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Adventures in Reading 2022
PART ONE: DISTRACTION AND ENCHANTMENT 2022 was unkind to my habit of reading lots of books. Partly my paid work was to blame: growing pains (which I am too old for) of the professional kind. Then there was the several weeks I wasted on Thomas Mann‘s Doctor Faustus, which I had to abandon. What drudgery! What a distraction! I’d read and admired a number of Mann’s short stories, but Doctor Faustus struck me as all posturing, a ponderous performance with no point in sight, almost every moment of it arriving via second- or third-hand reports about Mann’s fictional, Schoenbergian composer, Adrian Leverkühn.Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2021
It was another pandemic year, in some ways more challenging than the first. There was a sense of fraying in the fabric of social life, work life, personal focus (my poetry journal full of fragments that I’m not postmodern enough to throw down on pages and pretend that they cohere as poems), the persistent floating anxiety. Among the various costumes that relief arrived in were books, of course.Read More
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On Carol Bass’s Ripple Effect
Order directly from the publisher or from Amazon. I am blown away. Flummoxed. Exalted! There is a new brilliantaceous star atop my publishing tree this Christmas, thanks to editor, artist, and poet Carol Bass.Read More
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My Year in Books (2016)
As I did at the end of 2015, I’m laying out my past year’s book reading in the spirit of sharing the often haphazard journey of mind and heart that is my chief solitary pleasure. (There are other pleasures, of course, not solitary at all, but they don’t involve this particular addiction.) Again, the books listed below are ordered according to when I read them. I won’t comment on all of these titles because all of them are well worth reading.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Jim Harrison
Lorca Again When Lorca was murdered they had him turn around and look down the steep mountainside at Granada far below. Goodbye hometown. They shot him in the back as always, also in the butt because he was gay. The powerful rifles splintered him and later the family picked u the pieces on the slope for burial. What a rare bird. It was like shooting the last blue heron on earth. There’s a sundial there now. We drank a bottle Christine made called Memoire. I choked on the wine and tears.Read More
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Interview with Jim Harrison [Video]
Thanks to my good friend and mythographer extraordinaire Joe Nigg for send this my way.Read More
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Adios, Jim Harrison
I just this morning finished Jim Harrison’s latest collection of poems, Dead Man’s Float—as luminous and robust as all of Jim Harrison’s writing, so I’m taking his loss, which I found out about a few hours later, quite personally.Read More
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Laureation; Against Single-Mindedness; etc.
Gov. Hickenlooper, Melody, and I on the west steps of the Capitol Many of you know that in early September I was chosen by Governor John Hickenlooper to serve for the next four years as Poet Laureate of Colorado. It’s a great honor, of course, even more so because Gov. Hickenlooper was an English major with an early interest in creative writing.Read More
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The Condition of Vision: Tom Hennen’s Collected and New Poems
Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems by Tom Hennen My rating: 5 of 5 stars Some French writer when I was a boy said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are, I cannot remember by what argument he proved them even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be that the elements have their children.Read More
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A New Jim Harrison Suite
I’m a sucker for Jim Harrison‘s work, in poetry and prose, so I was excited to find a new long poem of his over at Narrative Magazine.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. 
