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The Work of the Poet
From a fine remembrance of Derek Walcott by Bert Almon: He repeatedly said that forms actually free the imagination. He had advice for writers when metre falters: “If the metre peters out, stop. Solve the problem, it’s a gift of discovery. Start a new sentence.” As for rhyme, he stated that “every line of verse wants to rhyme. Every line expects to be coupled.” But he also said that “Rhyme is a precipice,” because you might not find the right rhyme.Read More
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Adios, Tomas Tranströmer
We knew he had suffered a stroke in 1990. We knew he was in poor health. Nevertheless, the loss of him inspires an ache in the chest, a melancholy cold wind in the mind. Tomas Tranströmer is gone.Read More
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Derek Walcott on the Poet’s Voice … and Much More
From a Bill Moyers interview with Derek Walcott: It takes you all your life to write the way you speak without faking it. I mean I think it’s very hard for a poet, very-very, very-very hard to get to hear his own voice without affectation. I mean I couldn’t read my poems with a British accent, or an American accent. You know, there’s an inner thing that makes me speak, I hope, the way I would write—tonally, not just in terms of vocabulary.Read More
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Sea Poems of Juan Ramón Jiménez
The great Juan Ramón Jiménez often drew inspiration from the sea, and a great many of his sea poems are brought together in The Poet and the Sea, translated by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney. What follows is one of my favorites: IDEAL ARRIVAL February 11 To Joaquín Sorolla Suddenly, the afternoon opens out, like a golden fan, a great royal illusion.Read More
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Adios, Wisława Szymborska
“Poland’s 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska, whose simple words and playful verse plucked threads of irony and empathy out of life, has died. She was 88. […] The Nobel award committee’s citation called her the ‘Mozart of poetry,’ a woman who mixed the elegance of language with ‘the fury of Beethoven’ and tackled serious subjects with humor.” More here. * * * Hiroshige Utagawa, “Evening Showerat Atake and the Great Bridge” PEOPLE ON THE BRIDGEby Wisława Szymborska(tr.Read More
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Tranströmer Wins the Nobel
My Introduction to Tranströmer: fromRobert Bly’s Seventies Press,translated by Bly, 1970, with theSwedish originals en face I have heard the Swedes singing cheek to cheek.I do not think they will sing to me. But that’s ok. I feel like they’ve sung to me—sort of—because Tranströmer was on the No Bull Prizes list I posted back in 2007. The NYT calls his poetry “bleak but powerful,” which is only half true, because Tranströmer (it seems to me) is seldom bleak.Read More
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Szymborska’s “The Joy of Writing”
Wisława SzymborskaPhoto: Adam Golec©Agenca Gazeta THE JOY OF WRITINGby Wisława Szymborska Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?For a drink of written water from a springwhose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.Silence—this word also rustles across the pageand parts the boughsthat have sprouted from the word “woods.” Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,asre letters up to no good,clutches of clauses so subordinatethey’ll never let her get away.Read More
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Another Year on the List
The great Syrian poet Adonis appeared on my own Nobel list three years go, and now that the committee gave the award this year to Mario Vargas Llosa—a wonderful writer—it’s clear that Adonis will spend at least another year on that list. Gerard Russell made a strong case for Adonis a couple of days ago, but there was a string of poets (see below) who won in the 1980s and ’90s, and let’s be honest: it’s a prose world…. Nobel Prizewinning Poets Rudyard Kipling (1907)Rabindranath Tagore (1913)William Butler Yeats (1923)Gabriela Mistral (1945)Hermann Hesse (1946)T. S.Read More
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Reading Into and the Avant-Garde
Jacket Magazine has published a peculiarly passive-aggressive 4,000-plus word response by Jeffrey Side to a 193 word statement by Seamus Heaney, quoted from Heaney’s interview with Dennis O’Driscoll as published in Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. (The interview is no longer available online, alas.) Here is the Heaney excerpt; his initial “it” refers to the term “avant-garde”: It’s an old-fashioned term by now. In literature, nobody can cause bother any more. John Ashbery was a kind of avant-garde poet certainly and now he’s become a mainstream voice.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: Let the Truth Be Told
I promised in an earlier post to write about the second book I read in Mexico this year, Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations. But every time I try to write about the book I get stuck: Parra’s book is brilliant but, for me at least, unsummarizable. The collection contains five long poems in the form of speeches, which Parra actually delivered on various occasions.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. 
