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Poetry Month 2016: Hayden Carruth
Ovid, Old Buddy, I Would Discourse with You a While upon mutability—if it were possible. But you don’t know me. Already you cannot conceive my making the second line of a poem so much longer than the first.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Sam Hamill
from Lives of a Poet: Four Letters to Hayden Carruth 2. Pilate asks, “What is love?” For which I substituted friendship, which is love unburdened by erotic passion, but informed by love’s kindliness, if not by the inevitable necessities of dialectic argument. And so I begin again— “My dear friend,” I say, meaning I have stood breathless before the severe beauty and anguish and love and delight in your poems, stood breathlessly still as I listened to the turn of a line or phrase or flinched in recognition of a painful truth revealed.Read More
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Journeyman
Hayden Carruth, from ‘Homage to A. MacLeish,” in Effluences from the Sacred Caves: More Selected Essays and Reviews: What is it that makes poetic genius, a Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Browning, Ezra Pound? Poetic talent, of course; that comes first. But something more is needed, the capacity to push that talent, roughshod and in hell or high water, over everything, and this capacity is the more important ingredient. Genius is idiosyncrasy; often enough it is aberrance.Read More
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Thread of the Real Hits Hollywood
Well, not exactly Hollywood. More like independent Vermont (redundant, I know) film. Bob Arnold yesterday posted views of several “favorites”—a silent video showcase of recent titles that happens to include Thread of the Real. What a boost to see my humble book among new collections from the great Hayden Carruth and David Budbill, among many others! I also love the way Bob flips the books over to highlight the publishers—in my case, Conundrum Press, which did such a beautiful job of designing and producing Thread. Thanks, Bob! I always wanted to see one of my books in the movies….Read More
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After the First Man
Albert Camus (photo: Cecil Beaton) There’s nothing better than an unfinished book by a great writer to teach us about the struggle for clarity and coherence that lies at the heart of the creative process. Albert Camus‘s novel The First Man is a case in point.Read More
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More on The Poem in Its Skin
I mentioned Paul Carroll’s The Poem in Its Skin in the previous post but forgot to scan the cover. So here it is. I have to scan it because it’s out of print, along with all of the books from Carroll’s Follett Books imprint, Big Table Books. Via Big Table Carroll published the fat and important anthology The Young American Poets (1968), as well as the first collection of W. S.Read More
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Starting a Voice That Is Great List
Over at The Plumbline School there’s been an affectionate discussion of Hayden Carruth‘s durable anthology The Voice that Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. Among the back and forth in the comment stream one of this blog’s “followers,” the mysterious Mairi, made a fascinating suggestion: “Why don’t you start a list? By ‘you’ I mean all of you. Give people something else to sit around in coffee houses and come to fisticuffs over.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
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. 
