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Poetry Month 2016: Sam Hamill
from Lives of a Poet: Four Letters to Hayden Carruth 2. Pilate asks, “What is love?” For which I substituted friendship, which is love unburdened by erotic passion, but informed by love’s kindliness, if not by the inevitable necessities of dialectic argument. And so I begin again— “My dear friend,” I say, meaning I have stood breathless before the severe beauty and anguish and love and delight in your poems, stood breathlessly still as I listened to the turn of a line or phrase or flinched in recognition of a painful truth revealed.Read More
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Sam Hamill: “I can’t imagine a poetry without conscience”
Don’t miss this excellent interview with Sam Hamill. His Habitation: Collected Poems is forthcoming in September from Lost Horse Press.Read More
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An Anti-Review of Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems by Tadeusz Różewicz
Among my usual Google alerts from The Quarterly Conversation was a review of Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems by Tadeusz Różewicz. I’ve always found Quarterly Conversation reviews to be intelligent and insightful, and (full disclosure) Różewicz is one of my favorite poets—so I clicked right through to it. Unfortunately, this piece, by one Patrick Kurp, is an exception—that is, it is exceptionally skewed, snotty, and crackpottish.Read More
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For Whom Do Poets Speak?
Linh Dinh is right, of course, in this powerful brief statement on poetics, which takes as its touchstone a powerful stanza by Czeslaw Milosz. The question is why. Why do we (poets, yes, but citizens as well of a system—there are no nations, really, not anymore—designed to maintain the hegemony of a mendacious, thieving elite) … why do we tolerate and even promote poetry that is superficial, trite, and purposely “uncreative,” utterly lacking in scope and depth? Why do we write about what we wish rather than what we know? I’m not talking about politics, per se.Read More
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Donations for Sam Hamill
This recently posted on The Best American Poetry blog…: Sam Hamill is experiencing some serious financial hardship at present—medical treatments not covered by insurance, an inability to teach, a very modest pension. The poets Marilyn Hacker and Alfred Corn have been raising funds to help. Donations of all sizes will be appreciated. They can be sent care of Alfred Corn to: P.O. Box 214, Hopkinton, RI 02833 U.S.A.Read More
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Another Simple Desultory Philippic*
One doesn’t have to look to the Paris Review or Poetry Magazine or The New York Review of Books for profound insight. Here’s a bit of wisdom from an interview with Sam Hamill—”poet, publisher, editor and translator, [who] co-founded the Copper Canyon Press in 1972″—published online at The Kearney Hub in Kearney, Nebraska. Hamill remarks: “The way of poetry […] shows us that our lives are simply an instrument of our practice. If we alter our practice, we change our lives.Read More
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300-Year-Old News….
I just cashed in a book store gift card from Christmas (thanks, Joe and Esther!), picking up a copy of Basho: The Complete Haiku, translated by Jane Reichhold.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. 
