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A Squirt of the Salve of Humor
I’ve ranted here before about poetry written by grad students for other grad students—you know, that fragmentary, theory-ridden, wink-wink nudge-nudge poetry invoking the mouldering corpses of Wittgenstein and Derrida as if their ideas had not long ago been zombified. Well, it turns out that this kind of poetry has its analog in disciplines other than the language arts.Read More
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Friday Notebook 06.17.2011 (Insulting the Muse)
I somehow missed reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in the years when it was so wildly popular, but I’m reading it now and enjoying the hell out of it (to put it eschatologically). Here are a couple of brief passages from the book that found their way into my notebook this week: In those dark times a wise man had to believe things that were in contradiction among themselves. * As an ancient proverb says, three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works. And aches. Those were the scant pickin’s this week.Read More
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Presence and Absence in the Work of Shuntaro Tanikawa
What follows is an anti-review. It is an anti-review of Shuntaro Tanikawa’s 62 Sonnets and Definitions: Poems and prosepoems. I call it an “anti-review” because it violates the rules of reviewing in several ways. First, the book is not new: it appeared over a decade and a half ago, in 1992.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. 
