More
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Mastery
Several remarkable items in this morning’s online reading… This interview in Guernica Magazine with the inimitable Arundhati Roy Conrad DiDiodato’s trenchant meditation on certain observations by Donald Hall and their relevance to Canadian poetry and the avant-garde at large Jonathan Mayhew’s comments on writing about María Zambrano (more on this below) A tantalizing report on some scientific progress regarding the Voynich manuscript Among all these wonderful irruptions of insight, the one that made me jump up and ruffle my hair (as Nabokov said certain readers of Invitation to a Beheading would do) was Jonathan Mayhew’s: “I actually like learning more…Read More
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In Key with the Times
Donald Hall Seth Abramson One can only feel grateful for Seth Abramson’s “myth-busting” posts at The Huffington Post (see here and here). They constitute a reply to Donald Hall and his statements about “the McPoem,” set forth in his influential essay “Poetry and Ambition” (1983). “The workshop schools us to produce the McPoem,” Hall wrote, “which is ‘a mold in plaster, / Made with no loss of time,’ with no waste of effort, with no strenuous questioning as to merit.” This is false, according to my own experience, but that doesn’t matter.Read More
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Some Poundian Nuggets
I’ve lifted a few quotables by Ezra Pound from Donald Hall‘s Paris Review interview with him, published in 1962 but linked a few days back by Al Filreis: [In response to Hall’s question about how Pound would plan a new canto. “Do you follow a special course of reading for each one?”] One isn’t necessarily reading. One is working on the life vouchsafed, I should think. I don’t know about method. The what is so much more important than how. * Technique is the test of sincerity.Read More
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Seth Abramson on The School of Quietude
I’ve become addicted to Seth Abramson’s blog The Suburban Ecstasies, in part because he always seems to be thinking out loud, not delivering sermons or condescending rants, and thinking out loud requires openness—a quality I value much more than the closed-circuit pronouncements of the Harold Bloom type.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. 
