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On Carol Bass’s Ripple Effect
Order directly from the publisher or from Amazon. I am blown away. Flummoxed. Exalted! There is a new brilliantaceous star atop my publishing tree this Christmas, thanks to editor, artist, and poet Carol Bass.Read More
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My Year in Books (2017)
This year’s list is longer than usual, in part because I created two literature courses for the Professional Creative Writing program I direct at D.U.’s University College, a process that entailed lots of reading.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Nicky Beer
Marlene Dietrich Reads Rilke on the Lido, 1937 The beach is vulgar, the resort salted like dead fish. The book is not a prop. Strange to be called box office poison in such a poisonous time; she imagines the glass of a ticket booth fogged with a sinister green mist. The latest La Stampa is crumpled at her feet like a cheap towel, a crab dozing on Stalin’s mustache. Since the studios stopped calling, she’s noticed how the headlines crawl with new dread daily: Il Duce preening, Earhart missing, Guernica’s ruins smoking. How elegantly rubble photographs, she half-thinks.Read More
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David Giannini: An Interview (Part Two)
[Today’s post concludes my interview with David Giannini. Jump back to Part One for a brief introduction and a substantial bio-/bibliography of the poet.] * * * TPB: Given your inclination toward the poetic sequence and the mixing of verse and prose, do you see yourself as part of the Modernist project? Not to apply labels or anything. Just curious about how you see yourself within “the tribe” that Eliot spoke of….Read More
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David Giannini: An Interview (Part One)
I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting David Giannini face to face. We “met” a couple or three years back via this blog, when he emailed me a comment about some post or other, and I replied Our emails have continued to this day, sometimes in flurries, sometimes sporadically. From the beginning I was impressed by his intelligence, his wit, his commitment to poetry, and his generosity of spirit. As I’ve read his books one after another, I’ve also been impressed by his accomplishment.Read More
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Adios, Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich,Early and Late How many thousands pass on every day? How many poets? I don’t have the math skills to figure that one out. All I can say is that many more move “on to the next” without comment from me because, simply put, I don’t know them or their work. Mourning would feel disingenuous. The loss of Adrienne Rich is different. Although I never had the opportunity to meet her, her passing feels personal.Read More
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Friday Notebook 11.04.11
There is little in my notebook this week beyond a few stray quotes drawn from my reading and a raw reaction to one of Conrad DiDiodato’s most intriguing blog posts, which needs fleshing out. Let me post my notes on Conrad first: I reread Frank Samperi’s trilogy a few months ago, and it produced a kind of seething in my mind which I recognize in Conrad. His post suffers from a conflation of Language poetry (in the person of Silliman) and the Occupy Movement.Read More
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The Interpreted World
Israel Rosenfield, in his review of Oliver Sacks‘s The Mind’s Eye: The creation of a coherent environment out of chaotic stimuli is one of the brain’s primary activities. There are no colors in nature, only electromagnetic radiation of varying wavelengths (the visible spectrum is between 390 and 750 nanometers). If we are aware of our “real” visual worlds we would see constantly changing images of dirty gray, making it difficult for us to recognize forms.Read More
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On Imaginal Space
[This expands on my previous post, which it may help to read first.] I use the word “imaginal” to mean something far beyond the Webster’s definition, “of or relating to imagination, images, or imagery.” I mean it in the sense defined by the great scholar of Islamic mysticism Henry Corbin: …alam al-mithal, the world of the Image, mundus imaginalis: a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real…Read More
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The Openness of Coral Bracho
Readers of this blog know I’m a fan of openness. But defining “openness” is impossible: the very nature of it defies definition. And it’s easy to confuse it with “anything goes.” I once fell to arguing with a friend who insisted that anything an artist says is art is art; some poets have made the same assertion for their own writing. Can I be a fan of openness without sharing that assertion? I guess it comes down to suggesting the kinds of openness I’m actually a fan of.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2018, 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 two programs: Arts & Culture and Global Affairs. 
