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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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The Drama of War-Time Poetry
The performance of “War of Words” went off without a hitch last night in the Black Box Theater at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. Having written the script, I was surprised by how moving it was—how the century-old poems sprang to life with such power and subtlety from the mouths of the five actors. Among the many enlivening elements were smoothly delivered accents—Hardy’s Dorset English, Apollinaire’s bon vivant playfulness, the taut Germanic sounds of Trakl, and the sly Chicagoan cadences of Carl Sandburg.Read More
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An Alert from the Poetry Early Warning System
This is far in advance, I know, but I’m hoping you’ll all put this event on your calendars then jump on those devices to snag tickets! The event is a performance by four Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities actors of a script I’ve written/assembled, which aims to flesh out the conflicting and conflicted reactions to the U.S. entry into WWI by twelve North American poets.Read More
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Poetry Month 2016: Anna Akhmatova
The Muse When in the night I await her coming, My life seems stopped. I ask myself: What Are tributes, freedom, or youth compared To this treasured friend holding a flute? Look, she’s coming! She throws off her veil And watches me, steady and long.Read More
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Poetry Month 2015: Voices at the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress’s Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature What a trove of literary pleasures! And these selections are just the beginning…. “[These] selections from the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress became available to stream online for the first time [on April 15, 2015] — the launch of a project digitizing some of their 2,000 recordings from the past 75 years of literature.Read More
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From a Rocking Boat…
A few weeks back I realized that by the end of 2012 I would be putting up my one-thousandth post on The Perpetual Bird. And here it is—saved for New Year’s Eve! I’ve noodled over it for days with the intention, as always, to offer something interesting, provocative, insightful, and/or unusual.Read More
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Fallacies
At some level we understand that it’s futile and foolish to deny the importance of authorial intention. If literary theorists really believed that grasping authorial intention is a “fallacy,” they would not read poems—they would simply interview readers about the poems they’ve read. After all, the value of a poem (some theorists say) is primarily in the reader’s view of the poem, not in the poem itself, and certainly not in any intentions the poet may have had in writing it.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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Robert Frost’s Fine-Art Christmas Cards
By way of cluing you in to a poetry blog I’ve been enjoying a lot, by the name of Poetry & Popular Culture, here’s a link to a recent post dealing with Robert Frost’s Christmas cards.Read More
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Those Who Can’t Do…
I highly recommend a visit to Ron Silliman’s blog post today, in which you can savor his disordered thought process in all its glory. He starts off with a school-marmish sneer toward Curtis Faville for using parodize instead of the correct parody in the comments stream, while going on to note that there have been plenty of parodies of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, “tho I don’t recall linking to any.” You see, in Silliman’s world, “tho” is acceptable but “parodize” is not, undoubtedly because “tho” was sanctified by his Objectivist hero George Oppen.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. 
