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My Year in Books (2015)
I, too, dislike “best books” lists except when they bring me news of books I want to read but somehow overlooked, which is surprisingly seldom. Over 60-plus years of reading, beginning, as I recall, with Little Golden Books, I’ve developed enough self-awareness to guess correctly about 70 percent of time which books will bring me that mixture of pleasure and revelation that is my particular addiction.Read More
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Göran Sonnevi’s First Book in English
The Economy Spinning Faster and Faster by Göran Sonnevi My rating: 4 of 5 stars I thought I’d done fairly well with keeping up with one of my favorite poets, Robert Bly—both with his own books and his translations—so I was surprised when I read, in the recently published Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, that Bly had been working on translations of poems by Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi, whose work I became a fan of when I encountered it in 1993, in A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, beautifully translated by…Read More
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Minus 13
I keep meaning to post these links and keep forgetting. But now that we’re snowed in—or, to be more accurate, frozen in (it’s minus 13 degrees here in Indian Hills as I write)—I have a moment free from “real” work to make the recommendation.Read More
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Forms and Faculties of Language
This from Göran Sonnevi‘s astonishing booklength meditation on … well, everything (more or less), Mozart’s Third Brain, brilliantly translated by Rika Lesser: We speak about language, about grammarAnalytical or normative I propose the possibilitythat the differently constructed faculties of language in our two cerebral hemispheresperhaps give rise to two different kinds of syntax, engaging each otherin a dialogue Within myself I hear the dichotomies… […] Forms that arise within us The leap constantly occursThe translations The testing out We risk our lives onthe durability of these forms, their ability to describethe world And yet not one of them holds We see the spent forms, from outsideAnd yet they were…Read More
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Dangerous Considerations
The October 2007 issue of Poetry carries an observant, insightful bit of prose by the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski entitled a “Dangerous Considerations: A Notebook.” He touches on Christmas in Krakow, Gottfried Benn, political disputes occasioned by Zbigniew Herbert’s death, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann (whose Magic Mountain Musil described as a “shark’s stomach”), Ted Hughes’s translations of Yehuda Amichai, a festschrift honoring the poetry of Stanislaw Baranczak, the essays of Gershom Scholem, Saint-John Perse (nom de plume of Aléxis Léger, who in the 1930s served as director of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs), E. M.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. 
