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A Free Online Reading of Poems in Remembrance of the Holocaust: January 27th
On Thursday, January 27, 2022 at 7:00 p.m. Mountain Time, the Colorado Poets Center (CPC) and Judyth Hill are hosting a Poetry Reading entitled Poems in Remembrance of the Holocaust. The following Colorado Poets Center poets will be reading: Judyth Hill, David Rothman, Art Goodtimes, Gail BenEzra, Lynda La Rocca, Carol Guerrero-Murphy, Jeffrey Ethan Lee, Robert Cooperman, and Natalie Giarratano. You must register for the reading in advance through this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Atpf_ P5DSG2DVUGebUuzoQ After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the email containing information about joining the webinar.Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2021
It was another pandemic year, in some ways more challenging than the first. There was a sense of fraying in the fabric of social life, work life, personal focus (my poetry journal full of fragments that I’m not postmodern enough to throw down on pages and pretend that they cohere as poems), the persistent floating anxiety. Among the various costumes that relief arrived in were books, of course.Read More
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My Pandemic Year in Books
So Many Books, So Little Time I could have sworn that I’d read far fewer books this year than in past years, but it seems not to be so. It must be one of the few benign side effects of the pandemic. Of course, the pandemic has been hard on my writing, poems—at least poems of my kind—seeming fairly pointless amid the waves of infection and death and the tide of fascism rising out of the GOP (the Goosestepping Old Party).Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2019
2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.Read More
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Adventures in Reading 2018
Old Reading Room at BookBar (Photo: Tricia M.) Let me admit up front that I’ve included half a dozen books here that were read as part of my work with the Professional Creative Writing program at University College. But they all turned out to be worthwhile reading experiences. Even those I couldn’t quite connect with—Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West, Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw, and Adonis’s powerful Concerto al-Quds, which is also recondite and nakedly anguished by turns—continue to haunt me. This is usually an early indicator of re-readings in the offing.Read More
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Celebrate Armistice Day with “War of Words”
Click here to order or reserve tickets. Just $5 each! On Veterans Day, November 11, One Night Stand Theater will present a theatrical piece I created called “War of Words,” first performed at the Arvada Center earlier this year. November 11 is the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, which marked the end of World War I. With that in mind, “War of Words” features poetry of “The Great War,” primarily poetry by Americans such as Carl Sandburg, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and many others.Read More
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Legions of the Sun—Now Available
The companion anthology to “War of Words” is now available.Read More
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Legions of the Sun
Good news! The companion anthology to “War of Words,” Legions of the Sun, has arrived just in time for you to purchase it at the event! The book includes all the poems performed in “War of Words” as well as poems about WWI but written later. The latter section includes work from the immediate post-war (Jeffers, Pound, Eliot, Cummings and more) along with poems about the war by more recent poets, ranging from Louise Bogan, Archibald MacLeish, and Yehuda Amichai to Thomas Lux, Nicholas Samaras, Robert Cooperman, and Kierstin Bridger.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 2014 at BookBar
I started organizing First Saturday Poetry Readings at BookBar, a thriving indie bookstore in Northwest Denver, back in April 2014, and as the year nears its end I thought it would be useful to list everyone who has participated so far. Saturday, April 5: Andrea Hollander, reading from Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982–2012; Robert Cooperman, reading from Just Drive; and me myself, reading from the paperback reissue of Bed of Coals. Saturday, May 2: David Mason, then Poet Laureate of Colorado, and Chris Ransick, erstwhile Poet Laureate of Denver, in a Laureate Smackdown.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. 
