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Isms and the Liberation from True Knowledge
After observing that “someone who longs for particulars and seizes them in his writing is thinking in the best possible way,” Adam Zagajewski, a page or so later in Slight Exaggeration (as beamed into English by Clare Cavanagh), writes: We rarely consider how much we’ve lost by way of the systematization of intellectual life over the last century. In an age of ideology, systems, endless -isms, have taken hold everywhere, even, or rather especially, in universities.Read More
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Folktale Blues
I don’t know what it is about that portion of Europe that in the 16th and 17th centuries was part of the Ottoman Empire, but the poets who spring from that soil often write in the manner of folktales. (Think of Vasko Popa and his famous pebble.) It’s a mode that largely vanished with the Renaissance in the rest of Europe, which embraced the Enlightenment and its Realism with fierce devotion and consigned the Fantastic to children’s literature.Read More
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A Taste for Apocalypse
I had all kinds of reasons for wanting to like this book. First, my daughter gave it to me for Christmas; she spent enough years in the book business to know what might appeal to me. And she was right: I had read a review that made the book sound right up my alley—something dark, apocalyptic, Poe-ish. (I love Poe.) So I embraced the reading of it with relish. I have to say, though, that the novel disappointed me. László Krasznahorkai‘s Satantango is a dystopian amorality play.Read More
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The Authorities…
This captures the uncomfortable feeling I get every time I see Mitt Romney open his puppet mouth. “Do you know Schwarzer?” asked K. “No,” replied the Mayor. “Perhaps you know him, Mizzi? You don’t know him either? No, we don’t know him.” “That’s strange,” said K.; “he’s a son of one of the under-castellans.” “My dear Land-Surveyor,” replied the Mayor, “how on earth should I know all the sons of all the under-castellans?” “Right,” said K.; “then you’ll just have to take my word that he is one.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
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. 
