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Poetic Cleansing
I want to recommend the experience of reading and comparing two essays, a brief one by D. A. Powell and a longish one by Ron Silliman. The two pieces have similar titles — respectively, “Unburying Amy Lowell” and “Unerasing Early Levertov“* — but they couldn’t be more different in their aims and impacts. Powell offers a genuinely appreciative reappraisal of Amy Lowell as a poet; Silliman focuses on Levertov’s career, focusing on her strong but derivative early work to explain how she ended up in what, for him, is paradigm-shifting anthology (Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry).Read More
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Michaelian on “Blind Poetics”
Two quotes here from an insightful post by William Michaelian, the third in his series on “Blind Poetics”: A poet who insists on the superiority of his vision will attract followers who are afraid to see, think, and feel for themselves. * A poet who dismisses the life and work of another poet, living or dead, will dismiss any human being he thinks is in his way, or who challenges the cherished notion of himself.Read More
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Phronetic Possum
A recent post over at Possum Ego seems to address an idea I floated in an earlier post concerning relations as providing a productive focus for talking about poetry. Unfortunately, Dale Smith (Ol’ Possum?) uses some opaque language that annoys the crap out of me, such as: “Phronesis is mutable and undefined because it is dependent upon situations that call its wisdom into being for those moments.” We could slice and dice Aristotle to show why phonesis is not wisdom at all, but let’s not.Read More
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Open and Closed: A Response to Adam Fieled
Adam Fieled over at Stoning the Devil is, in my humble estimation, one of the most thoughtful post-avant partisans on the Web. When I respectfully threw down a gauntlet in his comment stream, he thoughtfully took it up in a post that’s useful in a number of ways, not least in its listing of poets in the post-avant ballpark (at least by Adam’s lights). Best of all, he presents two poems by Mark Young as examples of what he sees as characteristic and strong post-avant work.Read More
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On Theory
In a reply to a blog post by Lucia Perillo over at Harriet, I made a statement regarding writing from Theory vs. writing from Necessity, and John Shaw left a comment pointing out that my statement itself constituted a theory. I replied that I’d think about it and post further thoughts on the question later. Well, now is later, and here are my thoughts. Let me begin by attempting to define the word theory.Read More
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Little Somethings
A little something worth remembering, from someone named Perie Longo … “The Inuit root word anerca means both to breathe and to make poetry.” … and a little something worth forgetting from Charles Bernstein.Read More
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Poetic-Critical Complex Langpo Advocates Rationing Pierian Springwater
From a 2/6/08 blog post by Ron Silliman: “I am not at all certain that any MFA program should admit a student who cannot name a minimum of 100 books of contemporary poetry – published in the past 25 years – and say a little about each. And I am not sure that I would graduate any student who did not then seriously read 200 more such books over the next period of time – some schools require as few as 25 – and again could say a little about each.Read More
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The Poetic-Critical Complex
This is an expansion of my response to a comment from Reginald Shepherd regarding one of my posts below: I’ve never developed a settled opinion on the relationship between poetic complexity and poetic durability. Do Shakespeare’s sonnets trump Michael Drayton’s because they are more complex? (They are more complex both conceptually and rhetorically.) And if so, are we to value Conrad Aiken above William Carlos Williams, for example, or Louis Zukofsky above Philip Levine? These are ultimately questions involving The Canon and the people in charge of it. I do not mean you and me, of course.Read More
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Silly Man
Ordinarily I find Ron Silliman’s blog link-rich and intellectually entertaining. But his latest post on the work of Larry Eigner reads like a pastiche of avant-garde poetic theory. Here’s the particular passage that stuck in my craw: “Eigner really was a philosopher of consciousness who used poetry almost architecturally to sculpt the most marvelous observations of the particular, even when he chose the simplest categorical terms to plot this out. There is one poem in this relatively slender volume that is perhaps the apotheosis of this approach to the poem.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. 
