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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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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.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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Cutthroat Prizes for Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Fiction — Deadline October 20!
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For Whom Do Poets Speak?
Linh Dinh is right, of course, in this powerful brief statement on poetics, which takes as its touchstone a powerful stanza by Czeslaw Milosz. The question is why. Why do we (poets, yes, but citizens as well of a system—there are no nations, really, not anymore—designed to maintain the hegemony of a mendacious, thieving elite) … why do we tolerate and even promote poetry that is superficial, trite, and purposely “uncreative,” utterly lacking in scope and depth? Why do we write about what we wish rather than what we know? I’m not talking about politics, per se.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. 
