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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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Adios, Bill Knott
Bill Knott I just read in Coldfront that Bill Knott passed away on Wednesday due to complications from surgery. What a loss for his friends and for American “verse culture.” Bill liked to give the impression that he was leading a posthumous existence—ignored, washed up, inconsequential—when in fact he was well known (though no Mary Oliver or Robert Hass), creatively engaged (poetry, appreciations, screeds, visual art), and influential in ways that might inspire envy in other poets of his generation (he was born in 1940).Read More
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Friday Notebook 03.23.12
[From A Treatise on Poetry, by Czesław Miłosz (tr. Robert Hass):] If it’s all a dream, let’s dream it to the bottom. * … [A] poet without communityRustles in the wind like dry grasses in December.Read More
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Meditation at Xtranormal*
This kind-hearted hilarity is brought to you by Kelli Russell Agodon.Read More
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Mexico Books 2008: Installment 2
Ten Thousand Lives, by Ko Un. Introduction by Robert Hass. In Mexico I read this other book by Korean poet and former Buddhist monk Ko Un. It’s a selection of poems from his vast project, Maninbo, or Ten Thousand Lives. After several years as a leader of the resistance movement against the Korean Republic’s military dictatorships in the 1970s, Ko Un was imprisoned four times, enduring torture and extreme deprivation.Read More
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A Bagatelle
I’ve been toying with the idea of collecting a bunch of old essays and reviews, although why anyone would care about my long-ago opinions, if anyone ever did, I can’t imagine.Read More
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Poetic Brutality…
I launched into reading this article with an expectation of yet another clash of fundamentalisms, of the sort that has plagued Bangladeshi poet Taslima Nasrin. The outlines were familiar: a lecturer, one Sanjay M G, is attacked for reciting a poem “with ‘objectionable content….’ ” But it turns out the content involved a slur against a long-deceased political leader, Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire (d. 1680).Read More
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Silly Man II
Ron Silliman’s latest musing on trivia dressed up as poetry uses the idea of narrative to add William Stafford to his enemies list, the so-called “School of Quietude.” Silliman attacks Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark” as a “high point of American kitsch” that “uses plot to set up the arch-silliness” of the poem’s penultimate line, which according to Silliman is “a perfect instance of feigned & posed seriousness & just possibly the single most pompous line ever written.” Okay. He dislikes Stafford’s poem, as any reader is entitled to do.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. 
