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Louise Glück on Poetry, Life, and the Life of the Poet
I remember reading Blake’s “Little Black Boy,” and I remember reading the song from Cymbeline, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” And I must have been five years old, four years old—little … but I heard those poems. I often didn’t know …—with Blake’s poem, I knew obviously nothing of the historical background of the poem, but the cry from the heart to my ear, that I could hear. And other wonderful observations from one of our finest living poets….Read More
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Louise Glück Wanders Off the Mountain
Many years ago, when Louise Glück’s The House on Marshland was fairly new, I had the privilege of teaching it (or musing about it in front of others), along with three or four other full-length books of poems. Instead of cherry-picking poems to illustrate this or that form, technique, style, or voice, we engaged whole books on the level of theme, world-view, the force-fields created by various approaches to metaphor and tone, and yes, worked to understand what the author intended to say.Read More
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Tom Montag In the Zone
For several weeks now Tom Montag has been writing “in the zone” about poetry on is blog The Middlewesterner—the process, the purpose, the inside and the out of it. Today’s Montag post is especially resonant.Read More
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Earnings Report
In the comment stream related to a piquant entry on his blog, William Michaelian made this observation: “By and large, it seems we earn a readership that mirrors our own strengths and shortcomings.” Turn that one over a few times! There’s wisdom in it. I added a reaction to the comment stream there, and thought it might be worth expanding a bit here. What I thought is that the reverse may be true as well—that the writers we value mirror our own strengths and shortcomings.Read More
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The Poetry of Outsidership
I just discovered a site called Goodreads, and yesterday I posted this brief review there. I’ve expanded it somewhat and added a few links for this incarnation. Someone once pointed out that judges of the Yale Younger Poets competition are dependent on what comes across their desks. There are fat years and lean years. W. S. Merwin’s first year as judge was a lean one, evidently, since he could find no manuscript worth publishing. But last year was a fat one, if Fady Joudah‘s The Earth in the Attic (selected by Louise Glück) is any indication.Read More
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The Earth in the Attic
I just discovered a site called Goodreads, where I’ve experimentally posted a brief review of this year’s winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Earth in the Attic, by Fady Joudah (selected by Louise Glück). I think this is the link to it.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 17 books, including a translation of flash fictions by Mexican author Miguel Lupián, and co-edited two anthologies. He lives in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. He teaches at the University of Denver's University College, where he currently directs three programs: Professional Creative Writing, Arts & Culture Management, and Global Community Engagement. 
