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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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Lois Hayna and the Strangeness of Beauty Perfected
I am thrilled to let everyone know that my friend and fellow poet Lois Hayna has been awarded the Colorado Authors’ League’s first Lifetime Achievement Award. Congratulations, Lois! I first met Lois when she joined a poetry workshop I taught for now defunct Rocky Mountain Writers Guild back in the mid-1970s.Read More
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Friday Notebook 07.08.2011
“You have to make an about-face and leave the poem, [Char] said to me, and this you must do at the moment of deepest emotion, when you belong to it most entirely and you are at your weakest. Yet the turning-away is unavoidable, and you must find the strength to accomplish it.Read More
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Friday Notebook 07.01.2011
For my birthday, 80 degrees.Light wind. Windy light. * “Develop your legitimate strangeness.” —René Char, “Formal Share,” XXII (trans. Mary Ann Caws) * “To be a poet is to have an appetite for discomfort whose consummation, among the whirlwinds of all things existing and foreseen, stirs up, at the moment of closure, happiness.” —Char, “Formal Share,” XLII * “We belong to no one except the golden point of light from that lamp unknown to us, inaccessible to us, that keeps awake courage and silence.” —Char, “Leaves of Hypnos,” 5 (trans.Read More
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Char Contra Conceptual Writing*
René Char “The poet is that part of man rebellious to calculated projects.” —René Char, from his preface to Furor and Mystery (1948). _____________________________*Viz., con artists like Kenneth Goldsmith: “I will refer to the kind of writing in which I am involved as conceptual writing. In conceptual writing the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.Read More
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Two Messages from The Brittle Age
René Char How would the end justify the means? There is no end, only and forever the means, always more machinated. * Taking away the breath of work, its inconceivable dynasty, setting back the liberal arts until they no longer reflect on anything, this is the boneheap. [René Char, tr.Read More
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The Visible and the Invisible
Over at Issa’s Untidy Hut this quote appeared this morning, from the introduction to a new translation of poems by the great imaginal poet René Char. The introduction and translations were done by Gustaf Sobin, who essentially apprenticed with Char while living in France in the 1960s. Sobin remarks: René Char taught me, first, to read particulars: that the meticulously observed detail, drawn from nature, could provide the key to the deepest reaches of the imaginary.Read More
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, 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 three programs: Professional Creative Writing, Arts & Culture Management, and Global Community Engagement. 
