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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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Atwood on The Devil
The Devil comes to a writer and says, “I will make you the best writer of your generation. Never mind generation—of the century. No—this millennium! Not only the best, but the most famous, and also the richest; in addition to that, you will be very influential and your glory will endure forever. All you have to do is sell me your grandmother, your mother, your wife, your kids, your dog and your soul.” “Sure,” says the writer. “Absolutely—give me the pen, where do I sign?” Then he hesitates. “Just a minute,” he says.Read More
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Fighting Fire with Fireproof Values
All proceeds from this auction will go to PEN America to support their efforts in support of the freedom to write and the freedom to read and be read.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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Do You Want To Be Illiterate?
Carol Muske-Dukes Yesterday or the day before I posted a comment to a contentious but, from my point of view, on target essay by Carol Muske-Dukes on Huffington Post. In it, she rather neatly flays Ange Mlinko for her essay on Adrienne Rich, in which Mlinko uses the release of Rich’s Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012 to “reevaluate” the poet. My comment on Muske-Dukes’s essay was a bit terse: One only has to read Ange Mlinko’s poetry to understand her antipathy toward Rich. Insubstantial artists always detest substantial ones.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. 
