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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence. Then there was Ted Hughes‘s Selected Translations (see Ann Skea’s review here), offering a taste of texts ancient…Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Ovid
Tristia, Book IV, 10 Who was this I you read, this trifler in tender passions? You want to know, posterity? Then attend:— Sulmo is my homeland, where ice-cold mountain torrents make lush our pastures, and Rome is ninety miles off. Here I was born, in the year both consuls perished at Antony’s hands; heir (for what that’s worth) to an ancient family, no brand-new knight promoted just yesterday for his wealth. I was not the eldest child: I came after a brother born a twelvemonth before me, to the day so that we shared a birthday, celebrated one occasion with…Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Hayden Carruth
Ovid, Old Buddy, I Would Discourse with You a While upon mutability—if it were possible. But you don’t know me. Already you cannot conceive my making the second line of a poem so much longer than the first. No matter, mutability is the topic, and I see you there exiled on the Thracian shore among those hairy mariners speaking an improbable tongue, a location of you damnably similar to Syracuse, N.Y., and I see you addressing your first letter to the new emperor, Tiberius, looking blankly out to the rocks and the gray ocean as you search for rhythms and…Read More
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The Natural Poet
Don Quixote on poetry, in response to a gentleman whose son appears to be wasting his life as a scholar of the classics: “Señor, regarding your son’s lack of esteem for poetry in the modern languages, it is my understanding that he is mistaken, for this reason: the great Homer did not write in Latin because he was Greek, and Virgil did not write in Greek because he was Latin. In short, all the ancient poets wrote in their mother tongues, and they did not look for foreign languages in order to declare the nobility of their ideas. And this…Read More
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Happy Valentine’s Day!
Ovid’s Amores, 1:5 A hot afternoon: siesta-time. Exhausted, I lay sprawled across my bed.One window-shutter was closed, the other stood half-open, And the light came sifting throughAs it does in a wood. It recalled that crepuscular glow at sunset Or the trembling moment between darkness and dawn,Just right for a modest girl whose delicate bashfulness Needs some camouflage. And then—In stole Corinna, long hair tumbled about her Soft white throat, a rustle of summer skirts,Like some fabulous Eastern queen en route to her bridal-chamber— Or a top-line city call girl, out on the job.I tore the dress off her—not that it really hid much, But all the…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. 
