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A Melancholy Accident
From John Latta’s blog post yesterday—an eloquent (as usual) meditation on several related themes, which ends with this quotation from Thoreau‘s Walden: Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over—and it will be called, and will…Read More
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Recognitions
Today Jonathan Mayhew at ¡Bemsha SWING! offers a fond glance backward at 2006 as a year of stimulating comment box disputes, while John Latta brilliantly deconstructs Ron Silliman’s faux scholasticism while examining The Library of America’s edition of Poe’s Essays and Reviews. I admire both of these writers but prefer Tom Montag’s “Lines for November 17,” which captures my own mood of late. Montag, it seems to me, does what poets are supposed to do: he embraces and articulates recognitions that matter.Read More
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Package Words
John Latta today notes: Pound, in 1956, to a BBC interviewer: “You cannot have literature without curiosity, and when a writer’s curiosity dies out he is finished—he can do all the tricks you like, but without curiosity you get no literature with any life in it.” (Pound’s next remark—mandatory reading for the insistently egregious purveyors of dopey labels: “Confusion is caused by package words. You call a man a Manichaean or a Bolshevik, or something or other, and never find out what he is driving at.Read More
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What Is the Sound of One Reviewer Clapping?
The folks at Michigan Quarterly Review know the answer. I’ve got a stack of books myself that bloody well deserve a sentence, so maybe I’ll try my hand at this. Let’s see….Read More
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From the Eye of the Kent Johnson Storm
Doubtless a stack of otherKnopf titles you will notbe allowed to comment onfreely Actually, not the eye, but the expanding tentacles of it. See Edmond Caldwell’s commentary here (love the oppressive helicopter image) and here. John Latta, in a nota bene squib at the end of this post on his blog today, unholsters the correct word for the tactics of Knopf et.Read More
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Damn the Caesars
Un-Effing-Believable! So now anyone who speculates on the genesis of a poem may find himself or herself on the wrong end of a lawsuit? Ridiculous. I’m with Michael Hansen, just waiting for “the lovely limited edition heading my way in the next few weeks,” coming from Richard Owens of Punch Press, who publishes a magazine called Damn the Caesars.Read More
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A Stray Thought
I was reading Kent Johnson’s post on John Latta’s Isola di Rifiuti blog this morning when a stray thought zapped flylike through a small tear in the screen of my concentration. The post continues a debate between Johnson and Tony Towle over a famous poem ascribed to Frank O’Hara, but which Johnson speculates may in fact have been an imitation of O’Hara written in homage to the deceased poet by his friend Kenneth Koch.Read More
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Missed Opportunities
An astute and intellectually fiery post here by John Latta, re: missed opportunities of the avant-garde.Read More
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Becoming Unfree
(click to enlarge) Among many things I love about John Latta (aside from his mazy, musical poems—see here and here) is the fact that he reads interesting books that I would never read and nutshells their ideas over at Isola di Rifiuti. One of his recent posts, “Bruce Serafin’s ‘Avant-Garde Mentalities’”, is a case in point. While Serafin seems like a sensible, engaged critic, literary criticism is near the bottom of my reading list–just below memoirs of politicians and just above tales of addiction and recovery in Hollywood.Read More
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Delectable
Two delectable posts by Kent Johnson over at John Latta’s Isola di Rifuti (I recommend reading them in order, here and here).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. 
