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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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Adios, Hiatus
After my marathon of posts in April, celebrating Poetry Month, I took a hiatus and gave myself over to reading (Roderick Beaton’s biography of George Seferis, mainly, along with which I reread Seferis’s poems in all the translations in my library–Englishings by Warner, Keeley/Sherrard, and Kaiser) and my own work. I also read two new collections by Ted Kooser, Splitting an Order and The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book. I plan to write about all these in more detail, but for now I want to pass along a gem from The Wheeling Year.Read More
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Graveside in Damascus
In the recently released A Levant Journal, translated by Roderick Beaton from the Greek of Nobel Prize winning poet George Seferis, the great poet visits the grave of Jane Digby (a.k.a. “Ianthe”) in Damascus. As so often in his journals, Seferis produces what amounts to a prose poem—a brief description full of suggestive disturbances. He is incapable, it seems, of shallow writing. It was getting dark, a wind was blowing. Between the grave and the surrounding wall was a great walnut tree heavy with ripening fruit.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. 
