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Bob Arnold’s Beautiful Days
Bob Arnold is one of my favorite poets, at least in part because his poems (like those of Cid Corman) provide no fodder for PhD candidates. He writes to capture moments of heightened consciousness as they arise, and it’s pretty clear we need more of those. You won’t find them on the Sunday talk shows or in the dusty pages of Foreign Affairs. They arrive almost always in poetry. In Arnold’s poetry, they arrive without fanfare, without symbolic sub- or super-structures.Read More
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Thinking (as in the Just-Previous Post) of Kenny G.
Karl Shapiro | newyorktimes.com Lower the standard: that’s my motto. Somebody is always putting the food out of reach. We’re tired of falling off ladders. Who says a child can’t paint? A pro is somebody who does it for money. Lower the standards. Let’s all play poetry. Down with ideals, flags, convention buttons, morals, the scrambled eggs on the admiral’s hat. I’m talking sense. Lower the standards. Sabotage the stylistic approach. Let weeds grow in the subdivision. Putty up the incisions in the library façade, those names that frighten grade-school teachers, those names whose U’s are cut like V’s.Read More
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A World of Things
Bill Knott asks some important (to the extent that poetry is important) questions here and here. His focus is Objectivism (the Zukofsky/Williams/Reznikoff/Oppen Objectivism, not the hilariously stupid “philosophy” cooked up by that maven of selfishness, Ayn Rand), one of the root assumptions of which is the notion that content doesn’t matter. In fact, Objectivist poetry exalted a world of things, a world without meaning—except for the significance imposed upon it by the poet.Read More
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Re: The Plumbline School
I was a bit surprised to receive an email from Henry Gould of The Plumbline School, inviting me (at the suggestion of Plumbline fellow Joseph Duemer) to join their circle. My response was essentially a reaction to the School’s self-definition, to wit: “Plumbline poetry” is provisionally defined here as poetry which exhibits a stylistic “mean between extremes”: understated, transparent, inclusive, objective. It avoids extremes of both the ponderous and the superficial; it shuns mannerism and facile ornamentation, on behalf of clarity and simplicity of presentation. It strives for mimesis rather than pantomime.Read More
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The Poetic-Critical Complex
This is an expansion of my response to a comment from Reginald Shepherd regarding one of my posts below: I’ve never developed a settled opinion on the relationship between poetic complexity and poetic durability. Do Shakespeare’s sonnets trump Michael Drayton’s because they are more complex? (They are more complex both conceptually and rhetorically.) And if so, are we to value Conrad Aiken above William Carlos Williams, for example, or Louis Zukofsky above Philip Levine? These are ultimately questions involving The Canon and the people in charge of it. I do not mean you and me, of course.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. 
