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Seth Abramson on The School of Quietude
I’ve become addicted to Seth Abramson’s blog The Suburban Ecstasies, in part because he always seems to be thinking out loud, not delivering sermons or condescending rants, and thinking out loud requires openness—a quality I value much more than the closed-circuit pronouncements of the Harold Bloom type.Read More
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Taslima Nasrin Under House Arrest
The suppression of Talsima Nasrin’s writing has extended to her person. Details here and on her own web site here.Read More
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Pick Up the Phone!
Just finished reading Adrienne Rich’s excellent new collection, Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (if you know of a better book title from the past year, I’d like to hear about it). Here’s an insightful review that gets to the heart of what makes this book, and Rich’s work overall, continually powerful and refreshing. Her sympathies reach far beyond feminism or politics in the narrow sense, and in the process produce a kind of poetry that seems to move beyond the subjective/objective, interior/exterior dichotomy by bearing witness to our historical/existential moment.Read More
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A Brief Meditation on the “Masterpiece”
Around Christmas my daughter and I fell to arguing about the idea of a “masterpiece.” Having taught “masterpiece” courses, I felt obliged to defend the idea, although the longer we talked the more uncertain I felt about the notion. Then last night I was finishing up the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach’s Judas Eye and Self-Portrait/Deathwatch, an extraordinary selection of prison poetry and subsequent prose pieces.Read More
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The Naif
Part of any poet’s ongoing labor is thinking up and filing away possible titles. Some must do this for poems (I remember reading that John Ashbery begins every poem with a title—which may be why, since writing is a process of discovery, his poems often have no clear relationship with his titles), but for me titles almost always come after the poem is written. But I do collect potential titles for future collections. Today I filed away a new one: Native Tongue.Read More
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Big Brother is Reading Your Poetry
Click the title above for the story. And yes, I know. “This is happening in Israel, not the U.S.,” you’ll say. Hmm.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. 
