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Pikes Peak VideoPoetryLooza
Back in April I was honored to help the Pikes Peak Library District’s Poet Laureate Project kick off Poetry Month in Colorado Springs. It was a fine, well-attended shindig with several wonderful poets, and the District generously videotaped the whole thing. I shudder a bit to see myself onscreen; it brings home too vividly the fact that I have quite a few performance tics that I’m now too far into dotage to correct.Read More
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Eliot Khalil Wilson: Is It Invective?
MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION JOB SEARCH for Antonio Gramsci … and I’d like to add that I will teach all the classes; I will crave the eight o’clock. I will teach whatever you want, Fuji Island poetry, gator wrestling, Lamaze, all within my range. I will toil like a South African dockworker, my office in a men’s room stall; I’ll wait there forever like a hobo in a Beckett play. I will make the students love e; erupt in a lava flow of praise over their slightest efforts. I will coddle and pet. I will nurture.Read More
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Poetry Month 2015: Voices at the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress’s Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature What a trove of literary pleasures! And these selections are just the beginning…. “[These] selections from the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress became available to stream online for the first time [on April 15, 2015] — the launch of a project digitizing some of their 2,000 recordings from the past 75 years of literature.Read More
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Poetry Month 2015: Linda Hogan
LANGUAGE OF THE FROGS Tonight when the frogs are speaking their love language, the forests still stand in all their giving, I soak in the waters of loneliness thinking my cradle never destined this, not the loss of any children, not the end of any love, not for anyone born to this earth-promised happiness to lose it all, but then, what did it damage to lose everything, maybe the heart, or maybe not completely, because I still love the fields of morning, the brilliance of dew shed by night’s many skins, the bird I watch in a nest of weather…Read More
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Poetry Month 2015: César Vallejo
It’s almost certainly a fool’s errand for someone like me, whose Spanish has such a limited scope, to attempt translating César Vallejo. His language is famously thorny in the original, and the temptation in bringing him over into English is either to be as literal as possible or to sand away his edges by over-demystifying his torqued tropes. I’ve taken the middle road. In the end, I have to admit that I don’t comprehend the poem, though I feel I understand it, and I know I haven’t served it as well as it deserves.Read More
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Poetry Month 2015: Louis Jenkins
THE POET He is young and thin with dark hair and a deep, serious voice. He sips his coffee and says, “I have found that it is a good idea to check the words you use in a dictionary. I keep a list. Here is the word meadow. Since I was a child the word meadow always had connotations of peace and beauty. Once I used meadow in a poem and as a matter of practice I looked the word up. I found that a meadow was a small piece of grassland used to graze animals….Read More
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Poetry Month 2015: Robert Wendell King
CHOOSING WHERE TO LEAVE 1. The Corso Death Scene Gregory once told me that if he were on the street and knew he were dying, he’d slip into a movie, didn’t know why. So there were assumptions: a theater nearby, the right time. Well, we know now his way didn’t happen—daughter’s house, hospital. I thought, reading the news, that a movie would have had the comfort of closed darkness and he’d have been with others, a whole roomful staring at lights, at color, with music, everyone talking and talking on the screen, a movie about being alive. 2.Read More
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Poetry Month 2015: Italian Aphorists
Aphorisms often turn up embedded in poems—”Old men ought to be explorers“; “If there is a trail, you have taken a wrong turn“; “Age is the bilge / we cannot shake from the mop“; “I will try / to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening / scope, but enjoying the freedom that / Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, / that I have perceived nothing completely, / that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk“; etc.—but the art of writing pure aphorisms is a special skill.Read More
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Poetry Month 2015: Murray Moulding
A clutch of haiku by Murray Moulding. I met Murray many years ago at a poetry reading against George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but we became close only when we found ourselves in a small group of likeminded poets that meets monthly to share work, jabber, commiserate, kvetch, joke around, and nudge our own poems toward a state of aesthetic satori. * * * Cleared customs at dawn. Oh repellant afterlife, not one thing has changed. * Erotic nightmare stands to reason with a whip. It’s a long story.Read More
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Poetry Month 2015: C. A. Trypanis
NAMES by C. A. Trypanis Now whom did Hector and Ares kill first and whom last? —Iliad, V. 700 Now whom did Hector and Ares kill first, Whom last? Teuthros, Orestes, Techos, Oenomanos, Helenos, Oresbios . . . names, Are we supposed to remember them all? Names, many names, quantity, that is what matters; It advertises the splendour of the cause. As for the common soldier all that counts Is if he managed to die in a manner His generation approved. If he stumbled Against their decorum, he will never be forgiven By no matter how broadminded a posterity.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. 
