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Copper-Egg People
Just when you think the folks at Harriet have finally disappeared down the rabbit-hole of Con Writing and its several intersecting tunnels (look just under the sod: they don’t dig deep), in walks Linh Dinh to shake things up.Read More
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The Poe(li)tics of Reality
Robert P. Baird at 3 Quarks Daily draws a fascinating parallel between the motivations and methods of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and those of the Language poets. He compares Assange’s hatred of secrecy—which he (Assange) views as the essential strategy all authoritarian governments use to maintain their power—with the Language poets’ hatred of “the rules for the ‘clear’ and ‘orderly’ functioning of language” (Charles Bernstein), which they see as similarly essential to maintaining “the capitalist project.” Certainly the paranoia-tinged views of Assange do mirror Langpo’s paranoid fear of “official verse culture” (Bernstein), a.k.a. “the School of Quietude” (Ron Silliman).Read More
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But Are There Seven Types of Clarity? Huh? So There….
“Any fool can be ambiguous.” —Linh Dinh, in the comment stream attached to this post by Don Share.Read More
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No I Did Not Attend AWP, But…
For a couple of quick glimpses of the intellectual train wreck known as the Kenny Goldsmith Express, see this and this. For something to calm your nerves after perusing the debris field, try this and this (both via Linh Dinh), as well as this from Patricia Smith. I think I may give up poetry and start making these for sale at farmers markets.Read More
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Bloemker/Dinh Interview
Scott Bloemker has done an interesting interview with Linh Dinh, which includes his extraordinary poem “Clean, Clean, Clean” from his latest collection, Some Kind of Cheese Orgy.Read More
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Cheesy Goodness
I haven’t gotten my copy of Linh Dinh’s new collection Some Kind of Cheese Orgy, but this review by Hai-Dang Phan makes me anxious to get my hands on it.Read More
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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
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Ekleksographia #2
Linh Dinh has a short but packed poem in the new issue of Ekleksographia, a imaginally charged online lit mag.Read More
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Heights and Depths
Yesterday one of my favorite writers, Jim Harrison, was featured on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. I missed it but found it online here. For some reason only the MP3 audio of the segment is posted, with video posted separately of Harrison reading poems from his new collection, In Search of Small Gods.Read More
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Kryptonite
I’ve never been one to advertise my (many) failures, but I admit to enjoying Bill Knott’s posting, on an earlier incarnation of his blog, of selected rejection slips he’d gathered over the years. Some of them were outright hilarious. But I’m posting the following not to highlight the blindness of an editor, but to show what a genuinely kind rejection should look like.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. 
