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Dance First
Any opportunity to watch Gabriel Byrne in action is one nobody should miss.Read More
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Walt Whitman Spins in His Grave
First book awards are apt to be contentious. The major ones—Yale Younger Poets, the APR/Honickman, Cave Canem, the Walt Whitman—produce winners that are as often ignored as praised. In poetry, everything is arguable. But the 2013 Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award winner is especially distressing. Judge John Ashbery chose Chris Hosea‘s Put Your Hands In, which has been issued by Louisiana State University Press. I have to confess that I haven’t read the book and will not, based on the odious excerpts from it published in the Spring-Summer 2014 issue of American Poets.Read More
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Sucking Up (My Morning Vitriol)
“The Contradiction” (by David Spear) Why am I not surprised that Michael Robbins, in “reviewing” Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and My Life in the Nineties, begins with a truth (that Language poetry is boring), then accurately characterizes Hejinian’s approach: “writing as a paradoxically polished automatism.” Robbins is obviously a bright guy. Of course, calling Hejinian’s approach paradoxical doesn’t explain or justify it; in fact, it unmasks it as an exercise in cynicism: polish gives the lie to the writing’s ersatz automatism.Read More
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A Taste for Apocalypse
I had all kinds of reasons for wanting to like this book. First, my daughter gave it to me for Christmas; she spent enough years in the book business to know what might appeal to me. And she was right: I had read a review that made the book sound right up my alley—something dark, apocalyptic, Poe-ish. (I love Poe.) So I embraced the reading of it with relish. I have to say, though, that the novel disappointed me. László Krasznahorkai‘s Satantango is a dystopian amorality play.Read More
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Tin Ear
Rimbaud (who did nothave a tin ear) It’s statements like this that drive me nuts—at least when I’m in a certain mood: The poem [Paul Schmidt’s translation of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre”] starts with I drifted on a river I could not control. In the other of my most favorite translations, Samuel Beckett begins with Downstream on impassive rivers suddenly. Two magnificent and very different first lines, but rhythmically not that far apart. The statement is by Norma Cole, a widely-published poet and academic who teaches at the University of San Francisco.Read More
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On William Michaelian’s A Listening Thing
New from Cosmopsis Books I wanted to say a word about a quietly wonderful novel I just finished reading, by my cyber-friend, William Michaelian. I’ve never met William in the flesh, but have become a fan over the past few years, especially of his poetry. The fact is I don’t read much fiction; all too often fiction, being prose, wastes too many words on stage direction—“Jack began climbing the beanstalk, his soft leather booties slipping now and then on the dewy leaves,” etc.—while the humanity of the story goes missing.Read More
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Closed Histories
I’m too harried with work to write a thorough review of Sara Veglahn’s extraordinary chapbook Closed Histories, but I want to take a moment to recommend it. To the extent that comparisons are useful in describing a distinctive new voice, I would say that her work has similarities to writers as diverse as Karen Volkman, Yves Bonnefoy, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux, and the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons. Needless to say, I hope, these associations are subjective, and Ms. Veglahn herself might disavow them all! So I should let her speak for herself, if briefly: From the window, light.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. 
